@Sarah977 @Jennifer1421 @Lisa723
It's not only very large properties that are being cursed with raging parties and anti-social guest behaviour - these are only the ones we hear about, the ones that actually make the news.
Every night of the week, in every market, you have guests cramming 20 or 30 of their closest buddies into homes with a 4 or 5 guest maximum, and partying the weekend away. It's totally irrelevant to them that there aren't enough sleeping spaces - who ever goes to a party to sleep anyway? We rarely get to hear about these instances - it's usually only the neighbours and emergency services that are painfully aware of them.
I can cater for up to 12 guests at a time, and have been doing so since the earliest days of Airbnb, and I can tell you, it's a thousand times harder - and more stressful - to operate now, than it was even 3 or 4 years ago. For starters, with the combination of the "non-discrimination" policy, and the dreaded Instant Book (a necessary evil in saturated markets), it's become next to impossible to turn away guests that you just know are going to be trouble, and would have immediately rejected in the past. (Just try calling CX to claim one of your 3 free IB cancellations these days - they'll do everything in their power to try and force you to honour the booking)
As for vetting guests - the only way to do it, is to check their ID yourself. Airbnb lulls users into a false sense of security with their worthless "verified ID" scam, and hosts naively trust that the people turning up at their door, have been comprehensively checked out by Airbnb. That's not the case of course, and I've posted many times about Jumio, the dodgy third-party outfit to which ID verification is outsourced, and whose founder recently paid out $17 million to settle a fraud charge. I wouldn't trust that lot to verify my library card.
There has, undoubtedly, been a seismic shift in guest behaviour too, and that has become much more apparent in the past 12-18 months. Whereas before, the vast majority would respect a property as someone's home, and treat it accordingly, now a lot of them are acting as if they booked a crash pad for the weekend, and should be permitted to act and behave in any d*mn way they see fit.
By far the biggest - and most detrimental - change that I've observed, is that so many of the guests are so very well acquainted with Airbnb's T&Cs, and will shamelessly use them at every given opportunity, to try and bully/manipulate the host into bowing down to their ludicrous demands. They're fully aware that if they turn up with more guests than booked - and play dumb - that Airbnb will pressurise the host into taking them. And they also know that no matter how badly behaved they are or how much damage they cause, that even if they do get turfed out by the host, there's every chance that they'll get a refund anyway, and nine times out of ten, Airbnb will find them a new place to stay too. And sometimes, they'll even throw in a nice little 10% bonus on top, for the poor guests' "inconvenience"
The entire crux of the problem is that Airbnb, through their skewed policies and practices, have deliberately shifted the balance of power fully away from hosts, and onto the guests. And boy, don't the guests know it. Hosts, unfortunately, are paying an unbearable, unsustainable price for Airbnb refusing to hold rogue guests accountable for their actions. And it's only going to get worse.
