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“I didn’t see any payment information on your listing. Do you accept cash or credit card?”
This guest has a review (a good one) from September 2022. How can she not know how guests pay when they book through Airbnb? (it wasn’t a third party booking- the host mentioned her by name)
It didn’t sound like any kind of scam, just clueless. Anyway, she didn’t respond to my reply, so her inquiry has expired.
How odd and a bit mysterious!
I had something similar. Someone said they ad tried to book our property numerous times (we’re IB) but kept getting told “payment not valid” and asked me if I had everything set up correctly on my end. I had to explain that AirBnB collects and holds their payment, so the problem had to be with AirBnB.
Two days later they finally booked, but then cancelled within 24 hours because they found a different place to stay.
Well, I don’t use IB, so she couldn’t have tried to book and had it get rejected. It just sounded like she thought hosts collect payment, which I could see coming from a total newbie, but she already had at least one booking and stay. In fact, her account says she joined in 2012. Head scratcher.
I’ve had guests with many reviews who’ve thought that. It always surprises me too but I think once we know so much (probably too much, lol) about how it all works it’s hard to imagine not knowing.
There is no shortage of clueless guests. However, she might have been hinting about booking directly not realizing how quickly Airbnb picks up on such conversations in a thread.
Maybe she is using her family/friend account to book.
No, as I said, the one review she had mentioned her by name. The account has the same name. However, it’s possible she could have been letting someone else try to book under her account, pretending to be her.
I really have had guests think that I was personally taking the payment. It doesn’t even seem strange to me. Lots of people are used to booking directly with actual bnbs or vacation home rental companies. In those situations, the person you deal with is actually doing the payment. If anything, it’s the airbnb system that stands out as unusual to me.
I can certainly understand Airbnb newbies thinking they pay the host directly, but since this guest’s account had a review from a stay this past Sept, it just seemed odd that she wouldn’t have known how Airbnb bookings are paid for.
It actually just occurred to me that maybe the other booking was an IB and because I require Requests, she might have thought they are charged differently.
But since she never replied to my explanation, not even to thank me for the response, she’s not exactly a guest I’m eager to get a booking from, anyway.
Guests don’t have to know anything at all to book on Airbnb. I was a guest long before I hosted and I didn’t know anything either.
But when you were a guest for the first time, were you not aware that Airbnb charged your credit card for the booking, that you didn’t give the host your credit card number or pay them on arrival in cash? I imagine you were aware of that, and the credit card charge would have said Airbnb, not the host’s name.
I do realize, though, that some people just never look at their credit card statement, and although that seems odd to me, it’s no odder than posts I have read by hosts saying they just realized, at the end of Dec., that they hadn’t been paid for multiple bookings throughout the year, totalling thousands of dollars.
Many people seemingly just don’t pay attention.
Of course, I knew I used my credit card online to pay for the stays as opposed to paying cash on arrival, but, no, I didn’t know that the host wasn’t charging the card themselves. Even now, that doesn’t really make much sense to me, so I can see why guests don’t understand it.