Airbnb Bans People ‘Likely to Travel’ With Prohibited Users

Airbnb is reportedly banning people from its site based on their association with folks who have been deemed a safety risk and removed from the platform.

The company confirms to Vice(Opens in a new window) that it does “sometimes” restrict access because of someone’s travel partners, but says that referring to the bans as a result of association is overly “simplistic.”

Airbnb claims this is a “necessary safety precaution”; it’s unclear when the practice started or how often it’s implemented. According to Vice, Airbnb has been completing background checks on users for years—sometimes leading to prohibition over matters like a decade-old misdemeanor(Opens in a new window) related to an unleashed dog.

The system features an appeals process, which banned users told Vice’s Motherboard is often limited and frustrating. Customers may return to the platform only once their associate is reinstated, or they’re able to prove there is no close personal connection.

“If someone is removed for a serious safety incident during an Airbnb reservation and we need to remove them and cancel their future reservations, and we then find that someone re-books the exact same future reservation with the same credit card number, we will remove the second account,” Airbnb tells Motherboard.

Airbnb did not immediately respond to PCMag’s request for comment.

Following a Halloween 2019 shooting that killed five people at a California rental property, and then the COVID-19 pandemic, Airbnb codified its ban on parties and events as company policy in June 2022. By November, it rolled out new anti-party tools to help identify potentially high-risk reservations based on a user’s history, reviews, duration of membership, length of planned trip, distance to listing, weekend versus weekday booking, and more.

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