If you’re an Airbnb host looking to increase bookings for your rental, you know that it will naturally come with an influx of potential guests who may not follow the house rules or treat your short-term rental respectfully. Knowing how to screen your guests can help you avoid hosting issues. What does the screening process entail? How can you ensure that Airbnb guests are suitable for your rental?
Here are some expert tips and tricks to help screen your guests and avoid potential issues as you increase your Airbnb efforts.
Guest Screening 101
When screening guests and looking for red flags, focus on two primary areas: guest profiles and reviews. Although you’ll want to use the tips later in this guide for a more comprehensive check, these two areas will give you a good initial sense of whether a guest is a suitable fit for your short-term rental.
Guest profiles can tell you a lot about a guest. For example, do they have a picture? Does their profile contain a bio? Do they have identifying information that seems to align with who they’re advertising themselves as? Fake profiles can often look quite strange, so you’ll see issues almost immediately when you’re looking further into every guest.
Speaking to Airbnb reviews, looking at these can tell you whether previous hosts believed they were good guests or if they left their vacation rental looking terrible or damaged after they left. Just like the guest experience, the host experience is important too!
Essential Tips for Screening Airbnb Guests
Beyond our first set of tips, using Airbnb requires you to be detailed when looking into a guest’s background on the platform. This is why some essential tips are to ask for references and to talk to your guests. While you can guarantee that a vacation rental is protected with features like security deposits, you can also leverage traditional rental strategies like asking for guests’ references. Good guests won’t care and will provide you with contacts who can verify that they’re reliable and trustworthy.
Of course, taking the direct route can be an excellent way to go about the guest screening process as well. Asking them more about their travels, if they’ve used Airbnb before, what they think about it, and what they’re looking for in a host are among just some of the questions that can help you get to know your guest and determine if they’re a good fit for your rental. A guest’s profile can tell you more about them, but being proactive will give you information you can act on that an Airbnb profile can’t provide.
Expert Tricks to Screen Guests Effectively
Trying to screen guests using more conventional methods can feel impersonal and rather hit or miss. How can you know exactly who’s planning on booking your Airbnb? The best way to navigate this common issue is to have a phone call or video chat with your guest.
A phone call or a video chat can make it easier to verify your guest’s identity and help you develop a rapport with them so you can get a better feel for who they are and how they behave. During this call, you should have a transcript of a screening questionnaire for every Airbnb user, asking questions like what they do for work, why they chose your rental, and what other guests are like. These best practices will help you tremendously in the rental industry.
Maximizing Safety: Screening Airbnb Guests
There are several reasons why you want to make sure that you’re connecting with the right guests. While the primary concern might be the property itself, you should also be worried about the safety of the person in question, other guests, or even your neighbors. Airbnb gives you the support that you need in this regard, but there are still some considerations to keep in mind.
Your first defense offered by the Airbnb platform is ID verification and background checks. These basic aspects of the sign-up process ensure that the person signing up is who they say they are and that they don’t have any red flags that could prove problematic for the broader Airbnb community. That being said, ID verifications aren’t foolproof, and background checks aren’t always comprehensive. Be sure to delve deeper into these aspects, but use the strategies in this guide to enhance them and ensure both your community and your home remain safe when responding to bookings.
Top Techniques to Screen Your Airbnb Guests
Your approach to screening can make more of a difference than you know. Here are a few tips and top techniques to get better results.
- Know What to Look for: Looking into your guests’ profiles and pasts is great, but not if you don’t know what you’re looking for. AI photos or responses, plans to host parties, and other concerning profile elements or statements should all indicate that a guest is not a suitable one for your property.
- Reach Out to Other Hosts: If you have concerns about certain guests or if they’ve received some vague reviews, don’t be afraid to reach out to other hosts. Doing so can help you avoid a negative hosting experience that you would otherwise have had to endure.
- Use Airbnb’s Tools: Turning off instant booking, using ID verification tools, and asking for background checks can help you ensure that your guest booking requests are coming from people you can trust and that you’re protected in the process.
Mastering Guest Screening: Proven Strategies
The best approach to mastering the screening process is by learning from experienced super hosts who have excelled on Airbnb over a long period. Take a look at various Airbnb forums or see if you can find people who previously thrived on the Airbnb platform who are willing to share their top tricks and tips with you. Learning from those who have already figured out how to avoid bad guests can give you all the necessary insights to master the guest screening process, expediting your bookings and guaranteeing that you get guests who won’t disrespect your home or its rules.
Ensuring a Positive Experience: Screening Airbnb Guests
Finally, it’s important to make sure that your guests don’t feel as though the process is hostile or uncomfortable. If you approach the screening process in the wrong way, you run the risk of running off viable guests who likely would have been a valuable addition to your rental history. Here are some helpful tips that will always make sure you’re going about screening your guests the right way.
- Make it a conversation, not an interrogation. When guests feel like they’re being interrogated or you come off too aggressive, they may decide that you’re not the right host for home. Instead, ask your questions with curiosity and make sure to build a rapport with each guest who has a booking request, regardless of whether or not they’re going to be staying with you.
- Be transparent as well! Good guests are doing their research when they’re looking for a place to stay, which means that they’ll have questions for you too. If you’re doing all of the asking but you’re not responsive, you could be driving away good guests who you do want on your property. Keep this in mind when you begin having questions with guests.
- Check your tone with messages and try to be as positive and kind as possible. The biggest issue with instant messaging on any platform is that there’s a lot of humor and humanity that can get lost in translation. Taking care to write your messages carefully so that guests receive them the right way can make all the difference, helping you start a conversation that guests won’t run away from immediately. If you rub guests the wrong way, it can quickly turn into a problem that turns prospective bookings into non-existent bookings, something that’s not desirable when you’re first getting started on the platform or looking to grow your reviews and booking rates.
Screening Airbnb Guests Made Easy
Guest screening can seem like an insurmountable task, but a lot of it boils down to approach. If you know what Airbnb does to protect you and the actions you need to take to build upon that, you can learn how to screen Airbnb guests with ease and refine that approach over time to experience even better results. Use the expert tips and tricks offered above to help you avoid bad Airbnb experiences this season!
