Airbnb Scams Are Up 30x. Criminals Are Coming for Hosts.

On Monday’s Good Morning Hospitality, A Skift Podcast, Brandreth Canaley, Michael Goldin, and Jamie Lane break down who is actually winning in travel distribution and what the risks look like when platforms get exploited at scale.

The conversation opens with a story every Airbnb host needs to hear: scams are up 30x since the first half of 2023, and criminals are no longer creating fake accounts. They are hijacking established host accounts with years of five-star reviews and running fake listings inside the platform.

From there, the team digs into why experiences specialists like GetYourGuide are pulling ahead of OTA generalists. GetYourGuide crossed 1 billion euros in revenue in 2025 while Airbnb’s experiences business remains immaterial after more than a decade of attempts.

They close with Skift’s deep dive into Trip.com Group‘s $15.1 billion cash pile and why almost none of it is actually deployable and what that tells operators about the global distribution landscape.

This episode is presented by ⁠⁠Cloudbeds⁠⁠, Bilt⁠⁠, and StayFi.

Watch This Episode

Happy Monday.

Hello, everybody. It is the week of the fourth, 250 years.

It is, I can’t believe we are, I mean, it’s still June, but hanging on by a thread, I can’t believe we are this far into the year.

And Brandy is still at home this month, so.

I’m still at home, see, I told you, I told you.

I didn’t think it was possible.

I know, and I’m wearing my GMH merch today, but you just can’t see it, just our heads. So but they’re in spirit. I feel like I need to get like a hat or something.

Yeah, a Skift GMH collab hat.

Will, on it.

Man, that would be a collectible item.

Yeah. How are your weekends?

It was good. Let’s see, Friday, we did homemade pizzas and movie night. Saturday, we went to the pool and then went to the creek and played around in the creek.

This was great. Sunday church, so, you know, classic good old Southern American weekend.

Yeah, sounds great. Lots of water activities.

It’s hot. Yeah.

How about you, Jamie?

We went down to the FIFA Fan Fest on Saturday. We watched the England game. We watched some of the Croatia game.

It was packed, like tens of thousands of people down there, huge, big screens. Kids were definitely overwhelmed. It was hot.

I don’t know if you’re getting into the heat, Michael, down in Auburn.

We’re about five degrees warmer every day, so, yeah, we got it.

So, we definitely melted down there. The Colombian fans were down en masse. Like, it was a free ticket to get there, but you have to get in before it sort of fills up.

And as we were leaving, they shut down the gates, and there was thousands of people outside the gates wanting to get in. So, it was exciting. Yeah, and then we went to the pool yesterday.

So, we’re all packed or just about packed for Iceland.

Nice. When do you leave on the first?

We leave on the first.

You got your winter coat?

Got my winter coat, got my rain pants, rain jacket.

It’s probably going to be in the 50s, isn’t it? Yeah.

The high today is 53.

Nice.

Yeah.

But it will be sunny all day. So, it’ll be high most of the day probably.

When it’s not raining. Yeah.

Nice. Well, enjoy.

Yeah. How was your weekend?

Oh, my God. I had the most quintessential New England weekend. So much seafood.

One of my best friends was visiting from New York, and we had drinks and dinner on Newberry on Friday. We went to Island Creek Oysters in Duxbury on Saturday and went out on my friend’s boat.

Then yesterday, we met my friend, not my friend, my family in Mystic, Connecticut and ate more seafood. So I think I’ve, I mean, we have ordered at this point dozens and dozens and dozens of oysters, and clams, and lobster rolls.

Maybe not dozens of lobster rolls, but I’ve had one every day this weekend.

You lost me at the lobster, but everything else sounds good.

Yeah, that’s great. So, yeah, it’s, you know, New England summers really make you like, okay, I have to like remember how amazing and beautiful, and, you know, just picture perfect this is. So like April 3rd next year, I don’t want to die, you know.

But we have some interesting stories for you as always this week. Before we jump into them, want to give our sponsors at CloudBeds a shout out. CloudBeds unifies your operations, distribution, guest experience and revenue marketing in one place.

Powered by Signals, Hospitality’s first foundation AI model. Whether you’re trying to drive more direct bookings, cut down training time, or finally get your data working for you, CloudBeds is built for what’s next.

So you can find out more at the link in the show notes or at cloudbeds.com/gmh.

5:50

Hospitality Scams

So our first fun topic of the day is summer scams. So not necessarily scams for the summer, but just that this is when a lot of people are, you know, susceptible to them, listings that look too good to be true.

And the conversation is kind of around the people, the bad actors are getting more sophisticated.

It used to be there were fake listings that were brought up, but now it’s like they’re getting into actual professionally managed listings and posting, you know.

Yeah, Airbnb says they shut down over 200,000 fake listings a year or in total, which is a lot of fake listings, but Brandy, I remember stories from the COVID years where it was more fake guests booking places.

Correct.

Or fraudulent or activity teams. Unpure.

Yeah, that’s a really politically correct way of saying that. Yeah.

So the scams that I am intimately familiar with at this point are, someone uses real IDs to create real accounts and books long stays, so that it doesn’t look like it looks like someone’s coming for a week or two weeks, everything checks out, and

Strip clubs were shut down during COVID, so where were they supposed to go, Brandy?

Yeah.

I don’t know.

Only in your apartments.

I don’t know if that was a charity case I wanted to get behind, but that was one option.

Then another one that was creative was people would create Airbnb listings as a host, and so a guest would book the listing, and then they would book it on our direct site. So it came through to us as a direct booking.

All looked legit, but when the guest would show up, we wouldn’t have their reservation because they had booked it on Airbnb.

So I think the scams keep getting creative, and I think that one of the issues around big professional property managers, not even that big, if you have a couple people that are in and out of an account, before they had the co-hosting model where you

can share your accounts, you have so many people that need to log in. So two-factor authentication can be really difficult.

I know that that’s an easy thing if you don’t have any of those guardrails set up, that’s probably how the scammers are getting in.

How is Airbnb not created a multi login for PMs that have tens or hundreds or even thousands of properties?

Yeah, I think they were trying to solve that with where you can co-host and you can attach your account, but that doesn’t really factor in like a more professional manager at all when you have a reservations team that’s handling all of those

It’s one thing, Jamie, if it’s you and your wife and you get the code and she’s trying to log in, but you’re at work and you’re on a call and you can’t respond and then it’s frustrating and you can’t pass it back and forth.

But Brandy in four different time zones with 20 different stakeholders, that’s gotta be not the best user experience, but not worthy of a Brandy rant yet.

But no, no, no.

But that’s why you use a PMS, right?

So you can manage all that and not, if Airbnb is not gonna build it, then there are software providers that are gonna give you the ability to designate multiple accounts and people that respond only to guest messaging, AI to respond to guest

Yeah.

Well, and I think this also speaks to why some of the upgrades we’ve seen at all the different PMS, because a lot of times you didn’t have that ability.

If you needed to go into the resolution center, you had to log in or there were certain things where you couldn’t do it within your PMS.

I think over the last couple of years, we’ve seen especially the bigger PMS is really being like, improving their integrations with Airbnb, so that you’re totally right, that you don’t even have to think about it.

What’s the stat, Jamie? Eighty percent of listings are single owners or not connected to PMS?

It’s mostly individuals on Airbnb and the large ones generally are, but not always. I still surprisingly talk to a ton of hosts, 20, 30 listings and only on Airbnb and crushing it there.

Sorry, those might be the people that are more susceptible or even less than 20. You only have a couple. It’s like those phishing emails.

It’s people that have great listings, are providing a great service, and it just takes one email. The phishing attacks, it’s not like people are dumb and not paying attention.

It’s that the scams have gotten very sophisticated, and if you’re not super diligent or you’re in a rush because you’re in the field and something crazy is happening, it’s definitely an understandable trap to fall into.

Right. You couldn’t pick a group of people that are busier, trying to talk to people for things like, do I have 10 listings or do I have 15? Do I have guests checking in today?

If Airbnb is sending an e-mail, it must be.

What I thought was interesting though is, some of the responses on the article was that, and one of the protections Airbnb has in place though, is because they don’t pay out until 24 hours after the guest checks in, then that does protect some of the

Scams are up according to this article 30X, but it doesn’t feel like it’s anywhere near an insane number.

Like some of Brandy’s stories were the more fun ones that I’ve heard in terms of navigating around and navigating around Airbnb policies.

But I would say the majority of the scams are on the guest side to the managers saying, oh, well, the fridge was broken, give me a refund, fridge works fine. And Airbnb sides with the guests.

I think that’s a lot more scammy and happening every single day to every single operator. Right, Brandi?

Yeah, I actually have one quick story on that side. We had someone who tried to get, this was a long time ago, who sent us a picture of cockroaches on the floor.

And this is in Florida, like there’s, there’s cockroach, I mean, that’s not an unrealistic thing. We were like, there’s something weird about this photo.

And we’re, and after looking at it, you’re like, this is not like those bar stools that it’s taken, like don’t, are not in the home. Like they had just Google image search, like white floor cockroach and sent it in.

And we obviously didn’t refund them. But yeah, you know, it’s, people are like, they know that people know the game. So.

And now with AI, it’s just, so we like take this photo of the actual house, add some cockroaches in there.

Yeah.

Well, John says nice new hairdo, Jamie. He’s looking ready for his trip.

If you’re, I mean, most of our listeners are obviously on the operator side of this, so not falling for these scams often.

So definitely check your emails and make sure people, you know, if there’s a zero or a one instead of the I and Airbnb or something that you know that these are phishing attacks, but it’s also to the broader public.

If you see a listing for like 4th of July, last minute at a beautiful house in a popular area that’s super discounted, definitely, you know, you know, pay close attention, maybe check the direct site too.

And if you have a scam that has happened to you or to one of your friends, please let us know.

Oh, yeah. I can’t be the only one.

No, certainly not.

Awesome. Well, before we move on to our next topic, want to give another shout out to our sponsors at Bilt.

They’re helping restaurants and hotel F&B teams better understand their guests and create more personalized experiences that drive repeat visits. So if you care about loyalty and guest experience, it’s worth checking out.

Head to joinbilt.com/gmh or find the link in our show notes.

14:29

Experience Market Trends

So following up on a topic that we’ve been talking about throughout the last couple of weeks is this, the experience play and how the OTAs are still, I guess, playing catch up in that regard with experiences.

And last week we were talking about TripAdvisor and Viator. And so this article from Skift talks about how the original kind of single focused experience sites are winning right now. So Jamie, Michael, any thoughts on that?

I’ll start.

If Dennis would have reached out, I would have shared some latest data on Airbnb experiences, but since he didn’t, I’ll share it. And Airbnb relaunched experiences, last was it spring, along with services. And we’ve been tracking them.

We’ve seen from last summer to today about a 45% increase in experiences on Airbnb, which I’m definitely outpacing the growth that they’ve seen across the broader platform.

And this year when Airbnb was talking about it at their spring release or summer release, I was like, the things that are working are tours and food experiences. And those are definitely some of the things that are seeing some of the greatest growth.

So outdoor tours, cultural tours, landmarks, and food tours. Like that’s what people want to book, and that’s what’s sort of growing the fastest on the platform. And then, and booking is still doing great, integrating experiences in their platform.

It does feel like Expedia doesn’t really have that sort of integrated in though, and they’re working on it with their partners.

But everyone’s sort of behind Get Your Guide and Viator in terms of the breadth of experiences that are offered and then the growth that they’ve been seeing on their platform.

So it’s pretty much either the OTAs are going to have to maybe acquire, maybe beat out and figure out how to get to the supply, because if they don’t have the supply, they’re never going to have the bookings.

I think this is partially a story of incumbency and the other part of branding. And Jamie, if something in your house breaks, you’re probably not thinking, I’m going to go to Walmart and pick up the part. You can go to Home Depot.

Walmart might have it, but it’s just in your head, Home Depot is going to have more, more selection, better quality. And the OTAs have purchased experienced platforms before, except for Airbnb. And so they have them to offer.

It’s not that there’s nothing there. It’s just that that’s just not where guests think of, because there isn’t as much depth. It’s not, maybe there’s a perception that the quality is not the same or not as good.

But in all reality, it’s probably likely to be most the same experiences and opportunities to go see the world.

So I think one piece that jumped out regarding Airbnb in the Skift article was that what Chesky said back in May, that almost a fourth of new guests who booked an experience go book a stay or a service.

So this is for them a way to grab the consumer, similar to the hotel product, and then introduce them to short-term rentals, which is good for most of the listeners of this show.

I found it surprising that if someone booked a service, maybe if you were booking hair people before a big event or something like that, and then you’re like, oh, maybe I’ll book my next thing on Airbnb, I could maybe follow that train of thought.

But I find it surprising that it was experiences to book booking a stay.

Yeah, it’s probably selected data or causation correlation conundrum. But it could be that I’m going to, here’s an example with the World Cup. If I get tickets, then I’ll book my accommodation.

I’m going to book my accommodation and then get tickets. So there could be for Art Basel, if you got access to whatever the hot thing was that year, then you’d book the trip. And I think that probably is a large way of how people travel.

But for the majority of hiking experiences in the glaciers in Iceland, you’re booking a trip to Iceland first and then things to do. You’re not saying like, June, June, July is the perfect time to hike that glacier. Now, let me see what Airbnb has.

But Airbnb is putting up, and we’re booked at three Airbnbs while we’re in Iceland.

And they’re putting and sending a lot of notifications to book experiences throughout that trip. So, and you’d think that’s how it’s gonna happen.

If the more generalists are gonna drive experience growth, it’s gonna be that in-app notification a week or two before your stay, like, hey, let’s try to attach multiple pieces. So, they’re clearly, like, testing this and trying to grow it.

It’s just, like, we did book a lot of experiences, just none of them are offered through the Airbnb platform.

Like, all the museums we want to go to, like, we’re going to two in Iceland, like, the lava flow thing, the whales of Iceland, like, the more, the things that first-time visitors, especially with kids, are gonna hit up when they go to Iceland, like,

none of that’s available through the Airbnb app. It’s all the, I mean, helicopter tour, or, I mean, we’re gonna give you this guided hike that’s eight hours.

Like, most of this stuff isn’t, and if I wanted more options, I’d go look at Get Your Guide versus the 10 that I’ve listed on Airbnb.

Well, it’s interesting because the whole, I think, part of the experiences on Airbnb that does well is when you do something like maybe like a local tour, like in a, I remember when I was in Istanbul, we had like a really small like group and a guy

took us around and that felt more personal and kind of closer to the Airbnb original ethos of live like a local and all of that. And then I think for food experiences that tracks, but for the big museums or the big official tours, they’re not, that’s

not where you’re gonna go as I would think as those companies to offer your services. You probably want people to book direct if possible if you’re going to the museum or through one of the official channels that you probably already have some sort

Yeah, it’s no different than the messaging they send out on the home side.

You know, one home, one host versus, this is a big entity that you’re gonna be supporting versus instead of an individual in a local market. So, yeah, I don’t know.

But then so much of revenue is generated by property managers with professional inventory. Then I go to GetYourGuide, what do I see?

Like, I can book the lava show, I can book the Blue Lagoon, I can book the, and all the things we’re actually doing are bookable through GetYourGuide and all the things that we’re not doing are bookable through Airbnb.

So, yeah, well, it’ll be interesting to hear about your experience. I can’t wait to get the full breakdown afterwards, Airbnb versus professional tours and also just Iceland in general.

Jamie, is that a tourist trap versus a local experience conundrum here? Like, are we…

No, I think it is a mix of… There’s the things people do on their trips. Like, you’re going to go on a puffin tour, you’re going to go on…

Like, there are the things that are affordable too. Like, the lava flow thing is $50. Like, we’re going to go hike, we’re just not going to hire a tour guide to take us on a hike.

Like, we got to buy the tickets to get into the museum, right? Yeah. So it’s a…

I think it’s a different volume play. If there was only the cool, unique properties that Airbnb likes to advertise, it would be a neat niche product, but it wouldn’t be booking tens of thousands of condos in major cities around the world.

Yeah. Well, before we get into our next topic, which is going to be about balance sheets, cash balance sheets on the major OTAs, who’s going to buy Viator or is anybody going to buy Viator?

Is Airbnb just going to continue to try and build everything themselves, or are they going to go out and buy stuff?

I don’t think they’re going to buy Viator. I think there’s too much… I mean, this isn’t like a business strategy.

This is more like a vibe. But I think there’s too much at stake ego-wise. And not just not just Prime, but Airbnb as a whole, that they’ve really built all these things up.

And that would be too much of a public purchase to backtrack a decade of trying to get people to do their experiences.

We’ll see. We’ll see.

23:59

OTA Cash Balances

So our next topic, and we’ll let Jamie drive here since it’s primarily public disclosure, public financial disclosure.

You guys have all started listening to earnings calls. Don’t pretend you don’t.

Every single one of them. So Tripp is sitting on, according to the article, about 50 percent of its cash, 15 billion dollars, 50 percent of its market cap in cash, which is wildly more than every other OTA out there. What does this mean, Jamie?

Then what does it mean for some of the other OTAs? How does everyone plan to be using their cash?

Yeah. So first off, like this 15 billion dollar cash pile, it’s not like they’re about to go out and start outspending everyone globally, in terms of buying companies. They’ve got this wealth management product in there that isn’t really cash.

So you get rid of that, it’s about 12. Then almost all of it is stuck inside China behind capital controls. So there’s not much actually out there.

So when you actually go and compare it to booking, Expedia, Airbnb in terms of cash piles, Bookings actually has the biggest at roughly 16, but a relatively small percent of its overall market cap. But it’s almost no actual net cash behind it.

So I don’t think booking is going to go on a big buying spree. Expedia’s got a lot, but most of that is prepaid, unrestricted cash. I suspect a lot of it’s sitting with Verbo and people booking really far in advance.

So then Airbnb actually has the cleanest cash pile. A good mix of customer prepayments, but also just like raw cash and cash equivalents that they could actually go out and buy with.

So in terms of healthiest cash pile, I’d actually put it at Airbnb compared to the other four, and Tripp is probably the most restricted in terms of what they can do, unless they can come up with things to do within China.

I think one of the interesting things about this, I did not know a lot before this about the inner workings at Tripp, but obviously the Chinese government component of this, I thought was really interesting, and looking at other big companies that

have had these public takeovers and regulatory issues back in China, that the article talks about how they have obviously very canned responses, which you’re going to have during these calls, and that a lot of their actions or more telling what

Yeah.

Their anti-monopoly policy probably requires the major companies that could be deemed a monopoly to keep a decent amount of cash on hand to pay off the fines. But we don’t know any of that. A lot of it lives in a black box.

So Jamie, if you’re sitting on how many? $15 billion of cash, it’s most likely float, right? But you think they’re going to go on a buying spree?

Viator to trip.com.

Crazy. Are you going to add that to your projections, H2 predictions?

I will not. No.

I will not. I think one of my predictions was that maybe Airbnb was going to buy GetYourGuide or Viator. So I’ll sit behind that if they want to.

But no, I don’t think Trip is.

Well, I guess like with a lot of things, we’ll have to wait and see what happens. But it doesn’t sound, I do feel like it doesn’t sound super promising for trip.com that they make it out of this without a ton of interference. But we’ll see.

And ways to get it out and time, effort, taxes, things like that are in paying partners.

But yeah, it’s not where you’d want your cash to be probably tied up.

28:44

Upcoming Travels

Well, I know that we have some big trips coming up.

So Jamie, you’re leaving on the first and you’re gone for how long?

I’m gone for a month. So I might drop in in two or three weeks, we’ll see. But we’ll be in Iceland for 10 days and then Maine for two weeks.

And then back to Atlanta for the start of school August 1st.

That’s just so crazy to me that it’s August 1st.

That’s a long time to be gone. Do you have dogs, cats?

We’ve got a dog. Dog is staying with in-laws. In-laws are watching the plants.

I’m most worried about the plants staying alive.

Yeah.

I’m gone.

Yeah. How about you, Michael? Any fun plans for the fourth?

Well, we’ll probably do some fishing, go to see some fireworks, go to the pool.

Just try not to be in the sun too much.

Yeah. You guys are talking about the heat, and then I realized this week in Boston, it’s also supposed to hit 100. I guess it’s coming for us up here too.

Yeah.

But I’m running away to the Adirondacks for the weekend.

Hopefully, it’s a little bit.

But it’ll be July, so you’re outside of your window. Congrats on making it a full month.

See, I did it, guys. I did it. I stayed in Boston the whole time.

Well, thank you to all of our live listeners. We had a bunch of people tuning in today. Jonathan, Paul, as always, John, Ann, thank you so much for tuning in and engaging with the show.

To all of our listeners later on in the downloads, thank you for listening. You can catch all of our sponsors in the show notes and have a great 4th of July. We’ll see you next week.