Guest Vetting
We understand your challenges...
Reports of trashed apartments following parties off Airbnb bookings abound on mainstream media. Why do they receive so much media attention? Because unfortunately, they are not so uncommon. Parties thrown by short-term guests can cost hosts thousands upon thousands. In many cases, hospitality owners are left with little recourse and need to foot the entire bill – repairs, lost income, relocations of subsequent bookings, and the list goes on and on…
Beyond such parties, damages caused by guests staying for a couple of weeks or months may far exceed the security deposit kept by hosts. It is usually only at this point that hosts start to worry about who their guests really are and how they can go about recouping their guests’ costs. By then, it is usually too late.
How Can Zeevou's Guest Vetting Help?
Hosts need to be fully pro-active in screening and approving their guests before parting with keys. Besides ensuring that payments are collected via methods that reduce the risk of chargebacks, many hosts also require a security deposit to be paid ahead of arrival.
Furthermore, hosts may also require guests to provide their contact details and ID documents. While it is common practice in the hotel industry to gather this information from guests upon check-in, many hosts leave themselves open to unnecessary risks by failing to do so. Moreover, frequently guests are not required to sign a single piece of paper (or provide the digital equivalent) before they are handed over keys to a holiday home.
For those hosts that have tried to ensure all the boxes are ticked prior to arrival, it will be clear that it is extremely difficult to keep track of everything, especially in scale. This makes it difficult to ensure that keys are only ever handed over once all the financials and the guest vetting have been taken care of.
Our Team at Zeevou has developed a number of ways to help hosts keep their properties safe and to reduce the risk of financial costs caused by accepting bookings. While you may have worked extremely hard to get the booking in the first place and may be keen to get the funds paid out into your bank account, it is essential to ensure that you will not get a backlash down the line.
Thus, besides only collecting payments through 3-D Secure Links, Zeevou’s 5-Step Booking Confirmation Process helps you vet your guests thoroughly. Zeevou’s integration with Signable allows you to not only get your terms and conditions signed by guests but also to collect as many pieces of ID as you wish. For example, besides a copy of the passport, you may also wish to collect proof of address. This way, you can cross-check with the address they used to pass the 3-D Verification requirements on the payment collected or security deposit pre-authorised through Zeevou.
Zeevou allows you to keep track of the progress of each step of the booking confirmation process, including the guest verification. You will be able to see once the terms and conditions have been sent out to be signed and once the guest has completed the Signable envelope. Worry not, as the self-check-in instructions will still not be sent out, even if they return the envelope with a photo of their favourite Cocker Spaniel uploaded in lieu of ID.
Guests will only be granted access to a property once you have checked all the documentation submitted by them and verified their profile. To ensure the guest experience is as enjoyable as possible, Zeevou will remember this information, and next time a guest makes a booking, they will not be required to go through the guest vetting procedure a second time.
Should a guest damage your property or break your house rules, you can make their profile unverified to remind you that you do not wish to host the guest again should they try to book another one of your properties.
