Guest was a travel agent and lied about number of guests.

[Jocelyn36]

Hello everyone,

It has come to our attention that a guest who booked and transacted with us is a travel agent. We have confirmed this through our co-host: the guests staying at the place have told her that the person we contacted was not staying with them and is, in fact, a travel agent. The travel agent even made it seem that she was going to one of the guests staying in our place. This fault may be on our part for not discerning carefully, and will now be a learning lesson for us to better get to know guests in the future. 

However, our main problem is that the travel agent booked our place for 13 guests (which is just our maximum capacity), but there are 16 people staying in our place right now. We have confirmed this through our co-host: the current guests insisted the additional people are just visiting and will be staying in another place. Then later in the afternoon and onwards, our security cameras (located just outside the house, so we're not spying! Just for security reasons) had been tampered (this is stated in our house rules). This worried us so we had our co-host just check the vicinity of the house and found the "visitors" car parked. This was late at night. 

Aside from the current guests who have already broken our house rules, it seems the travel agent said to us that there will be 13 guests, but in her own agency had booked way more guests than that. We thought about asking for an "extra persons fee" from the additional guests in person, however the guests were adamant that they have already paid all their fees to the travel agent. So now our only course it seems is to request money from the travel agent. 

My question is that what else can be done about this? Breaking of the house rules will definitely show up in their review but this does not even affect the actual guest posing as a travel agent. Are there other ways in which a travel agent posing as a deceiving guest may be sanctioned?

Please share your thoughts with us as we have just started hosting a few months ago. 

Best Regards, 

Jocelyn

[Allison2 · Accepted solution]

This is a third-party booking and breaks Airbnb's terms & conditions - you'll want to get in touch with Airbnb to see what your options are. You'll also want to think about what your goal is - do you want them out? Is it okay for them to stay so long as you are paid the additional person fees?

First, I'd establish your side of the story in Airbnb messaging.

"Dear travel agent,

It's come to our attention that you aren't one of the guests staying in our listing, and that you booked this stay as a travel agent. Third party bookings are a violation of Airbnb's terms and conditions, unless made through a Airbnb business acount. In addition to this, we have security footage of 16 guests, not 13 as stated on the reservation confirmation; the additional person fees would be $xx. The occupants also tampered with security cameras, which is a violation of our house rules.

Sharing our homes requires a degree of trust in guests, which you unfortunately have violated.  We will get in touch with Airbnb to see how to resolve this situation."

Then call Airbnb to see what your options are. You could push to cancel, but may have to refund (full? partial? none?). You should have a strong argument that the guests are the ones violating T&C and therefore shouldn't receive any refund.

I'd also suggest you add the following to your house rules: No unregistered guests are allowed on the property at any time.

This solves a world of issues with "oh, they just stopped by for a minute" guests who are still there at 3am. If they aren't on the registration, they shouldn't be there!

[Jocelyn36]

Thank you for you advice! Will contact Airbnb and the travel agent. All we want is to receive the proper fees for the number of guests and make sure this never happens again.