“The people have spoken, the bastards,” declared Democrat hopeful Dick Tuck in his concession speech, following defeat in the 1962 California Senate primary.

Voters are not always right, and history is littered with examples of malign and incompetent governments whose path to destruction has been cleared by their justification of having a popular mandate.

The Tuck quote frequently occurs to me as the owner of a holiday home which I let to paying customers and whose collective voice is exercised through the modern, some would say tyrannical, ballot of the customer review website.

The connection between standing for government and renting a property may seem somewhat tenuous at first glance, but bear with me.

Just as we are led to believe in the infallibility of democratic government, despite some obvious examples of things going wrong – Germany circa 1933-45 springs to mind – we are also encouraged to hold to the maxim that “the customer is always right”.

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Thanks to the internet, the customer’s voice is now exerted and heard more often than at any time in human history. No matter what you buy – anything from a packet of soap powder to a jet engine – you now have the opportunity to review it and its seller online.

For more than a decade, I have owned a holiday home in Spain, which I let during the summer months to help pay for the running costs, and this is the tenth September I have arrived at the end of the season to survey the damage and take care of repairs.

The site through which I let the property has its own review section and, through this admittedly limited petri dish, I have learned some valuable things about the drivers of human nature.

One of the first lessons I learned is that you can literally never do enough for your guests. An early idea was to offer some unexpected extras, to make their stay more enjoyable, so I invested in golf clubs, bikes and badminton equipment for the adults and a trampoline, ping-pong table, and a basketball hoop and basketball for children. By the end of the first season, all of them were trashed or stolen.

I bought a printer, to allow guests to print off their return airline tickets. The first set of guests used all the paper and drained the cartridges of ink within a week, and the second group broke the printer.

I quickly grasped that it benefits you more to provide fewer facilities, because everything you do offer simply gives guests more opportunities to complain.

If you provide four sun loungers, they will generally go unremarked upon in a review. If you provide eight, but one has a small crack in it, the guests will mention the cracked lounger.

Another revelation has been that people will literally steal anything that isn’t nailed down - from crockery and glasses, to hairdryers, lamps and even air conditioning machine remote handsets.

Some guests treat the flat as a party doss houseSome guests treat the flat as a party doss house (Image: free)Thankfully, most guests are reasonable and appreciative of your efforts as a sole owner. They recognise that they are staying in someone’s family home, rather than in a facility run by a large, well-resourced holiday company. Because of that, I have been able to retain a generally high rating for customer satisfaction.

However, the minority of naysayers, insatiable critics and other deplorables always makes life difficult.

There are those who regard owning a phone as having a 24-hour helpline to sort out every minor niggle of their holiday experience.

I fielded a call from one guest who could only find one of the two bottle openers listed on the inventory, and from another who felt that she shouldn’t have to change a gas canister while she was on holiday, which simply involved switching the clamp from the empty bottle to a full one, and she wanted someone to attend, late at night, to do it for her.

Some have left the property in a truly despicable state, with cooked, uneaten food lying in every room and rubbish bags strewn all over. One group chose to cook on a primus stove in the living room, rather than to use the fully equipped kitchen.

Background is no guide to behaviour, and I find that those whom, on the face of it, are better off, are generally less demanding, as well as being more polite and appreciative.

In an admittedly limited straw poll of national characteristics, I have found that English and Scottish guests are, by far, the most agreeable and reasonable. Spaniards are the dirtiest (and I'm half-Spanish), Germans and Dutch the most pedantic and Irish the wildest and, coincidentally, the thirstiest.

One Irish group literally devastated the place, including smashing down the front door as, I later learned from neighbours, the well-quenched patriarch aggressively pursued his paramour in search of more lubrication.

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During the recent Euros, a group of German guests wanted to watch their country play in a match on the same day I was switching wifi providers, so I told them I would reimburse them if they bought their own data.

Rather than purchase a local sim card at a cost of less than €20 from the local supermarket less than 2km away, they applied data roaming charges to their home mobile account, and billed me for €250.

French guests are, however, the most egregious in almost every way. I have lost track of the number of imaginative ways they have devised to try to recover their rental costs, usually through the implied threat of a negative review.

One group posted a picture of themselves badly bitten by mosquitoes, after failing to take any precautions, and threatened to post that the property was infested with bed bugs.

Another called me late on a Sunday evening to report that they had pulled a mirror from the wall in one of the bathrooms, which they had dropped onto a water pipe, severing it, and they required it to be fixed immediately.

I managed to source an emergency plumber (no mean feat on a Sunday in Spain) and he attended and fixed the problem in a few minutes.

Despite me absorbing the €700 callout and repair cost, the guests chose not to mention the incident in a generally negative online review, during which they complained about having to drive to the nearest supermarket. They also left the air conditioners switched on at full power 24/7, throughout their stay, running up an electricity bill of €500 in a fortnight.

There is no failsafe requirement for reviews to be fair, accurate or even truthful, and I always take steps to respond to the most outlandish. But getting involved in a he-said-she-said, online tit-for-tat with customers can often look worse than ignoring the original comments which may be completely untrue.

Of course, having more democracy is always better than having less. The people will continue speaking, regardless of what I, or anyone else thinks, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Carlos Alba is a journalist, author, and PR consultant at Carlos Alba Media. His latest novel, There’s a Problem with Dad, explores the issue of undiagnosed autism among older people.