Top short-term rental company sped up its booking process by 75% and implemented ML-driven fraud detection with Persona

In a world filled with hospitality options, a leading short-term rental company stood out for its unique combination of beautiful spaces and mobile-first service. The shift toward remote work and longer destination-focused stays fueled explosive growth for the company as well.

Persona had been a long-time partner of the company since 2020. The company's operational model of contactless stays necessitated an automated check-in method powered by digital identity verification. But as the company expanded globally, its trust and safety team, which was responsible for identifying problematic guests and fraudulent reservations, wanted to scale and streamline their processes without adding friction for guests.

Problem: Trust and safety faced a backlog of manual reviews and sophisticated fraud during its hypergrowth

With the short-term rental company's booking volume growing 45% year over year, its trust and safety team spent an increasing amount of time manually reviewing tens of thousands of upcoming bookings. This influx of bookings also brought bad actors who continuously evolved their fraud tactics to make it past manual review, leaving the team feeling like they were playing "whack-a-mole" with fraudsters and people looking to break house rules, such as throwing parties.

As such, the company began searching for a way to scale its bookings approval process without just throwing more people at the problem or sacrificing the ability to catch these risky guests.

Solution: The company streamlined manual review and fraud detection via Persona-powered machine learning

The short-term rental company knew if it wanted to streamline its manual review process, it needed to be able to consolidate external signals with data from its own systems. As it already used Persona to verify users during check-in (and during other parts of the guest experience), it decided to partner with Persona's product and data science team to build a custom machine learning-powered monitoring system that either automatically approved bookings or sent risky bookings to the team's manual review queue for further investigation.

The head of trust and safety explained that their company intentionally chose to identify potentially fraudulent bookings with a machine learning approach rather than relying on a legacy rules-based approach to keep up with rapidly changing fraud patterns.

Since implementing bookings monitoring via Persona, the trust and safety team has seen significant benefits:

Improved guest experience due to a 75% decrease in manual review time

Before an automated bookings monitoring system powered by Persona was implemented, guests who booked a stay often had to wait for an extended period to hear if their reservation was approved while the trust and safety team worked through the manual review queue. This was frustrating for both guests and the trust and safety team, who wanted to provide the best possible experience.

With Persona's platform automating most decisions, the company reduced time spent manually reviewing bookings by 75%, reducing the cost associated with a booking by an equivalent amount. This gave the team more time to focus on the truly risky bookings, as they knew these had been flagged by the model.

Thanks to this new process, the company also saw its NPS increase, as guests heard back on the status of their booking in hours rather than weeks.

Nuanced risk detection powered by machine learning

Rather than having to manually factor hospitality-specific concepts like length of stay into its decisions, the company was able to easily model these signals inside Persona without its own dedicated data science or engineering resources.

Persona's machine learning model incorporated over 50 distinct signals — from guest data collected by Persona to booking information like length of stay and how far in advance a guest booked — which were ingested via Persona's Workflows and Transactions. This flexibility made it easy for the company to bring in key business data at the start and layer in additional signals over time to improve future iterations of the system.

"There are many internal signals that contribute to whether a guest's booking is risky, and it was simple to incorporate them all into the model. We can easily add more over time and keep evolving our risk model without having to retrofit a signal to Persona."

By assessing signals from across the guest experience, rather than just identity or payments data like with traditional transactions monitoring solutions, the short-term rental company could automatically approve around 85% of bookings while identifying fraud in a more nuanced way than a manual reviewer could accomplish on their own. The machine learning approach made it possible for the team to adapt quickly to new patterns of bad actors and fraudsters rather than having to endlessly orchestrate dozens of possible rules.

Comprehensive fraud protection with integrated identity verification and transaction monitoring

Since 2020, Persona has seamlessly grown from the rental company's identity verification provider to a comprehensive onboarding, fraud prevention, and monitoring partner. The chief reason? Persona made it easy to leverage and compare data from any interaction a guest has with the company to every other interaction, minimizing friction for both guests and the trust and safety team.

For instance, the company could catch instances of non-compliance with its terms of service by comparing the ID used during check-in with the personal information on the booking. Persona even helped the company catch stolen credit card use by comparing IDs used during bookings against information from the credit card transaction.

These verification touchpoints gave the company multiple ways to defend against fraud, freeing up its team to focus on the bookings that required the most attention.

As the booking monitoring system incorporated more customers and signals, the team hoped Persona would continue to get even better at detecting fraud. As the head of trust and safety put it, "We had all this data we wanted to bring to Persona to create better fraud signals. And eventually, we wanted to be able to find risky guests at not just the point of booking, but at any other point of the guest lifecycle."

Result: The company managed risk across the guest experience by balancing automation and manual review

While the short-term rental company previously thought that its business model required a labor-intensive trust and safety process, it came to understand that a balance of automation and manual review inside of Persona was the key to keeping up with its hypergrowth.

The most recent use case for Persona may have been booking monitoring, but the head of trust and safety believes it wouldn't end there. As they put it, “The Persona team feels like an extension of ours. For new solutions, we choose to go with Persona since we can customize to our needs and requirements while leveraging what we already have versus having to find more vendors.”

With Persona serving as their command center for all things identity and fraud prevention, the company was free to focus on what it did best — giving guests a better place to stay via efficient, tech-driven operations.

‍