That’s a good thing. It will divert more people to Airbnb. The new Airbnb marketing campaign can be “we allow you to book travel with other people’s credit cards!”
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It sounds as though you and I share many of the same ideas!
I am a little older than most hosts at 86 but still love meeting people.
Don’t know when I’ll stop!!
Mary
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We give our cc card to waiters whenever we go out to eat … doesn’t anybody else do that?/// eiiiiieeeeee
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Now that is a red flag!
Lol
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It is actually part of our city ordinance to collect IDs upon arrival, as well as sign a contract with the city, and to verify you are 25 years+ as the main reservation holder.
We are a 3500 sq ft home in a hot vacation spot so unfortunately we cannot let things like no ID slide. Too much at risk.
Mary, I really hope that when I’m your age I have such a lovely and positive attitude towards guests. Long may you host. 
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Thank you, its the guests who help keep me going!!
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luckily for me the ccv on my card has worn off, so i’ve memorised it. actually i think it’s good practice to obscure it if you can.
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If your booking requires a photo in the profile and the guest has a flower or dog, you can cancel the reservation penalty free on Airbnb.
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I’ve just completely stopped worrying about it after having it happen at a variety of places (gas stations, bars, pizza places and a couple places we never figured out). Our city seems to be filled with skimmers. It happened 6 times in one year!
And every single time the card company/bank removed the fraudulent charges and fed-exed us a new card with a new number. Never took more than a couple of minutes to sort it out.
My profile pic on Air is a nice sunset from my house, which I also use in my listing. In the probably a dz.+ times I’ve reserved Air properties, only one host has asked for an actual pic of me, which I gladly sent to her. I like that Air is proactive in not allowing discrimination of any kind, & will gladly submit a pic of myself if asked. However, I honestly can’t say I could come up w/ one photo of myself that I like, as I am my own worst (photo) critic.
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Thank you!!! I did not know this. The next time I get a dog picture, I’ll write the guest and say either put up a useful photo or I’m cancelling the reservation.
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Hopefully in a less antagonistic manner. 
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Same. I require a regular facial profile photo. I don’t understand why this is so difficult. If they have a problem with this, they are REALLY going to have a problem keeping the property in order, so I think hosts should think hard on this.
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I verify that the person checking in is the person on the profile. I do not accept third-party bookings. I have had too many people try to use other people’s accounts.
Third party booking isn’t allowed anyway. I didn’t know this till I had a conversation on the phone with AirBnB. They can get a special professional AirBnB account that allows it but a normal account can’t. It’s somewhere in the T&C. I’ve never seen one of the special accounts. Don’t know what hoops they make them jump through. Quite a good excuse to decline the booking and ask them to get them booking for themselves though.
Also to everyone more generally about the ‘profile’ pic. My understanding is there are two. An avatar that can be anything and that can be seen before booking and a profile pic that can only be seen after booking, to prevent hosts being racist etc. but some people use the same pic for both. They do similar with names. Don’t think you can see the surname till after booking, although a lot of information can be gathered from first names. It’d make more sense to me to use initials.
What information can you gather from that?
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We recently had a woman stay for 3 months and we joked that we wouldn’t be able to pick her out of a lineup. She left every day at 5:30am and returned at 8:30 pm. Her profile pic was too small to get details so all we knew was from seeing her walk up the driveway sometimes. We knew she was tall, thin, dark hair. She was a perfect guest. I wish she’d come back.
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I’ve had so many guests over the years that look nothing like their profile pic. Usually the problem seems to be that they have used a much more flattering picture or, at this point, the profile picture could be 12+years old. I don’t really care as long as I can reach the guest at the phone number listed on the account and that they follow my rules and leave the place in good condition.
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The only thing hosts see before a booking is confirmed is the first letter of the guest’s first name. The guest doesn’t choose that, it is standard across the platform. The profile photo you see after a booking is confirmed is the one the guest has chosen.
In the case where a guest doesn’t have a clear photo of their face, Airbnb would have one that the guest had to submit for ID verification purposes, but hosts aren’t privy to that photo.
I find your statement incredibly discriminatory and totally incorrect. The only information I can think of that could be gleaned from a first name would involve making assumptions about a guest’s race, nationality, religion, or sex, none of which is information that should make a damn bit of difference to a host. (Except in the case of homeshare hosts who only accept guests of the same sex as the host, and even then, there are plenty of people with gender-neutral names or females with nicknames like Charlie. I had a guest whose name was Elia, which I assumed was a male guest- it turned out her real name was Elizabeth, but she’s always gone by Elia)
And those assumptions may be completely wrong. Parents choose all sorts of names for their children that may reflect nothing but the parents liking that name or it being the name of someone they admire. Arabic names are common in Mexico- lots of guys named Omar, for instance. They aren’t Arab at all, nor is their heritage- they are Mexican.
I could walk right by many of my upcoming guests on the street and never recognize them from their profile photo, even if it’s a clear face photo. It’s not even necessarily that they picked a more flattering photo- many people just look different in photos than in real life. (A lot of models may be unrecognizable and not turn heads in person- they’re just really photogenic, and some very attractive people aren’t photogenic at all.) They look enough like the photo that I can tell it’s the same person when they arrive, but I wouldn’t be able to pick them out of a line-up just based on the photo.
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