Which just shows that using the misleading numbers on the US website is a business decision.
Screenshots:
I had completely forgotten it was even listed there. Six months and one inquiry. I promptly deleted the listing.
Glad to be done with AirBNB, but it really helped out at a bad time.
When COVID-19 travel bans proliferated in early 2020, AirBnB proactively refunded my money for a reservation that was nominally no longer cancellable.
VRBO told me to reach out to the host, which turned out to be this apartment rental agency that would ghost my emails for a few days, then offer future credit, then told me to get in line as they have many customers, and eventually processed the refund 3 months or so down the road.
Needless to say, I no longer use VRBO.
It is "solved" in usa airbnb too , infact german one seems to have more fees/line items, not less.
example: https://imgur.com/a/FJaKHvS
can someone make a PSA to all the people making this "hosts pulling shit" comment on every single airbnb thread.
And yes you can also filter by total price.
On airbnb.com.au, the full cost is the default view, and you can change the pricing to USD very easily in the bottom floating footer.
Why do you have such spl expectation for just airbnb?
"You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing after they have tried everything else.” -- Winston Churchill
[1] https://www.transportation.gov/individuals/aviation-consumer...
I use it to search in the US as it’s the only way to know all in cost, which the US version always tries to obfuscate
I went to Airbnb.com just now, and got this banner: https://i.imgur.com/zasryfr.png
So it's a new thing.
The reason it makes more sense to do it for hotels is that many cities have 15+% or $$/night taxes. The highest rate is 20%.
https://hvs.com/article/8911-2020-HVS-Lodging-Tax-Report-USA
So, the PSA is “don’t listen to this bozo, it’s still shit”.
Guess how long the list is when I check out of a hotel:
1. Press the check out button on the app and leave
2. There is no number #2
That’s hard/impossible to find in hotels.
The stand alone house can have a yard or a distance to the next house.
Sometimes you can find AirBnb right near a place you need to be in the next morning whereas a hotel might need to be a long ways away and travel between the locations can be problematic.
It will include listings that are up to about €3/night more expensive than your filter setting, but listings that would qualify just on base price but not on total price are filtered out as you would expect.
Same happens with cell phones here. You sign up for a price and the first bill has several fees added making it quite a bit more expensive.
I wish there was a law in the US that mandated that the paid price is the advertised price.
Wow. Somehow, that seems shadier than just showing a misleading price then piling on fees for everyone.
To me it just shows that sometimes strict regulation is the right thing to avoid the tragedy of commons.
Isn't Biden literally asking for congress to make a law to that effect? (Which is a really smart move on his part tbh)
1) They artificially lower the listed price per night, causing the home to show up in more searches. This could easily be fixed by Airbnb.
2) It's used as a way to incentivize longer stays. This motivation probably won't go away. Many Airbnbs are empty during the weekdays.
3) It's a way for hosts (and Airbnb) to skirt taxes. This is the real reason Airbnb doesn't want to punish the practice.
Many municipalities in the U.S. tax Airbnbs as a percentage of their nightly rate, and cleaning fees aren't included in that calculation. If those savings are passed onto the guest, they would theoretically lower the effective cost per night.
Why would shifting payment from nightly cost to cleaning fee have an effect on the hosts' tax liability? If they actually pay someone that much to clean the place, they get to deduct it from their business income either way. What you call it doesn't matter.
I would be curious if Airbnb takes a cut of the cleaning fees, or only the nightly rate. I could see how that might differ, and if so that it would incentivize hosts to shift toward the cleaning fees.
And for many hosts, the main costs are the checking in/out/cleaning/laundry. So if they could charge $100 check in fee, plus $20/night, they would.
The fed should have some wheel that could introduce random 4% swings every six months that would hopefully disrupt the private equity leveraged buyout schemes, but who am I kidding, it would just lead to some ridiculous speculation/betting on what the next random modifier to the base interest rate is.
Perhaps, rather than offering good interest rates to large companies and hedge funds / private equity, there should be special low interest rates for single house owners, but businesses actually have to pay higher interest rates for commercial ventures.
Of course someone would figure out a scheme to get individuals to overprovision their mortgages and then back-assemble the excess debt with kickbacks to route it to other uses.
There has to be some way to have low interest rates to help out the "little guys" but make big biz and stock market leverage/margin buying pay a higher interest rate. If you have a high interest rate, it just benefits banks and the rich, who are the only people that have "real money", in case anyone actually does have "real money".
Legally mandated LtV < 1 based on `min(sale, appraisal)` would pretty much hinder such schemes. You can always sell your house to your child/parent and get equity back into the family anyway, but in general this would mean mortgage (real estate leveraged financing) could only be used to finance the sale.
They can however at times be slow, and frustrating, for some random things you'd need. But I can deal with it.
In contrast, my girlfriend who lived in a shared apartment with independent landlord, wouldn't fix heat, and then did a cheap replacement, which broke in few months, and refused again. And now she's out of the apartment, not giving back the amount he owes to her. I'm not sure if there any data to backup, but at-least in city, it seems like independent landlords are possibly worse.
You only hear about this after your booking has been accepted -- in the case of instant booking, you have already been charged. And it's usually not too much -- maybe 20-40 EUR. Often it's explained as a mandatory city tax or something like that, and you don't know the city so....
So at this point you can choose: report the host to AirBnB, lose the booking you wanted after already going through all the stress of finding it, and wait probably a long time before you get your money back.
Or, just grumble and pay it. Because of the way reviews are incentivized, it would be a Bad Idea to complain about it in the review, which is why you didn't see anyone complain about it so far.
I'm not proud of this, but the four or five times it happened I just paid it, because in the big picture it wasn't that much. I think the highest was 100 but it was for a long stay costing over 1000.
But unlike the "cleaning fee" where you can, with a lot of imagination, picture some definition of "cleaning" that might, on average, cost that much -- maybe every third guest soils the bed? -- the cash-on-arrival thing is transparently cheating.
Follow the incentives -- five star reviews only, please!
It was advertised up-front but unsure if there was any reason they couldn’t roll it up into the fee. Maybe it is a separate city-issued POS?
Or maybe a tax thing: if the hotel collected it, they’d have to charge VAT, but not if the booker pays it direct?
If they're extremely sneaky, their next trick is to fake property damage or extra cleaning fees collected post stay, but that's not a highly repeatable trick without them getting banned, so less likely to happen and you can dispute it with Airbnb, though ymmv.
Do hosts look at the reviews the guests have left to previous hosts and that incentivizes the guests not to give bad reviews? Or am I missing something?
Additionally, I’ve heard stories of negative reviews getting “disappeared” but I’m not sure how that works.
Tangentially: this is why I read lots of reviews before booking, because you can sometimes spot rotten host behavior hiding in the five-star reviews.
Their profits should be systematically targeted if the fees are undisclosed upfront and they’re abusing it.
Why would you not report that? Airbnb would bring the hammer down on that host so quickly it wouldn't be funny. I'm serious, they would not tolerate that whatsoever and would get you compensated and moved to another property.
I've heard way too many Airbnb customer service horror stories to believe that you can count on this.
Just recently I had someone cancelling on me whilst I was in the car driving to the place. Airbnb were straight on it, instant refund, extra credit towards another place and someone rang me to try and help me book an alternative for that night (I was quicker than them and had thankfully booked the next door unit before they even rang).
I've had a few bad stays over the years (getting woken early doors by bailiffs was fun), but they've generally been sorted out really quickly.
The times I've tried the alternatives in the last few years I've come up short and regretted the lack of support.
I've used airbnb for many years (since the glory days!), but have to agree the fees are killing me now.. just give me the full price up front..
Because of this. I spend a lot of time picking the property and often, where I go, there aren’t that many good ones, nor much time left before I arrive. “Another property” might not be in the same town.
Between tolerating the BS, or losing my preferred apartment… or, I guess, antagonizing the host who already doesn’t follow the AirBnB rules… I have so far chosen to tolerate the BS.
If you make another choice, that’s fine. If you find it so outrageous lol then we just have different priorities.
Besides price, service is also worse during stay. At a hotel I can get towels, soap, whenever I want. Airbnb it’s maybe once a day the host can bring things to you.
I don't know what these cleaning fees are for if I'm doing all the cleaning! The last place I stayed had a "please, do everything" checkout policy. Take the trash to the dumpster, clean the towels, and run the dishwasher.
The disgusting thing is that they seem to take it on faith that these chores get done. Increasingly, AirBnBs are disgusting. Dirty dishes. Dirty counters. Bedding that I can't prove, but... I'm pretty sure hasn't been washed in a loooong time.
It's still something I put up with if staying for an extended period of time. Mostly for the (dirty) kitchens more than anything else. However, for short stays? Hotels all the way.
>If the guests help out the cleaning fees can in principle be much lower.
is it ever, though?
This cavalier attitude to, like, the basic overhead of running a hospitality business, is why I'm back on team hotel for most stays.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34821620
When we leave in the spring, we pay a $110 cleaning fee and the property management company takes care of everything - cleaning, finding guests, cleaning, replenishment, maintenance, and they have a warehouse full of furniture when they need to replace everything.
True they take 48% of the proceeds + 4% escrow to handle major repairs. But I don’t have to deal with anything.
It’s in Florida so of course it’s cyclical. But since we stay there during low season, it covers its own expenses the other half.
This is investment advice. This is not an investment idea. This was a lifestyle choice to give us a place to stay during the winter.
But I would rather get two anal probes than be a traditional landlord again.
I'd prefer taking care of basic sundry issues myself in exchange for something that is at least a studio apartment with full kitchen so I can save a bit on eating out costs, do grocery runs every 4-5 days.
I stay in alot of hotels for 2-3 day stretches. The lack of daily housekeeping really bugs me. But they seem to be building better midrange properties.
I'm back to hotels because that was the closest I came to having the quintessential perfect AirBnB experience. Any halfway decent hotel has better service, better beds, better climate control, better everything pretty much.
I don't think its the luxury you are defining it by. Its a room in somones house that comes with its pros and cons.
> I'm back to hotels because that was the closest I came to having the quintessential perfect AirBnB experience.
since when do hotels have 'hosts' ? I even quoted that line in my original response. Airbnb = 'air bed and breakfast' , i.e renting an air mattress in someones home, that was the original idea anyways. Renting 'whole apartments' came much later and insn't a 'quintessential' airbnb experience.
> Not sure if you’ve never used it
Also, I read that as snark too.
My sympathy is with the host here.
The cheap fuck of a slumlord wanted to avoid paying $5/day in electric bills for the thing. This wasn't central air.
But yeah I've only ever met one host in the USA, and that was because they lived next door.
They gave us a small tour, showed us how to use some appliances (like the heater) and showed us how to use the door code, and walked through the expectations (at that time, they were simple, was happy to accomodate).
That was it.
Every time after that, nope, never once.
AirBNB has even worse prices, but I check them both every time
I stayed in a few non-Marriott hotels in northern Japan and didn't have any trouble there beyond the normal Japanese hotel badness (they're clean, but insanely cramped, expensive, and uncomfortable)
Well, that's a good idea, but... What's the point? They don't have any rooms that are clean or sections of the hotel that are well-staffed
My SO and I stayed at a Waldorf Astoria a few weeks ago and they managed to screw up the stay so badly that we'll probably never go back to that specific location ever again -- the response that we received from the staff was so bad I was looking on LinkedIn to see if I had any friends who were still at Hilton Corporate to help me get the local property to fix their screw up (charging my credit card $10k for a $2800 stay because someone fat-fingered a $100 nightly charge into a $1000 nightly charge) because the local management just couldn't do anything.
But for whatever reason, a lot of US sellers have an aversion to int’l shipping.
Int’l shipping was a boon for business when I was actively selling.
For good reason. You could point to domestic USPS tracking information as proof of delivery (which occasionally worked in your favor) during PayPal disputes.
For international shipments, the tracking is lost as soon as the item crosses the border. Whether the item was delivered or not cannot be contested by the seller, who then has to pay out on 100% of claims brought against them.
That's variable and (often) not the case for shipments to Canada. USPS International First Class would yield a tracking number that has delivery confirmation to the destination.
https://community.ebay.ca/t5/Buyer-Central/Does-USPS-First-C...
> Electronic USPS Delivery Confirmation International service — abbreviated E-USPS DELCON INTL — is a tracking service available at no charge for First-Class Package International Service items to select destination countries (see 252.22)
Those ~50 countries listed here: https://pe.usps.com/text/imm/immc2_022.htm#ep2686878
(This was for video games that would cost me like $1 to ship).
Airbnb does take a cut of them though, so it's unlikely they'll lead the push to punish the practice like eBay did.
promising to address this "transparently" and "holistically", even though unlike the US, they already show the full price in some other countries
https://skift.com/2022/10/10/airbnb-ceo-says-fee-transparenc...
Fees should be clear and upfront, But if a host is going to get a house cleaner after a guest leaves, it really does make sense for cleaning to be a separate lump sum fee.
Usually businesses tries to hide their pricing mechanism and give opaque "sales".
y = k*x + m
Is nicer.
That seems disingenuous, because they've been doing it in other countries for a long time, including for logged-out viewers -- presumably because they were legally required to.
Lots of hotels and cities lobbied to tax Airbnb hosts like hotels (via Airbnb) and have in many cases successfully done so. Corresponding with this trend is the rise of hosting businesses (LLCs and such) that see this as a arbitrage business opportunity to compete with traditional hotel / motels but extract either higher fees / rents, or dramatically lower maintenance costs (often, in the worst examples, both) by shifting much of the responsibility to the end users, because that's how the platform culture started off.
Its quite different to reasonably keep nice and tidy a spare room or maybe guest house and you interact with the host, have a neat experience. Its quite another to get stacked with fees and poor experiences and have expectations foisted on to you. Its very clear that hosting has taken too much of an entrepreneurial edge to it. Unfortunately, i think single experience driven hosts are driven out of the market because of overhead.
The other thing Airbnb didn't do well, is when guests were really bad to hosts, they didn't do enough to compensate hosts that had real, legitimate issues. There ended up being alot of overhead in hosting an Airbnb and I think alot of people who legit thought they were going to be able to give nice, great experiences at a reasonable value with reasonable expectations got exhausted after X many bad guests.
They haven't really done enough to police and/or support the platform on both sides to incentivize the original value proposition: unique staying experiences you can't get at a hotel.
Now, the upside is, Hotels feel the heat, and price more reasonably, and really got their accommodations down. As a result, I haven't used Airbnb since 2018 or so.
At the time we suggested that they limit shipping fees to no more than 50% of the total cost of the item, but it never got implemented.
I just checked and it looks like their compromise was to set max shipping rates for different types of items: https://www.ebay.com/help/selling/shipping-items/maximum-shi...
The result is that bulky worthless items have lopsided price/shipping. Ebay offers the UI tools to show users the bottom line and they can make an informed decision.
And like I said I don't use eBay anymore, but back then, they didn't give the tools. You could only sort by listing price without shipping included.
If they now offer tools to include shipping in the search, then sure.
If I remember correctly ebay didn't take a percentage of the shipping only the sale. So I'd sell it for $5 but charge $25 for shipping and they only took a % of the $5 so I'd keep a lot more money
It's perfectly reasonable for hosts to charge more for a single night stay than for a 2 week stay. Turning over an AirBnB between guests is a huge hassle and has real costs.
AirBnB should make the true cost per night more visible, but eliminating cleaning fees altogether would be a loss.
[0] https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/airbnb-settles-6-million-cla...
Not that it matters. We haven't used AirBnB in ages because the fees are exorbitant.
[0]: mines through Capital One Venture but there's many ones out there, research which works for you!
Why isn't cleaning part of staying somewhere???
I think you touched on it but there is some reasonable compromise. Dirt on the floor mats and basic cleaning should be included, but if you are spraying champagne on the walls it would be reasonable not to be included. Where do you draw the line. If you want to charge for the "worst case" it will inflate your prices dramatically. If you charge for the average then people are basically incentivized to be unnecessarily messy. Of course many hosts will be unreasonable and charge extra for the very basics that should be included.
when it becomes damage versus expected usage would be a good line just like hotels have been doing centuries.
basic cleaning services such as cleaning linens,dishes,furniture,light dusting, basic floor sweeping ,etc.
you destroy the property or require excessive cleaning because you had a party with excessive dirtiness like spilled drinks on walls , linens thrown all over the place and stained, etc. then include an abusive charge.
This doesn't seem that difficult? Hotels have solved this for decades already - if you trash the room they can and will charge you for cleaning it up, but you are also not expected to make the place good-as-new when you leave.
As a two-sided marketplace Airbnb obviously has no direct control over hosts and has trouble enforcing consistent standards... but at the risk of being a bit sarcastic: that's Airbnb's problem, not ours as customers. Other options (aka hotels, B&Bs, etc.) in this industry have figured this out and it's simply not a problem.
I don’t think it’s that hard. You have some reasonable cleaning procedure that you always do (quick vacuum, make the bed, tidy up, etc.) and any problems beyond that you charge the guest extra. Of course you could quibble about the exact details but it seems like a stable situation for hotels.
Because all platforms face the temptation to become plantations. And while consumers have cash, hosts have assets and are much more likely to leverage them in the event of a dispute. The consumer goes in expecting a deal for $X, when all the fees are added on consumers feel bad, but don't want to lose the time cost they have already sunk into browsing and choosing a short-term rental property, figuring that other offerings on the platform will probably be the same. Really starting over means going to a whole new website and a whole new selection process and a whole new set of terms and conditions, and there will probably be junk fees tacked on at the end anyway.
This is 100% true. Hosts figured this out pretty fast and leaned into it. The biggest reason is that showing a cheap price on the initial search result page was very effective at getting bookings. I suspect this is even more effective in this case vs some others because rentals are not easily comparable. ie, travelers invest non-trivial time into researching a place (looking at pictures, location, description, etc) to decide that it works for them before they notice the higher price - and then don't want to throw away that "sunk cost" of their time.
>I don't understand why Airbnb is still on the side of hosts with this.
Everything I said up there also works at the level of Google search results. If just one vendor (ABnB, Vrbo, etc) switches to up-front pricing, then all their competitors look _much_ cheaper at first glance. And once the traveler is on their site, it's unlikely that they'll back out and go to a different one. The whole industry is basically in a "Mexican standoff" situation. Or maybe Prisoner's Dilemma if you prefer.
Also, the platforms are perfectly capable of doing all-in-one pricing, because they legally have to everywhere other than the US. There's loooots of extra logic to handle doing it two different ways. At some level they'd love to get rid of that complexity, but just can't for reasons mentioned.
source: worked on pricing at Vrbo for eight years.
At one point we were sending prices to GHS, which I think were all-in. But it was a fraught relationship, which I think ended. Google was trying to take a huge cut of the fees, while offloading the hard work of managing travelers, owners, payments, complaints, etc to us. It didn't make sense to help them eat our lunch.
It's unfortunate, as they had a good thing going for a short time.
Airbnb simply makes more money and gets more bookings with the "hidden" fee structure for obvious reasons.
Don't agree with that. I get the cleaning only once, I want to pay for it only once. What sucks is that airbnb doesn't show us the full, real price from the get go, but I'm not sure why the pricing model should change, especially since there are also tons of other fees like sales taxes, airbnb fees, tourism taxes and such.
What airbnb should do is show the final price when you search.
It's pretty much the same thing as the VAT. Displaying the final price rather than the price before tax could work, as witnessed by... every country that is not in North America. But I guess showing lower prices is good for business.
I don’t do cleaning fees or any of that BS - the price is the price is the price. Cleaning is my problem - it costs me about £130 per stay in fixed overheads for cleaning, linen hire, stocking of consumables, flowers, etc., and that’s incorporated into my nightly rate and my minimum stay length.
I also don’t ask guests to do anything other than lock the door behind them when they leave.
The poor execution of Airbnb plus has been a disappointment - I signed up for it willingly, thinking that it would help boost guest confidence, but unfortunately so many hosts decide to nickel and dime and bait and switch that it’s meaningless. I’d welcome frequent inspections of what I’m doing, as unless I’m providing a stellar service, I am not content.
I have watched guests slowly become more paranoid over the years, as the crappy hosts have a corrosive effect on customer confidence across the platform - and I have had my fair share of crappy hosts when I have been a guest - demands for extra money, entirely fabricated damage claims, on and on.
It also doesn’t help that an awful lot of my competition is literally illegal - not registered with the council, not paying taxes on their revenue, not doing commercial waste collection, etc. - I have literally just responded to a Welsh government request for comment saying “yes, regulate the shit out of this and drop a big hammer on anyone who does not comply”, as again, I get guests anxiously asking if bedding and hot water are included in the price.
I agree they should kill the fees - they do nothing good for anyone in the long term.
Instead, they’re screwing around with broken categorisation which does nobody any good, and with making their search virtually unusable - they now only show you a small percentage of available properties, which is deeply frustrating both as a guest and a host.
Filtering by price is a frustrating experience when the service and cleaning fees aren’t factored into the prices I’m looking at. It’s more work than it needs to be to compare prices in areas with lots of listings.
A lot of the objections around the cleaning fee are that hosts often have long lists of chores they expect guests to do in addition to a large cleaning fee, and sometimes those chores are not spelled out until you check in.
1: https://bnbfacts.com/airbnb-cleaning-fee-how-much-hosts-char... 2: https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/travel/airbnb-has-a-plan-...
Hosts want to show lower prices, so in search you don't see all the fees, but then when you get all the way down the funnel you finally see these completely ridiculous fees (usually around cleaning) of what you'll actual pay. I don't understand why Airbnb is still on the side of hosts with this. They need to change the UX, and it would expose so much of the BS hosts try to pull around rates. This would quickly kill the need for hosts to try to game the system like they do now.
Also in general, I refuse to use Airbnb these days when it's not only more than a hotel, but the audacity of some hosts have for checking out is hilariously dumb (cleaning, vacuuming, laundry, etc.). The reliability of hosts is all over the place, I see so many horror stories of last minute cancellations, hosts trying to pull one over on guests, and other sketchy practices they continue to allow.
Note: I could be wrong now though (maybe they do show up front pricing now/), but they already burned the bridge where I stopped even looking at them as an option.
Note (again): I just checked, and it does show a "total cost" in search, but it's still pretty deceptive. It should just be baked into the single nightly cost, and not a separate cost where you have to do the math to figure it all out. They should kill fees all together. Have it so it's just left at the hands of the host to make into a single cost that they want to charge per night, and simplify it.