(disclaimer: I was an Airbnb employee)
Edit: It's just in the footer and I was blind. Thanks, that's actually awesome!
Thanks!
I am amazed that ABNB has this dark pattern as I don't see how it benefits them and it clearly pisses off users and makes searching so much more work than necessary.
The way things are is bad for guests and bad for honest hosts.
There are a few reasons to keep it the way it is: Airbnb is probably aspirational about its userbase: they don't want people to choose based on price comparison, it's more about the unique space. Or maybe this even speaks to actual measured user behavior. Airbnb invests a lot in data science so I would assume they have either tested this or have data to show the performance impact of such a change. They also might want to one day reduce or eliminate such fees using a membership program of some kind. So a perk of this membership would effectively be "all in pricing"
Ideally, cleaning fees and similar shouldn't be allowed - they're a cost of doing business and should be rolled into the nightly. Heck, taxes too for that matter - no reason they need to be hidden from the main view.
They count on people to just go through with checkout since they spent a whole bunch of time to get through that point. Compare this with kayak which shows you final price right on the search screen.
And then there is a problem with reviews where a guest is not really motivated to write a bad review even if they have a bad experience because people are usually conflict avoidant. So almost all airbnbs have positive reviews 4.9 review average making the whole review section useless. Also, there is no way for user to sort reviews in ascending order of star rating.