By hosting on Airbnb, we're opening our homes to a significant number of people we've never met and know only through our online interactions. For the safety of our homes, neighbors, and communities, we absolutely need the ability to verify the identities of the people who are actually staying with us. Almost all of our guests have been truly wonderful, but we've had to institute a fairly ridiculous number of additional House Rules and disclosures in our listing descriptions in order to effectively protect ourselves against the few guests who might cause issues.
While API-connected hosts using separate channel management platforms (Guesty, OwnerRez, etc.) can require guests to sign off-platform legal agreements and collect guest identification, there are four major issues I've identified with the Airbnb platform that prevent hosts from effectively verifying our guests:
1. Airbnb has its own propriety guest verification protocols, but still notes that they can’t guarantee someone is who they claim to be (https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/1237). This is a huge liability that could potentially be solved in a number of ways, including:
A) Clarify and consolidate the extremely nebulous policies regarding a host's ability to independently collect guest identification.
B) Apply a more stringent protocol to guest profiles that allows hosts to access more information about their guests, including legal names, recently verified phone numbers, current cities of residence, and profile pictures that clearly depict faces without obstruction or other people. This protocol would need to be employed for all guests and not just for newly created profiles. Joint guest profiles for supposedly married couples should also be disallowed and only one individual person should be represented by any given guest profile.
2. Despite violating Airbnb policy (https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/427) and the House Rules of many hosts, guests continue to book third-party reservations. Along with a number of issues like confounding direct communication with guests who are actually on the premises, violating this policy could potentially affect a host's ability to maintain insurance coverage for the reservation. It's possible that a host could screen for this type of booking by disabling instant bookings and interrogating their guests prior to confirmation, but that likely limits a listing's favorability in terms of both guest preferences and search ranking. This issue could be resolved by ensuring that all guests are aware of this policy and requiring employers who book company travel to enroll and participate in the Airbnb for Work program. Guests should be required to review and acknowledge an additional disclosure agreement as part of the booking confirmation process that would include not only a host's full additional House Rules, but verification that the booking guest will actually be on the premises during the stay.
3. Besides requiring that minors and pets are always attended, Host's don't typically manage which adult guests are on the premises at any given time after check-in. If there's ever an urgent need to get in touch with someone in our home, it's possible that another adult guest might be the only one present, and we would have no means of immediately and directly contacting that guest without their personal phone number. Hosts need more information about the additional guests on any given booking, which could be granted by requiring that all adult guests have their own verified Airbnb profiles attached to bookings as co-travelers, providing the last names and phone numbers of additional guests, etc. There shouldn't be any unidentified adults staying in someone's home who are simply labeled "Guest" within the booking details.
4. Airbnb's age guidelines for what determines adults vs children vs infants are essentially useless from a host perspective. Hosts need to know how many legal adults and how many minor guests will be in their homes. Prompting guests to book anyone over the age of 13 as an adult may help guests identify what listings have a suitable bed/bath count, but this policy offers no practical information for hosts. If Airbnb wishes to continue guiding guests with this information for search purposes, then the ability to clarify an "adult" guest as a minor needs to be offered as part of the booking confirmation process.
These issues are from the perspective a host based in the United States and may not reflect the needs of hosts in other countries. I'm also sure that other hosts on this forum have noticed additional issues and have even better ideas for how they can all be resolved! I don't know how closely Airbnb monitors this forum, but I can't think of a better way for our voices to be heard!
