Has anyone had a 3rd party booking, where one person will book for a group of people but the person booking it is not coming themselves. This way we have no idea who these people are. I had this happen to me. The request said 2 people but 3 showed up. They were all with the same fitness group. The booking was for 8 days but these people left after 6 days. To my surprise on the 7th day a new person just showed up at my door step. He was there for the AIRBNB but no one notified me that someone else was coming. Then I found out that still another peesin was supposed to join him. He ended up not stain because he felt uncomfortable that it wasn’t an entire place, only two rooms and a bath as advertized. In my mind that should have been 2 separate bookings to begin with. Maybe they tried to pay for the cleaning fee only once but expected more. Has anyone had a 3rd party booking? How do you handle it?
Opinions vary on this. I don’t mind third party bookings. I find no correlation in guest quality. Usually corporate bookings or relatives. Have had good experiences.
I have had a couple and did not have any problems, so like @Brandt , I don’t mind them.
I probably would feel differently about 3rd party bookings if I was a live-in host.
Supposedly, since 3rd party bookings violate Airbnb’s terms of service, you can call Airbnb and have them cancel the reservation without penalty, plus if you get a bad review it also will violate the terms of service since the review doesn’t come from a person that actually stayed, so you can have it removed.
Airbnb will not back you up unless the the third-party booking a business account. I will not accept third-party bookings.
There are so very many threads here about third party bookings. Hosts have a wide variety of views and (like me) some people won’t want to write their opinions at length yet again. It’s a good idea to use the search facility (top right of the homepage). It will send you in the right direction 
My policy too. Want to have access to the profile of a person staying there, so just tell them it is against Airbnb policy and give them the link to the policy. Some have responded they’ve don’t it elsewhere and I’m just like “not with me”.