I was traveling last week, made a same day last minute booking. Used the same credit card I've been using for all my three years of traveling with AirBnb. But this time it asked me to do a verification process, which I couldn't understand. There's nothing wrong with my credit card - no holds on it, scores of thousands of dollars of credit available on it. Just AirBnb's arbitrary request. Turned into a nightmare. Multiple calls to airbnb, no resolution. Finally, I just paid the host directly. Fortunately, I was in the US, had a car, had a cell phone with data service. If I had been traveling outside the US, with no data or no car, would have become even more of a nightmare. Used hotels for the rest of the trip, since I couldn't use AirBnb. I even tried uploading a different credit card, and ran into the same problem.
When I got home, I looked into this, and found a lot of complaints from people about this new onerous, burdensome, credit card verification process. I have a rental unit I have up on AirBnb, and business has been slower lately. I put two and two together, and realized that others are running into this nightmare, too, so aren't able to book. I've gone ahead and listed the property on other websites now, too.
I don't know why Airbnb doesn't use standard verifications, and instead is asking people to send them a copy of their credit card statements. In today's world, people will just move on to the next choice, rather than do that.
