[w3pm]

"I'm sure they deal with this with people wanting to stay beyond their trip date or trying to book directly, but Airbnb can easily track this stuff with the scheduling feature and seeing discrepancies when users try to go offline."

Just curious, what recourse does Airbnb have when discovering these discrepancies?

[psuter]

If you bypass AirBnB, you will not benefit from their insurance coverage. I have heard of cases where recurring guests would try to arrange the next deal directly, and that factor was always the decisive reason for the host to decline.

[chrischen]

Up until the the SF incident, I'm pretty sure AirBNB didn't even offer insurance.

[jlees]

I'd imagine it's hard to tell the difference between offline bookings from other sources, and repeat guests. We list our room on Airbnb and occasionally on work email lists, CL etc, for longer-term sublets. We have never taken an Airbnb guest offline, but from the surface it would look pretty similar, with the balance of insurance vs someone you have had enough contact with to trust (and the fees/tax aspect), I can certainly see why people'd do it. Especially given a recent experience with unexpected underpayment from them :/

[outericky]

They could disallow that host from listing their space. Small revenue loss to AirBnB. Big revenue loss to the host. Not really worth the few bucks to not be able to use airbnb.