So the email from Airbnb dated August 19th regarding changes to their off Platform Policy removes an important safety option for hosts.
Respecting our hosts and guests is a top priority for Airbnb, so we’ve published new guidelines around messaging between our guests and hosts based on feedback from our community on how they’d like to receive messages and share contact information. This policy is part of Airbnb’s Terms of Service that all hosts agree to, and will be enforced more stringently going forward which could result in account suspensions or deactivations.
More details can be found in the link above, but as a reminder, the following behaviors are generally prohibited on Airbnb:
- Asking guests for their contact information
Airbnb has proven over and over again with huge parties, shootings, rapes, etc, that they do not care about hosts or the homes we are responsible for, they only care about getting their commissions. They tell us we can not get a guest's address to do a background check but yet they have a disclosure that we should not trust their background check and they encourage us to do a web search on the guest's name and to search US federal and state sex offender registries but without a home address there are usually dozens and even hundreds of people with the same name.
The guest can know our address but we can't know theirs? I often do a websearch on a home address to see if it's a valid address if I see red flags on a reservation but now they are taking that option away from us. As someone else said, it's easy to get a throw away email address and a burner phone so home addresses are a more valuable and trustworthy tool.