Safety concern- someone else shows up than the person who booked the reservation

[Yiwei3]

Hi hosts,

I've had a few times when the person showing up is totally different from who booked the reservation.  How do you find out about those and how do you handle that once you figured it out?  I ended up changing the code to get in.  It doesn't seem like there's a place to report it on Airbnb.

[Yiwei3]

@Maia29 I will be checking IDs for everyone who has no reviews or sounds suspicious going forward!!

[Sheila22]

Airbnb does not protect from this.  PERIOD!   And they will not change.  I first realized this when my daughter had three different ABB charges show up on her credit card.  THREE TRIPS booked! using my daughter's payment method.  My daughter didn't even have an ABB account (she was 20 when this happened).  As a Host I was appalled by this...it meant someone was making Airbnb bookings with stolen credit card.  How often does this occur.  I complained to to ABB saying how is this possible?:  it's so easy to prevent -- just make sure the name/address on the payment method matches the name/address on the account.  This is someone's home -- the vetting should be stringent.  When I complained to ABB, they didn't seem surprised...and they didn't care to change their vetting process to prevent this from happening in the future -- I was shocked.  Even gas stations make you enter a zip code to prevent use of stolen credit card.  I've complained many times asking ABB to make sure payment method matches account -- they refuse.  ABB is NOT vetting properly.  Do not trust that they are vetting the Guests enough -- they are NOT, and they don't care.

[Yiwei3]

@Anonymous @Helen427 So the guest tried to get a refund, and it didn't happen.  Now they left a review.  Can I get this review removed?

[Anonymous]

@Yiwei3   You can't get a review removed pre-emptively without knowing what it said. What you should do is go ahead and submit a concise, honest, factual review of your experience with these guests, at which point both will be published and you'll be able to see what they wrote.

If the guest's review clearly violates the  content policy you might be able to get it removed. But this is relatively rare. So be prepared to write a Host Response to correct any inaccuracies or put negative comments into context, with your prospective guests in mind as the audience. One of the biggest mistakes hosts make with negative reviews is writing responses that make them look angry and vindictive; be sure to avoid that trap by responding in a way that demonstrates your grace and professionalism.

[Yiwei3]

@Anonymous are you able to see the review Latiya left?  I just left her a review.  She said "I find men to be a treat, I wouldn't stay here".

[Anonymous]

@Yiwei3 I'm not seeing this review on your profile... Could it be that it was already removed? 

[Yiwei3]

@Anonymous I think it did!  I messaged Airbnb to find out.  They agreed with me that it is irrelevant to the listing.  I'm so glad!