Hello Everyone,
A newbie here - dipping our toes in the water of holiday letting our annexe (North Yorkshire, England).
Taking the photos, preparing the property description, going through the forms - no problem.
Verifying identity -BIG problem, wasting many hours.
Driving Licence - take a photo, send it in, take selfie on the phone app, and that in, too.
FAIL. The algorithm couldn’t match the photos. Hardly surprising; the licence photo, like on all UK plastic licences, is a faint, tiny hologram.
Try again, with passport.
Same result - again, not surprising. The UK passport has another faint hologram, with just a passing resemblance. (Female, of a certain age, grey hair, Caucasian).
Impasse. We have been on to Support by phone, then upgraded to higher echelons abroad, by email.
Surely, this must be a common experience, given we all have the same type of documents here, and no actual ID card?
Thinking of packing it in, frankly, and advertising our flat privately. Especially after reading the cautionary tales on here about the trials and tribulations of holiday letting. What a hassle it’s been - and we haven’t even started!
Airbnb software is notoriously horrible. Lots of hosts and guests have had this issue.
Thanks for that - good to know I’m not alone! But what to do to overcome the problem?
Keep trying until you tear all your hair out or give up? I really don’t know what to suggest.
If you are trying to do all this with your phone, try doing it on your computer. That worked for one host who posted about having this issue.
Thanks Muddy. We sent the photos from phone to laptop, and then on to Airbnb, but still no luck.
Will keep trying for a while longer.
I’ve just tried calling them after receiving three bookings in less than 24 hours whilst both my listings have been closed since March 2020. I have given up after going around and around in circles, being cut off, and finally, being unable to cut them off! I had to remove my sim card before the call would end!
In the meantime, Mr Joan looks at my listings and finds they have defaulted back to factory settings, so to speak, hence the bookings.
Fortunately, all three were most understanding, even the one who was told to ask me for a refund! Sorry mate, they have your money, not me.
I’m not sure I want to ever host with Air again. This morning feels ludicrous.
Thank you for letting us know your unfortunate experiences. We have just had a reply from ‘Pooja’ to say this form of identification is essential, but offering no help whatsoever in overcoming the problems to attain it. Like you, I think we will be waving goodbye to Airbnb - before we have even started! R.
Hello @Ronabrom
UK host here . I didn’t have any problem uploading my ID using my passport but can imagine how frustrating it must be to experience these problems.
I can only suggest you set up your listing without ID until you can get this issue resolved.
Tweet and Facebook:
“Really wanted to be Airbnb hosts, but will have to go with VRBO. Tiny photos on our Brit passport & driving license don’t pass the Airbnb “matching” test for mobile photo ID. Customer service tells us they can do nothing after many attempts and calls for assistance. Oh well.”
Persevere! Have just managed, by luck rather than judgement. Tried one last go -a photo of the whole two pages of passport from further away. The Support site had said ‘Try zooming out’, so I gave it a go. Totally counter- intuitive!
Mind you, it then said the listing had gone live, but no sign at all.
Further enquiries revealed ‘checking the calendar’ takes them a further 6 hours!
We’ll see - not impressed so far…
Rather than use your phone, try using a scanner. They seem to be able to deal with IDs that have holograms embedded than cameras, especially phone cameras. If you can scan at 1200 dpi you should get really good images.
If you have a scanner, place the items you want to send to yahoo on the flatbed and COPY them, the ‘invisible’ seals should be much better. Then send those images. Been there done that. If you then scan the copied image they should be better.
Many thanks to all responders - the advice should certainly help others in the same boat - and there must be plenty of them!
It’s been some time since I’ve needed to deal with Airbnb CS, as I’ve been closed since March 2020.
As described above, my listings in our B&B were “mysteriously” re-opened this week, and I received three bookings in less than 24 hours, All have been superb with being told they can’t yet stay in a B&B as per govt regs.
One booked via IB for 24./25. this w/e, the person who was told to ask me for a refund, but cancelled once he understood. I had an email from Air to say he’d cancelled, then one this morning to ask me to review him, even though they knew he hadn’t stayed. I thought I’d say how gracious he’d been about cancelling, until I saw I had to rate his cleanliness!
Tonight I get notification that they have paid me for his non stay. WTF?
Now what do I do? I am so out of touch that even the platform is unfamiliar! And it doesn’t help that I am inadvertently living in Portugal, not the UK, as some are aware of.
I’m only keeping my listings up, in case I want to do some hosting here when we finally move permanently.
I have also not taken bookings since March 2020 because I home share.
I really miss hosting and the cool guests I usually get, but I’m rather dreading getting back into the Airbnb game- from the posts I’ve been reading, they seem to have more platform glitches than ever, and CS reps seem to be not only useless, but detrimental to one’s business in the decisions they make.