STR - Guest Verification/Screening

[Shane Bishop]

Hi! We're new hosts to the STR community, but have managed MTRs for about 3 years. We have always screened our MTR guests, and so far, have required our STR guests to complete a verification through Truvi. So far, we've had a few guests flagged by Truvi for criminal background, but Truvi will not disclose the nature of the red flag. So we have two questions for the BP community!!

1) If a guest is flagged and we don't feel comfortable with the booking, can we submit the flagged report to Airbnb and cancel the booking without penalty? The screening is listed in our description as a requirement. 

2) Are other STR hosts requiring screenings and how do you handle it? Is there a better method than Truvi?

I personally have not ever had to fill out a guest verification as a guest, but as new hosts, we want to protect ourselves, our property, and our neighbors as much as possible. 

Thanks for the support!

[Collin Hays]

Good questions, Shane.  99 percent of your bookings are going to come from Airbnb, VRBO, or both.  They have verifications.  Even with that, we've had thousands of direct bookings over the years without any sort of verification - to an extent. I don't know of anything that we could reasonably verify that would make us uncomfortable.  It might make me really uncomfortable to know the criminal backgrounds of some of our tens of thousands of guests over the years for sure.  I can only imagine what that might look like. But it isn't viable to delve into criminal backgrounds, etc.