I always google the names of people who request to stay with us just to see if any red flags (arrests) come up. Someone who just requested to stay with us had a disorderly conduct arrest pop up. He also has no reviews on airbnb. Although he could be fine and it was a one off thing I’d just be more comfortable not accepting his reservation. What would you do? Am I being too paranoid? Also wondering what I should say if I deny his request but keep the dates open for other bookings?
Thanks!
How do you google them? There is no last names
How does that happen? Did you google search him?
I would ask the potential guest about the charge. Could have been something extremely minor.
Once a guest has booked you can see their first and last name.
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How do you see the full names before they book? Are you sure that the person who made the request is the same person you found on Google? Twenty years ago (when there was still such a thing as a print telephone directory there were fifteen pages of people with the same name as me. (Admittedly it’s a pretty common name!)
Disorderly conduct could be anything - a student demo or something?
He says he can google them
When they request before the bookings
Then don’t we have a bit of a security issue here? I thought that last names (both host and guest) were only revealed when a booking is made. That’s how it’s always been for me, anyway and I thought it was a security measure. But it seems that this is a bug or something?
No. Quite often, for me, anyway, it shows up (or used to show up) in the booking request, always in the subject line of the email sent from Airbnb, not on any of the Airbnb web pages.
Here’s an example from my records, dated 6th March 2017:
Subject: Pending: Reservation Request - Firstname Lastname
It looks like this hasn’t happened recently. So maybe it was unintentional, was noticed, and changed.
In any case, I always ask for full names in response to reservation requests. A practice I recommend. Though thus far, searches have not revealed anything interesting. I’m hoping for a Ruritarian Prince going incognito, or maybe a Russian Anarchist.
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Name in request email. Eh it was in the past two years and he has no reviews at all so to me it’s too much of a red flag. I know we will get another booking and think I would like to turn it down. I’m just not sure what to say.
I dont know for sure, but i could never see guests last name and sometimes its even fictional name like TravelAddict
No I can’t either but I think that the difference is that I use IB but many guests still enquire before booking. So maybe there’s a difference between ‘contact host’ and ‘request to book’?
have no idea. I just think that there are so many equal names in a same state or city, how one know when he googles who is who. Especially if age is unknown.
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I can confirm this. At university there were so many with the same name in the same class and year, the only unique identifier was date of birth. Even then on the odd occasion it was same name, same date of birth and we then had to check something else like home address as well.
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Hi Belwoodranch, Where do you get the information about the charges? What public site has this information? Is it a news site? Charges don’t mean a person is guilty or convicted.