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I'm renting an Airbnb appartment with my friends this summer. Do we all need an account or is one account for the person who will be paying sufficient? One of the steps in the booking process is entering everyone's name and email address. Now we have all received an email saying this:

[name] booked a place in [place] and added you as a guest. Sign up to view the trip details on Airbnb.

And there's a big fat link which says Accept [name]'s trip invitation

When I follow the link, it takes me to a page which says Sign up to join this trip.

So my question is this: Do I really need an account or are they just trying to make me set up an account even though I don't need (and want) to.

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    Read the terms and conditions; your answer is in there.
    – fkraiem
    Jun 13, 2016 at 0:48
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    @fkraiem Are the Airbnb's term and conditions unusually clear and reasonably sized ? Because usually terms and conditions are written with the purpose of discouraging people from reading before accepting, and/or of making it ridiculously difficult to understand the legalese they are written in, and/or of making people give up reading quite soon. See f.ex. bbc.com/news/world-europe-36378215 . Jun 13, 2016 at 10:30
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    @SantiBailors They're about 16,000 words, which is a couple of hundred words shorter than A Midsummer Night's Dream. Jan 16, 2017 at 21:58
  • I'm a host and I absolutely want Airbnb to have the name, address, telephone number, and government ID of everyone who stays in my home. Wouldn't you want the same? I'm allowing strangers to live with me. I want to know exactly who they are. It's a safety issue. Nov 23, 2017 at 16:04
  • @MLaVoraPerry You are free to ask for them yourself, why on earth would you force people to surrender their personal information to a third party? That's just as ridiculous as demanding that every visitor has a Google Plus account.
    – JohnEye
    Nov 24, 2017 at 16:29

1 Answer 1

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No you don't all need an account. Only one (the one who makes the booking) is enough.

Source: I have often stayed at Airbnbs together with other people (either as the one who made the booking or accompanying) and no multiple accounts were necessary.

You only need to specify the number of guests, you wouldn't even need to give their emails. Since you get to specify the number of guests, your contract is for you plus the number of additional guests you specify, similar to when you make a hotel booking and specify that e.g. two persons will stay in the room.
What you describe is a scheme to get you signed up for Airbnb. You can safely ignore those emails if you are not the one who made the booking.

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