> 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.

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.