I had a guest who due to some sort of glitch was able to book my place for $60 a night instead of $300 on Vrbo. I decided to honor. 10 people. She raised a huge stink about my ID requirement and left a one star review trashing everything, from quality of pillows to lay out and of course mentioned IDs.
I decided to be funny in my reply and said something along the lines of that she rented at a rate of $6 per person due to glitch and if my future guests want to know what a princess on a popper budget looks like, I have her picture ID. Apparently she read my response and called Vrbo complaining that I was supposed to delete her ID. Ridiculous request as it was send though the Vrbo messaging system so there is no way to delete; of course I was not going to show it future guests; I can tell her I deleted it but how would she ever know if I did.
Airbnb would have definitely sent me a message telling me how I wronged the guest, most likely would have asked me to give a discount and maybe even suspended me for some breach of privacy or some other reason. Vrbo sent a message: this is what the guest wanted, call them, have a good night. I know Airbnb is the more popular of the two however I have never heard of anyone picking it for the reason of more involved customer service on the guest side.
I think if Airbnb stayed out of the guest/host relationship more, it would not have affected guests negatively (most hosts will do the right thing!) but made hosts happier.
