Learning how to screen guests for short-term rental bookings is one of the few things a host controls completely before a stranger has keys to the property. The catch is that most screening advice tells you to go with your gut, and your gut is exactly the part of the process that gets hosts into trouble. Australian anti-discrimination law and platform policy both draw a hard line between assessing a booking and assessing a person. This guide covers what Airbnb and Stayz already check, what is left to you, and where the legal boundaries sit.
What guest screening actually means (and what Airbnb and Stayz already do for you)
Most hosts overestimate the platform. Airbnb requires guests to supply a government photo identification document, an email address and a phone number to create a profile and book, and it screens all users against the United States Treasury sanctions list globally. Deeper background checks, covering criminal databases and sex offender registries, run only in a small number of markets including the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. Airbnb states plainly in its own policy that these checks are limited in scope, may be out of date, and should not be relied on alone.
Airbnb also runs an automated reservation screening system that looks for party risk signals in the booking itself, such as account history, trip length and the type of listing. It works quietly in the background. You never see the output, and you have no say in what triggers a flag.
Stayz gives you less. A guest may carry a Verified Identity badge, but there is currently no way for an owner or manager to require a guest to confirm their identity before they send a booking request. Contact details arrive only after you accept.
One detail catches nearly every host by surprise: Airbnb does not show you a guest’s profile photo while you are deciding on a reservation request. You see it after you accept. That is deliberate, and it tells you what the platform considers a legitimate basis for a decision.
So what is left to you? Everything about the booking itself. Who is coming, how many, why, for how long, and whether the answers hold together.
A guest screening checklist for every booking
Work the same list every time. Consistency is what separates screening from a hunch, and it is also your best defence if a declined guest ever complains.
- Check verification status and profile completeness. Confirmed identity, phone and email. A profile with none of these is worth a question, not an automatic decline.
- Read the trip details for internal consistency. Two guests booking a four-bedroom house for one Saturday night in December is a different proposition to two guests booking it for a week in June. Length of stay, guest count and timing tell you more than anything else on the page.
- Read the review history properly. Look for what past hosts avoided saying. A short, flat review with no warmth is often a polite host declining to write the truth. Read across several reviews before drawing any conclusion.
- Ask two or three plain questions. What brings you to Melbourne? Who is travelling with you? What time are you planning to arrive? These are ordinary hospitality questions and they are entirely permitted. The answers, and the willingness to answer at all, do most of the screening work.
- Confirm the guest is booking for themselves. Airbnb does not allow bookings made on behalf of another person. It is a fair and policy-backed question.
- Verify identity for direct bookings. With no platform layer, this falls to you. Covered in detail below.
- Send the house rules and get an acknowledgement in writing. Occupancy limits, no parties, quiet hours, parking. An acknowledged rule is enforceable. An assumed one is not.
- Record the decision and the reason. One line in your booking notes. This takes ten seconds and is the single most useful habit on the list.
Red flags that actually predict problem guests
| Red flag | What it usually means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Last-minute booking from a local address for one or two nights, especially a Friday or Saturday | The highest-correlation party signal there is. Someone who lives nearby rarely needs accommodation nearby | Ask directly what the occasion is and how many people will be at the property. Decline if the answer is vague |
| Evasive or one-word answers to direct questions | The guest is avoiding committing to something in writing | Ask once more, specifically. Persistent evasion is grounds to decline |
| Guest count that does not match the trip described | Undisclosed extra guests, which is the most common cause of damage and neighbour complaints | Restate the occupancy limit and the extra-guest fee, and ask for confirmation of the final number |
| Request to pay or communicate off-platform | Either fraud, or an attempt to remove the payment protection and message record that protect you | Decline and report it. There is no benign version of this |
| Brand new profile with no reviews | Usually nothing at all. Every guest starts somewhere | Screen on the booking details and their answers instead. A new profile alone is a weak signal |
| Booking on behalf of a friend, relative or client | Against Airbnb policy, and it means the person you screened is not the person staying | Ask the actual guest to book under their own account |
What you are legally allowed to ask (and what you are not)
This is where hosts create real exposure, and it is the part almost no screening guide covers for an Australian audience.
Anti-discrimination obligations for Australian hosts
Providing accommodation is a regulated activity. Federal legislation including the Racial Discrimination Act 1975, the Sex Discrimination Act 1984, the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 and the Age Discrimination Act 2004 applies, alongside state law. In Victoria, the Equal Opportunity Act 2010 makes it unlawful for accommodation providers, a category that expressly includes hotels and camping sites and extends to short-stay accommodation, to refuse a person accommodation because of a protected attribute. Victoria’s list is broader than most hosts expect and now includes profession, trade or occupation. Other states operate equivalent regimes, such as the Anti-Discrimination Act 1991 in Queensland and the Equal Opportunity Act 1984 in South Australia.
Airbnb’s Nondiscrimination Policy sits on top of that and is stricter in places than the law requires. Hosts may not decline or cancel a booking, or apply different rules or fees, because of a protected characteristic. Three specific positions catch experienced hosts out. You may not decline guests based on nationality because a previous guest from that country caused a problem. You may not decline older guests because you think the property is unsuitable. You may not decline a guest with a disability on suitability grounds. In each case the platform’s expectation is the same: describe the property accurately, including the steep staircase or the absence of a lift, and let the guest decide for themselves.
The practical rule is simple. Screen the booking, not the person. Every question on the checklist above is about the trip. None of them is about who the guest is.
Privacy limits on researching a guest online
Plenty of guides recommend searching a guest’s social media before accepting. That advice has aged badly in Australia.
Many small hosting operations sit under the Privacy Act 1988 small business turnover threshold and are therefore exempt from the Australian Privacy Principles. That exemption is narrower than it sounds, and it no longer protects you from the main risk. On 10 June 2025, a statutory tort for serious invasions of privacy commenced under Schedule 2 of the Privacy Act, introduced by the Privacy and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2024. An individual can now sue directly for either intrusion upon seclusion or misuse of information relating to them, and the tort applies regardless of whether the small business exemption covers you.
The threshold is meaningful. The invasion must be serious, must be intentional or reckless, and the person must have had a reasonable expectation of privacy. Glancing at a public profile is unlikely to meet it. Compiling a file on a guest, storing what you find, or sharing it with other hosts is a different matter entirely, and it now carries a personal legal risk that did not exist before June 2025.
The better habit is also the easier one. Ask the guest the question directly. You get a more reliable answer and a written record of it.
The legal information in this section is general guidance only and is not legal advice. Platform policies and legislation change. Confirm the position for your own situation with the relevant platform policy or a qualified lawyer.
Screening differently for Instant Book and request to book
The two booking modes do not need more or less screening. They need screening at different moments.
With request to book on Airbnb, or 24-hour review on Stayz, the screening happens before you commit. You have a window to ask questions and decline without consequence. Use it. If you do not respond to a Stayz request within 24 hours it is declined automatically, which is a poor way to make a decision.
With Instant Book, the booking is confirmed the moment the guest presses the button and screening moves to the hour after. Set the requirements the platform lets you set, then message every new booking within the first hour with your standard questions. On Stayz, guests must agree to your house rules and policies before an instant booking completes, and a booking that breaches those rules gives you grounds to request cancellation. That only works if the rules are specific. “No parties” is enforceable. “Respectful guests only” is not.
Instant Book carries a ranking advantage on both platforms, which is why most professionally managed listings use it. The trade-off is that your house rules have to do the work your inbox used to.
Screening guests for direct bookings
Direct bookings remove the platform’s verification layer completely. No identity check, no review history, no payment protection, no messaging record held by a third party. You are running the whole process.
Three things do most of the work.
Verify identity before check-in. Use an identity verification service that matches a government-issued document to a selfie, rather than asking a guest to email a photo of their licence. A photograph of a document proves very little on its own, and it leaves you storing sensitive personal information you are then responsible for protecting.
Take a security deposit or a card pre-authorisation. The hold matters more than the amount. Guests planning to break the rules tend to disengage when a deposit appears.
Use a written short-stay agreement. Occupancy limits, quiet hours, the extra-guest fee, the damage position and a cancellation policy, acknowledged before arrival. This is the document that decides how a dispute ends.
One further check costs nothing: confirm the name on the payment card matches the name of the person booking. Mismatches are common in fraudulent bookings and rare in legitimate ones.
How to decline a booking professionally
Keep it short, neutral and about the booking. Do not explain your reasoning in any detail, and never reference anything that could be read as a protected attribute. On Airbnb, declining a request is a normal action with no penalty. Declining repeatedly on Instant Book is a different matter, so if you find yourself doing it, change your Instant Book settings rather than your decline rate.
A template that works:
Thank you for your enquiry. Unfortunately I am not able to accept this booking. I hope you find somewhere suitable for your trip.
That is the whole message. Hosts get into difficulty when they add a reason. “We have had problems with groups like yours” is the sentence that turns a routine decline into a complaint, and it is a sentence Airbnb’s enforcement team reads exactly as it sounds.
If the issue is a fixable mismatch, such as guest numbers, say so plainly and offer the correction instead of declining.
How a professional property manager screens guests differently
Screening one property is a judgement call. Screening across dozens is a process, and the difference shows up in the outcomes.
Across the Melbourne portfolio we manage, screening runs to written criteria rather than instinct. Every enquiry goes through the same questions in the same order, and the answers are recorded against the booking. Guest communication is handled by our team and monitored and vetted from the Melbourne office, which means the standard applied on a Tuesday afternoon is the standard applied at 11pm on a Saturday. A single host, screening tired, does not get that consistency, and inconsistency is what produces both bad bookings and discrimination complaints.
Volume also produces pattern recognition that no checklist captures. When you see hundreds of bookings a month across Airbnb, Stayz and Booking.com, you learn which combinations of signals actually precede a problem and which ones are noise. Most hosts who decline every guest without reviews are declining good bookings for no reason.
If self-managing is starting to feel like the constraint rather than the saving, it is worth reading our comparison of self-managing vs. hiring a Melbourne Airbnb manager, or looking at how we approach professional Airbnb property management in Melbourne.
Guest screening tools worth considering
Three categories are worth knowing, and none of them is essential for a single well-managed property.
Identity verification services match a government document against a live selfie and return a pass or fail, which is far stronger than collecting document photos yourself. Damage protection products sit between a security deposit and insurance, and are most useful where a platform’s own cover leaves gaps. Deposit and pre-authorisation tools place a hold on a card without charging it, which is the deterrent that matters for direct bookings.
Assess any of them on what happens when you make a claim, not on what the marketing page promises. That is where the differences appear.
Frequently asked questions
Does Airbnb screen guests for me? Partially. Airbnb verifies identity documents, processes payments, screens all users against global sanctions lists and runs automated party-risk scoring on reservations. Criminal record and sex offender registry checks apply only in a limited set of markets, and Airbnb states these checks have significant limitations. Assessing whether a specific booking suits your property remains your job.
Can I decline a guest who has no reviews? Yes. Review history is not a protected attribute, and declining on that basis alone is permitted. Whether it is sensible is another question. Every guest has a first booking, and a new profile combined with a straightforward answer to a direct question is usually a fine risk.
Can I require identification before accepting a booking? On Airbnb and Stayz you cannot require additional identification as a condition of accepting a request, and Stayz has no mechanism for a host to require verification before a request is sent. You can request identification after a booking is confirmed, and for direct bookings you can require it before check-in.
Is it legal to decline based on reviews alone? Yes. Past guest conduct documented in reviews is a legitimate, non-discriminatory basis for a decision. Record the reason at the time.
What if a guest lies about the number of people staying? Undisclosed extra guests breach your house rules, provided the limit is stated in them. Raise it with the guest in the platform messaging thread rather than by phone, so the exchange is recorded, and escalate to the platform if it is not resolved. This is why occupancy limits belong in your written rules rather than in your head.
Should I use Instant Book or request to book? Instant Book improves ranking and conversion on both Airbnb and Stayz, which is why most managed listings use it. It works when your house rules are specific enough to enforce and you message every new booking promptly. If neither of those is true yet, request to book is the safer setting.
Screening well is a habit, not a policy
Good screening is not a rule you write once. It is the same short set of questions asked on every booking, the same criteria applied whether you are fresh on a Monday morning or tired on a Sunday night, and a written record of why you decided what you decided. That is unglamorous work, and it is most of the reason some properties have a quiet year while comparable ones nearby do not.
It is also relentless, which is the honest answer to is managing an Airbnb hard. If you own a short-stay property in Melbourne and the screening, messaging and out-of-hours judgement calls have stopped being enjoyable, we manage more than 70 properties across the city and would be glad to talk through what handing it over would look like.
