Re:ACCC: Airbnb allegedly misled Australians about accommoda...
by 8n4vidtmkvmk on Wednesday June 08, 2022 @03:33AM
(#31664403)
as a Canadian, i mostly assume everything is in USD. surprised when it isnt. i like seeing the C$ then i know I'm getting a discount!
Re:ACCC: Airbnb allegedly misled Australians about accommoda...
by skissane on Wednesday June 08, 2022 @04:54AM
(#31664835)
The ACCC's complaint [0] says that consumers in Australia were going to airbnb.com.au, to book accomodation in Australia, and were being displayed US dollar prices, marked simply as $ rather than USD or US$.
If you went to a .ca website, to book accomodation in Canada, you'd expect unadorned $ to mean C$ not US$.
[0] paragraph 10 of https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/ACCC%20v%20Airbnb%20Ire...
Re:ACCC: Airbnb allegedly misled Australians about accommoda...
by askvictor on Thursday June 09, 2022 @12:17AM
(#31677491)
The issue happened a number of times to my partner. We have only ever used AirBnB in Australia, registered in Australia, and booked Australian properties. Why they would, in those cases, think defaulting to USD is acceptable is beyond me. It's not like it's a predominantly-US company; it has localized presence.
> Was this really deliberate? Seems likely given their attention to details like this.
Random guess: maybe some US customers are confused by (or even just dislike) seeing "US$" or "USD" as opposed to just "$"? If enough US customers are like this (or even just if Airbnb believes that they are), that might influence a decision to just display "$" when they think (however wrongly) the customer is from the US.
I've never used Airbnb, so can't comment on their UX specifically, but I've seen before web sites run by US companies which offer their services to non-US customers, but have a UX which starts out by assuming you are in the US, and you sometimes have to go out of your way to tell them that you are not, and it is easy to miss doing so.