I booked an Airbnb in March of 2025 and I didn’t have to go through any of that. It was in Hollywood, CA.
I made another on last January in St Louis and canceled it a couple of days later and also didn’t have to do that.
My account is ten years old though. Maybe that’s why
I will just say that the use case for AirBnb for me is as a long term rental that isn’t *long enough to warrant an apartment with a lease. To that end, I have used AirBnb three times, thankfully without incident:
I personally wouldn’t want to risk an AirBnb in the short term. Too many unknowns, never mind any requirement to upload ID (which seems reasonable enough to me).
*Even then it may be a toss up with an extended stay hotel, albeit with less space in the hotel.
Not sure if this helps or has been addressed but - I only use AirBnb for international travel. I have been doing this twice a year for at least 10 years and have had no problems. Most of the horror stories I have read about booking with them have been about domestic bookings.
For domestic bookings I have found VRBO to be excellent.
Too late to edit the previous comment but - If I remember correctly it has been common practice for international bookings to give passport information for a while. I remember having to do it to book a couple of places in Portugal in 2018.
I just checked my AirBnB account and I have 13 completed stays and 2 booked for the spring in Prague and Budapest. I’ve also completed a couple of stays with VRBO.
I prefer Airbnb for multi-day stays, especially if it’s the whole family. I’ve never had problems with ID verification or canceled stays. I have had a few issues, including an apartment in Paris where the heat didn’t work and they had to give us plugin electric heaters. Then again, I’ve stayed in major brand hotels like Hilton that were absolute shit shows.
They are the vendors selling the DVD sets, and they are acting like AirBnB folks with insane requirements. [though requesting the social security number AND all the credit card and billing info is absolutely screaming I am going to steal and sell your shit]
Is this just limited to AirBnB? Reason I ask is that my (admittedly limited) understanding is that there’s not that much difference between AirBnB and VRBO, and I don’t see nearly as many complaints about VRBO.
VRBO has been in business longer, their fees may be higher for both renters and owners. I’ve seen the same rental listed on both sites and the pricing is different, but I got the feeling there were more guarantees/ protections with VRBO. Just my opinion
Well because that is clearly a scam site. I am not seeing the connection to Airbnb. Of course a scam site will try to scam you. That’s not a mainstream legit company suddenly requiring sensitive information. It seems that series never had a US DVD release so anything you find is likely to be shady.
I suspect that the ID is required for new customers for insurance purposes. Whenever my daughter rents a car online, be it Turo or Enterprise, she has to send over her Drivers License with a photo of her holding it to show she’s the same person.
Airbnb doesn’t always need to get your ID if they are able to verify you through other means, what they refer to as “trusted third-party sources”. In my case, I had originally connected my Airbnb account to my Facebook profile, which was probably enough to verify me. Or maybe it connected me through my credit card? Who knows, but it’s not a simple as “everyone must provide a picture of their government ID.”
Exactly. And this isn’t some new phenomenon. They’ve been around as long as the web has existed. In other words, it’s a completely unrelated complaint and has no reason to be brought up in this thread.
@aruvqan_myers I suggest you take this over here:
That’s the thread for complaining about scammers in general. This thread is about Airbnb.