How To Prevent Bad Airbnb Guests

Back in 2014, when I was growing my lease arbitrage business in Silicon Valley, I had about 30 listings.

One day, Airbnb called me and said that as of that moment, I was banned from the platform. They were also going to cancel all reservations outside of 15 days.

“Why? I have hundreds of perfect 5-star reviews! What I offer is the future of Airbnb (non lived in homes)."

Their response? “Sorry, it was a decision from upper management”. I later learned it was political at a time where Airbnb was seen as an even bigger disrupter. Now they are just normalized.

Overnight, that decision cost me about $100k in confirmed bookings. My heart sank... I had leases to pay!

I had to come up with a strategy fast, which meant moving onto other OTAs like Booking.com and VRBO.

At the time, Booking.com was really built for hotels. While I did end up driving a good amount of bookings, a large portion of them were booked using stolen credit cards because they did not vet guests the same way Airbnb did.

Because of that, I had to build a system to verify that the people booking were actually the people staying.

This is an actual screenshot from the guide I sent my team back that once I learned what the red flags were:

How Did I Do This?

I learned (the hard way) that there are a lot of bad people who have bad intentions when booking. Many use stolen credit cards, and are fraudsters.

That is when I started using pre arrival forms. Back then I used Cognito Forms.

Most PMS software now allows you to trigger a "pre arrival form", and I highly recommend it. Stop bad guests, and collect data!

These forms let you collect key information like name, phone number, email address, and purpose of travel. You can also require a government issued ID, a selfie holding that ID, and a signed rental agreement.

There are also tools like Superhog and Autohost that can run additional checks if you want to go even further.

The Red Flags

There are very clear patterns that you can recognize to be aware of fraudsters:

• Fraudsters tend to book last minute, usually within a 24 hour window.

• The average length of stay is typically around two nights.

• When asked for a purpose of travel, they often give strange answers like home renovation or vague explanations that do not fully make sense.

• They frequently have local area codes.

• Their email addresses are often odd, something like James00142@yahoo.com

  
  

One of the best preventative measures is requiring guests to upload a photo of themselves holding their ID.

This makes it much easier to verify that the person booking actually matches the identification provided.

If you use a payment processor like Stripe, you can also see location data, IP addresses, and risk scores, which helps paint a clearer picture.

The Bottom Line

If you get a last minute reservation that includes several of these variables, you should have a heightened sense of awareness.

If you ever feel uncomfortable, you can reach out to Airbnb, and they are usually more than willing to cancel the reservation.

If you are going to require pre arrival forms, make sure you clearly disclose this in the Other Things to Note section of your listing.

This is completely valid. Many properties have HOAs that require guest information, so the key is transparency.

Disclaimer

I also want to point out that last minute stays can be an amazing opportunity. You just have to pay attention.

Just the other day, I received this 30 day booking request the day before arrival for a beach house I own in Oceanside.

I was intentionally pricing it high, hitting my minimums. It wasn’t booked, and it was low season. That was intentional. I did not want to go too low.

The guest who booked had another Airbnb cancel on them the night before, so they found my property and booked it. BOOM!

I called them right away, triggered my pre arrival form, collected the information, and everything checked out. It was 100% legitimate.

Always trust your gut, learn to recognize patterns, and understand that if something doesn’t feel right, the reality is it probably won’t end well.