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A comment on Airbnb Is Different Now. Parent comment

Re:Airbnb Is Different Now by user3939382 on Tuesday September 26, 2023 @07:50AM (#37657922)
Booking.com yet another company I’ll never trust with dark patterns in their UI that hides fees.
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Re:Airbnb Is Different Now by reilly3000 on Tuesday September 26, 2023 @08:12AM (#37658110)
I’ve never seen a hidden fee on there. Some hotels charge a resort fee which Booking cannot charge or collect, but that is disclosed upfront.
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Re:Airbnb Is Different Now by user3939382 on Tuesday September 26, 2023 @10:08AM (#37659564)
I’ve seen them advertise rates on Google for 50% of the real price because of resort, cleaning fees, etc. Whether they collect it or not is immaterial for the consumer, that’s their internal business/problem. They’re advertising fake rates.
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Re:Airbnb Is Different Now by corbezzoli on Tuesday September 26, 2023 @08:02AM (#37658022)
Dark patterns aplenty, but hidden fees? I don’t think there's a single hotel booking site that shows taxes by default unless required by law. Maybe Google Search? I use Booking.com plenty and it's pretty predictable. Agoda on the other hand has super… ahem "flexible" prices that change at every reload, or depending on how you reach the site, or on your cookies, or…
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Re:Airbnb Is Different Now by prepend on Tuesday September 26, 2023 @08:06AM (#37658056)
> single hotel booking site that shows taxes by default unless required by law

That doesn’t make it not suck. Not hiding fees doesn’t mean “we always show what’s legally required.”

As a customer I want to know how much things cost. It’s a pain to not know taxes when shopping rooms. Especially since I rarely know city taxes and some hotels have different taxes because they are “resort” or “convention” or whatever tax rules exist for a particular jurisdiction.

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Re:Airbnb Is Different Now by corbezzoli on Tuesday September 26, 2023 @08:24AM (#37658246)
Totally agree, I'm just saying it's unfortunately a standard across the industry, it's not just Booking. You're always allowed to set "show full price", which is then remembered after the first visit. It's the first thing I do whenever I compare prices across sites.

Overall I find Booking pretty neat, once you get past all the "449 people booked this room in the last 4 seconds" bs.

Having said that, Agoda has the lowest price most of the time, so I put with their bs even more willingly.

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Re:Airbnb Is Different Now by user3939382 on Tuesday September 26, 2023 @10:13AM (#37659643)
It’s a standard in the US because of lacking consumer protection laws. Some countries don’t allow these companies to play these games and the advertised rates are the real rates.
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Re:Airbnb Is Different Now by mardifoufs on Tuesday September 26, 2023 @12:34PM (#37661817)
They do the exact same thing in Europe. Booking is a European corporation too.
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Re:Airbnb Is Different Now by user3939382 on Tuesday September 26, 2023 @12:54PM (#37662193)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resort_fee#Countries_where_res...

Europe

European Union regulations say that mandatory fees must be included in advertised prices, making hidden resort fees illegal.[118][119]

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