Is This Booking Safe? Free Risk Assessment for Vacation Rental Hosts

Platforms use identical risk rules for every property in America: weekend booking + short stay + large group = party risk flag. A 10-person Friday check-in at a Miami Beach house gets the same flag as a 10-person Friday check-in at a quiet cabin in Vermont. One is completely normal. The other is a genuine red flag. Without location context, you either reject good bookings that would have been fine, or you accept dangerous ones because the platform said they looked normal. Both cost you money.

Party zones — Miami, Vegas, Nashville, Austin, Key West, Scottsdale — have lower party risk modifiers because large groups are expected behavior. Rural and quiet areas have higher modifiers because large groups are anomalous. College towns spike during specific weekends. Resort areas have seasonal patterns. The 16 World Cup 2026 host cities will see booking surges that generic rules will completely misread. The same booking details produce completely different risk scores depending on where your property actually sits. That's not a feature — it's the minimum intelligence a host should have before accepting a booking.

Every state has a different number of days after which a guest can claim tenant rights. Florida: 7 days — the shortest in the US. A standard week-long vacation booking already brushes this line. Connecticut: 28 days. California, New York, Texas, and most states: 30 days. Once a guest crosses that threshold, you can't ask them to leave. You need formal eviction proceedings — lawyers, courts, weeks to months of lost revenue. Your OTA doesn't show you how close a booking comes to this line. The risk assessment tool does, for every booking, in every state.

Declining a booking is your right. But every decision must be based on behavioral signals, never demographic factors. Investigate when: guest count far exceeds what's typical for your area, the guest is evasive about the purpose of the stay, it's a third-party booking (someone booking for someone else), there are requests to bypass house rules, or the stay approaches your state's squatter threshold. The word is "investigate" — not "reject." Ask questions. Request information. Make decisions based on documented data, not suspicion. Every assessment creates a compliance audit trail showing exactly which factors were considered.

Every risk assessment evaluates behavioral signals only: communication patterns, booking details, payment verification, stay duration, guest count, and geographic context. Demographic, ethnic, and personal characteristics are never factors — not as tiebreakers, not as context, not at all. This isn't a legal disclaimer. It's how the scoring works at a fundamental level. The assessment includes a compliance audit trail documenting every factor used and every factor excluded, so you have documentation if anyone ever questions your booking decisions.