Odd Message from Airbnb

1

I just received a Request and in the message stream was a note from Airbnb (the XXX’s are my addition):

Be careful with this request
Communicating or paying outside of Airbnb puts you at risk of being scammed. If XXX is asking you to do this, please report them and decline their request–we’ll exempt this instance from your acceptance rate.

If they aren’t, respond before XXX on XXX to maintain your response rate.

Then I have a choice of two buttons, “Report and decline” and “Dismiss”.

All good for Airbnb to be trying to catch this kind of thing, but this guest did not send a message with the request at all! They have stayed with me before and were perfect guests.

I just find it odd that Airbnb would flag a non-message, when I have received messages from other guests in the past where they tried to send me phone numbers and it did not flag those.

2

Well, since you didn’t post the actual message (redacted) which the guest sent, we can’t even begin to guess why Air thought they wanted to communicate or pay outside the platform.

Air’s automated message searcher probably detected something it thought was an email address or phone number – whether it was or not…

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3

Maybe Airbnb actually removed the message that they sent you which discussed paying off platform? Or maybe this guest has been flagged by Airbnb as having done it before.

4

I think you didn’t read this part of my post:

5

I suppose this is possible, but I accepted the request and all communication has been normal since, no mention of paying off platform from this guest. They have stayed with me before so would have my phone number if they wanted to contact me off-platform.

Again, possible, but I am the only host this guest has ever stayed with (or at least the only one that has exchanged reviews, anyway).

Just odd all around.

6

How would Airbnb know if guest had done this before? Wouldn’t host & guest have discussed this off the platform?

Could Airbnb be sending a preemptive notice based on repeat guests to discourage off-site bookings?

7

The guest could have been previously reported by another host or otherwise caught by Airbnb trying to take a transaction off-platform.

I strongly suspect that the guest’s message to @georgiahost was censored by Airbnb either because the message actually suggested an off-platform booking or because Airbnb incorrectly thought it did. It would be interesting if georgiahost followed up with the guest to get the guest’s side. Might make an interesting conversation during the stay.

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