Truvi
Miami, FL Mar 21, 2026
Guest verification is one of the cornerstones of our business. After all, you're allowing strangers into one of the most expensive assets you own, so you have every right to know who stays at your home. All OTAs allow hosts to run their own verifications, though some have requirements you must adhere to. (If you don't know why you should verify your guests, read why we don't trust Airbnb to verif our guests), but don't take our word for it, read what Airbnb says about their guest verification:
I don't know about you, but I like to know who stays at our places. We use a third party to do our guest verifications. It's called Truvi, and not only do they biometrically compare a selfie to a government-issued ID, but they also check that the mobile phone account, email address, social media, and other data points from a guest weren't created a few days ago. This helps reassure hosts that the booker is not a spam account, but a real person. Like I said, the different channels have requirements that you need to comply with in order to use an external guest verification.
Airbnb
You are required to post in the description that you require guest verification. Airbnb calls this section the "Listing Description". The bad news is that it's only 500 characters long, so keep it short. You can explain the hows and whys later, but it must be disclosed in this section. (Here's Airbnb's help article on this.)
Here's how we have it written up for our listing. If you're having guests sign a short-term vacation rental agreement, you need to disclose it in the same section.
If you have it listed here, and a guest refuses to complete the verification, you can call Airbnb and ask them to cancel the reservation. They will cancel it, because the guest has violated your house rules, and it's a trust and safety issue. The guest will have their money refunded, but the cancellation will not count against your rankings, super host status, and you won't be charged a cancellation fee by Airbnb.
"Our [Airbnb's] identity verification process checks a person’s information against trusted third-party sources or a government ID. The process has safeguards, but doesn’t guarantee that someone is who they say they are."
VRBO
I'm not aware of any requirements that VRBO places on how you disclose that you externally verify your guests (or on having them sign a short-term vacation rental agreement, for that matter). We still include it in the first paragraph of our listing description on this channel as well.
I'd rather be safe than sorry.
VRBO has also backed us up on this and allowed us to cancel reservations for guests who haven't completed the guest verification without penalty.
Booking.com
Booking is a little trickier than the other OTAs, since there's no apparent place to add this info in the listing. In fact, the only place you can even add any text is in your "Key collection" Policies, so we have added it there.
We've also added it to the "Small Print" at the very bottom of our listing descriptions.
To add the Small Print (fine print) on Booking.com, log in to the Extranet, go to the Property tab, and select View your descriptions. Scroll to "The fine print" section to check predefined conditions or use "Request a change" to add custom text, which is then reviewed by the Content Team.
This, like every step on Booking.com, takes time, and you need to explain to the Content Team what you want to add to the sections. It's possible, but it took us contacting them a few times to get it right.
Although Booking.com says that it differentiates between reservations cancelled by a host and those cancelled by a guest, in our experience, we don't see that distinction in their analytics data.
#MastrmindProTip
What's important is that all three major OTA's allow you to cancel a reservation from a guest who has not completed their guest verification. We tell guests they should complete it within 24 hours, but we're a little more lenient for reservations farther out. However, we expect verifications to be completed in a few days, and we have cancelled reservations on all three platforms.
By cancelling them early, it frees up our Calendar for another booking - the last thing you want is to have a reservation on the books for weeks, only to cancel it a few days before check-in and leave a gaping hole in your Calendar.
The hardest thing is to change your mindset, from thinking that you lost money when refusing an unverified guest stay at your listing to understanding that you just dodged a potentially bad guest. Think of it this way - how much money would you spend to remove a one-star review from your listing, or having to fix thousands of dollars in damage, or needing to repair a broken relationship with a neighbor?
Stick to your guns, cancel the reservation, and move on. We started verifying our guests over a year ago and have never looked back.