We are a very large property management company in South Africa. Airbnb is currently withholding thousands of dollars of payments in order to review us based on their "Know Your Customer" policy. Please see article regarding their policies for account verification https://www.airbnb.co.za/help/article/3004.
The issues mentioned here started in April 2024 and are ongoing. There has been a lot of repitition and vague answers over the last months. Most recently there has been no response on our payouts over the last week despite receiving confirmation that it should take a maximum of 48 hours for a response after we tried a new approach. (We found a link that allowed us to select "No beneficial owners" for our company)
In April 2024 our payouts were paused with a message:
"Upon review, we need you to provide the document(s) which shows all current beneficial owners’ names and the percentage of ownership. This is often in a document you may have already provided to the business registry."
I found this after some searching:
What is a beneficial owner and why is it required?
A beneficial owner is anyone who directly or indirectly owns or controls more than 25% of a business
(https://www.airbnb.co.za/help/article/3444#:~:text=A%20beneficial%20owner%20is%20anyone,than%2025%25...
The above description was not provided with our payouts being paused. We were only advised that we do have beneficial owners. We provided company registration forms and ownership flow charts and received the below response:
Thank you for your quick response. we noticed that some of your shares belong to trust. We need Letter of authority documents which mentioned all the trust detail.
Please add all the individual Trustees, Beneficiaries, Settlor(s) and Protector(s) as Beneficial owners, with a maximum of 4 names in the form
How can we add all individuals (maximum of 4) for a company split between many trusts with many individuals? (I tried to explain that 100 divided by 4 is 25%. Since everyone owns less than 25%, that would mean that we have more than 4 individual owners but, unfortunately, they were not able to explain clearly or correct any misconceptions I might have that is causing this misunderstanding.)
Further down the line - please see question from us and answer from this specialised team reviewing us:
Question
Hi there, we would like to upload business registration forms instead of a government ID and be listed as an entity and not an individual as we are a company and not an individual. We would like the listing to show under *Company Name* and not *Current Individual's Name*
Under account > personal info > Government ID we have added the ID for*Current Individual's Name* We would like to register all our listings under the business "*Company Name*" instead of under an individual
Could we do it in this way as we operate as an entity and not an individual this would be a more accurate way to represent our properties?
Answer
Thank you for your quick response. We apologize for the inconvenience that might have caused you. As we can check your previous business documents that is shared by you. You shares belong to *Trust* we just need the compete deed documents for that trust which include the trustees, Beneficiaries, Settlor(s) and Protector(s) as Beneficial owners detail.
You can simply send us the screenshots of the complete deed right here in this message thread in JPG format for your own convenience. I will gladly accept them and if there is anything in the document that we may require, do not worry, I will indeed inform you.
Further repetition of the above queries did not provide us with much understanding.
Questions based on our issues:
1. If we are a company with a trust that has 25% of the company and the trust has 5 individuals in - are these people beneficial owners?
2. I know Airbnb is meant to be for individuals hosting, but they have been aware that we are a company from the beginning. Why are our payouts paused if this is a new policy?
3. What laws exactly are the reason behind the payouts being paused? From our point of view this is unethical.
