Well, defeats the whole purpose of setting up an email relay system doesn’t it!
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Yep, that’s exactly what I told my wife in the end! Either she was up to no good or it was all completely innocent stupidity. I am leaning now toward the latter. But, I also told my wife if it was the latter, that she would drive us crazy with her stupidity while she was here and we would be so annoyed it wouldn’t be worth it.
I actually trusted her more after I saw her allegedly real picture on her ID. It was the fake pictures, along with her early “demand” for our address that initially put me off.
According to her ID, she’s 22 and we’ve had a string of early-20-somethings in the last couple of months that have driven us absolutely mad. So, even if I was wrong about her, I think we saved ourselves a bunch of trouble by cancelling.
Yes, that’s true. Usually they take on a western first name and keep their Chinese last name. They don’t use their Chinese first name as their last name either - they keep their real last name.
Anyway, she learned a lesson, if you don’t use your real name here, it can mean trouble. It bothered me mostly that her last name was different - not that she had a westernized first name. Except that usually when they take on a westernized first name it’s an actual western first name. Most popular seem to be names from very old movie stars. This name, Oliviarsl isn’t any name at all. Google it - and no results come up! It’s a name that has never been used - and it has a bizarre L on the end which makes no sense at all.
On her facebook page she said she grew up in Seattle. So, being 22, if she grew up here, she certainly could have been expected to have better English and maybe a real western first name - not one that isn’t even a real word! Anyway, there was just too much about this that didn’t make sense.
Oh and another thing, speaking of her facebook page. On facebook she said she lived in New York - which left me wondering why she making a reservation with us - I’ve heard all the stories about local reservations. On Airbnb she said she lived in Seattle, and the ID she sent was from California!!
She is probably totally innocent and just stupid, but she needs to do a better job of presenting herself to the world if she expects strangers to do business with her. That’s just not how this new interconnected world works. You can’t be telling three different stories in three different places and expect people to trust you enough to have you into their homes!
So true. In fact, I would say 90% of our guests have empty profiles. But most of them have more than two forms of verified ID and most of them have some form of verified government ID. This was one of the few we saw that only had 2 forms of verified ID. Not even a phone number! Just facebook and an email.
I agree with you about all the various foreign forms of English. But even with that considered, this message was just enough off from what we usually get that it roused my concerns.
Haha! That’s hilarious - you still don’t know her name!! In our case, we almost never know how to pronounce the names of our guests! We’ve gotten so used to never calling them by their name when they’re here because we have no idea how their name is pronounced!
Yes, I’m totally open to the possibility that I over analyzed. It’s just that in her original photos, she looked like such a floozy. It came too close to making us suspect she might be prostituting out of our home. We’ve seen the stories of that happening around here. That was her biggest mistake in the end - not using real pictures of herself. If she had used her real picture, I would have never had a second thought about accepting her reservation.
I was trusting their promise that they wouldn’t hold it against you if you were uncomfortable with the booking. And if I was going to cancel, I wanted to do so quickly so as to cause minimal disruption to the guest. I didn’t know this until last night, but when you cancel, Airbnb shows a screen that says something like, “Please think twice before you cancel. Think about the inconvenience this will cause the guest.” That’s totally legitimate for them to point out, because cancellations can leave a really sour taste in a guest’s mouth. We’ve had hosts cancel on us and it’s a terrible thing.
Right under that, Airbnb shows you some stats, like “Their reservation is 5 days away”, “They made their reservation 36 minutes ago.” So let’s say they made their reservation 23 days ago and their stay is in 1 day - you’re supposed to realize by seeing that - that you’re causing a great inconvenience to your guest. When I saw that, I wanted to cancel it as quickly as possible so Air could see I caused minimal inconvenience. And I wasn’t sure how long it would take them to respond to a message.
I did message them on twitter right afterwards and they assured me they wouldn’t hold these two cancellations against us. So, hopefully that will be true! We’ve done hundreds of reservations without any cancellations, so hopefully that’ll help too.
Well, this whole experience was worth it - just to learn that! I had no idea you could do that!
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Whew! This is pretty much a one-man thread. You must be in a writin’ mood. I’m not in a readin’ mood but maybe I’ll give it another go this afternoon.
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Print it out and take it to the beach 
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No beach here…but my toes are sandy for some reason. 
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Hmm, do you live in Peru near @GutHend?
That would be DustyToes though!
Or perhaps, Inca-toes?
No I don’t live in Peru near @GutHend…who, by the way, has gone silent for a while. Maybe he’s had lots of guests and is flush with $$$.
I’m trying to get out the door to an app’t so toodle-loo.
And toodle pip @SandyToes! 
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or even better, more architecture clients, which is where his real talents lie.
15% of my guests are Chinese/Koreans/HK/Taiwanese. Majority of them have English names that are unofficial, undocumented. I noticed that they sometimes change their English names. This doesn’t bother me now, *but it was a red flag for me as well. Nothing bad ever happened.
edit: added *but
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Many of my guests are Chinese and Korean too and the name situation can indeed be confusing. Often they will give their surname as their main profile name and then, as everyone has said, choose an English name for communication purposes. It’s primarily the Chinese who do this, I’ve found. Some of the English names they choose are so old-fashioned they do make you smile. Joyce and Doris have stayed with me several times!
Also, I’ve had several cases where Chinese guests have more than one Airbnb account. I’m not sure how they manage to do this but I’m guessing it has something to do with the restrictions the Chinese government imposes on internet access. So possibly they have one account for travelling within China and another for travelling abroad.
Another thing is that sometimes Chinese guests will cite their country of origin as anywhere except China because they worry they will be declined due to the bad reputation of Chinese tourists internationally. Sad but true.
Interesting related article on the name thing:
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I use my middle name as host and guest. I should have set up a separate account for travel. To be honest, as long as the money comes in, I don’t care what name they use. I’m renting a weekend cottage. I always wondered why hotel registere needed to exist, all the stories re Mr and Mrs smith, brown, jones.
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I had a Chinese guest named “Man.” I thought “I’m not going to accept a guest named ‘man’!” But when I saw her picture I realized what was going on. Another person named “new user” was able to book with me. When I pointed out the name for the reservation they fixed it.
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I’ve had some hilarious names from Chinese guests. MushroomGirl was probably my favourite and she remains in my top ten best guests ever. I don’t know. I’ve come to the conclusion that you can’t rely on anything except your own fortitude when you hear the doorbell ring and you open your door.
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We are trying to get our new place renovated in a record time of less than 1 month. This involves working 14 hours a day and I’m totally waisted. However, don’t worry: I’ll be back !
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Yay! Come back soon, we miss you!! 
And your war-and-peace-length posts! (Hmm, maybe not!) 
Bonne renovation!
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I’m just winding down a big renovation of my space (not my airbnb space) and I am completely sympathetic to the 14 hour days. I will say that I’ve never felt better however. I just think of it as renovation cross-fit. LOL.
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You’ll have to tell us all about your new place when completed!
So, 14-hr. days have done wonders for your waist, eh? (You probably meant “wasted” but I picked up on it and am just teasing… 
)
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I’m sorry I didn’t read everything, but as far as names go I will give you the example of my hubby: He has a first and second name. Family, friends and he himself refer to him, depending on the day and the time of year, with 5 names derived from his first name and 3 names derived from his second name. Apart from that he has three nicknames. So whenever someone is talking to me about my hubby they might use no less than 11 names.
To be honest: I hate it, as sometimes it confuses me incredibly.
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Potential Review:
Cannot recommend Mr. [oh what’s the point]. He used a different name in each of his messages to me and a different one when I spoke to him each of the days he stayed.
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