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The article touches up on it, but the "Additional fees and upfront pricing" is my biggest frustration with Airbnb that they refuse to fix (it's an easy solution

The article touches up on it, but the "Additional fees and upfront pricing" is my biggest frustration with Airbnb that they refuse to fix (it's an easy solution, in my opinion). 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.

PaulHoule 4y ago
Myself I came to the conclusion I could usually find a hotel I liked better than an AirBNB for a similar price, but with much less risk that anything goes wrong.
Espressosaurus 4y ago
AirBNB is relying on the bait and switch; why would they change unless they were forced to by regulation?
- ipaddr 4y ago
  Customers choosing another provider
- spacemadness 4y ago
  I refuse to use them ever again as I’m tired of their business tactics and their entitled hosts’ attitudes, but the real judge is if people stop using them due to the bait and switch baked into their product. If not, they’ll just carry on as usual.
xivzgrev 4y ago
Exactly. There was a time I preferred Airbnb but now I choose hotels unless I am looking for some kind of experience 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.
- no_wizard 4y ago
  If at all. Never had a host bring anything to us whenever we stayed in Airbnbs. Often, never saw the host at all (they'd just text a code to get in and out of the places I've stayed)
  - colordrops 4y ago
    You've seen a host before? I've never seen one.
    - jedberg 4y ago
      Mostly in Europe and Africa. When we stayed in AirBnBs in Europe we've met the host almost every time. One helped me park my oversized rental van and then paid for the parking since it didn't fit in the spot that came with the house. Another was there to show us all the amenities. Another was there to tell us to pretend we were his friend because rentals weren't allowed. And the one in Africa did a whole grocery shopping for us because she knew we were arriving late with kids and wouldn't have any food to feed them in the morning. But yeah I've only ever met one host in the USA, and that was because they lived next door.
    - no_wizard 4y ago
      Once, when I stayed in Petaluma many years ago (I think 2014 or 2015?) but it was maybe 5 minutes? 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.
    - pclmulqdq 4y ago
roflyear 4y ago
My favorite is the hosts who charge $nnn for cleaning fees but then expect you to basically clean everything including doing laundry, sweeping, etc.. then they complain when you have dirt on their floor mats asking for even more $$$ Why isn't cleaning part of staying somewhere???
- kevincox 4y ago
  > 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.
  - potatolicious 4y ago
    > "Where do you draw the line." 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.
  - tshaddox 4y ago
    > Where do you draw the line. 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.
    - kevincox 4y ago
jedberg 4y ago
eBay had (maybe still has I don't use it) that problem too. Sellers would list something with a Buy-It-Now price of $5, but when you got to the last step, you'd see that shipping was $25. 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-shipping-costs?id=4655 https://www.ebay.com/help/selling/shipping-items/maximum-shi...
- dumpsterlid 4y ago
  [dead]
- hijinks 4y ago
  in the late 90s i sold dave matthews band bootlegs from their concerts on ebay. Ya not legal but I did it in college to make money since I had a cd burner. 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
  - jedberg 4y ago
    Yep, that was part of why people did it.
- tempoponet 4y ago
  I feel transparency in pricing is more valuable to the users. I've sold items that cost more to ship than they were worth; the problem is that if they choose to return the item I would eat the shipping cost if I offered "free shipping". 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.
  - jedberg 4y ago
    But you can just charge for shipping a return. 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.
chongli 4y ago
EBay went through a similar problem where people would list an item very cheap and then charge a fortune for shipping. Now eBay shows you the price and the shipping charges from the search result list and even lets you sort by “lowest price + shipping”. This makes the experience of using eBay infinitely better!
- digianarchist 4y ago
  Large shipping costs were a way to circumvent eBay's fees. They didn't charge fees on shipping costs if I recall correctly.
  - Scoundreller 4y ago
    This is it. I’d sell stuff for 1 cent and put the $5 S&H in the title itself. (This was for video games that would cost me like $1 to ship).
  - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 4y ago
    With Airbnbs it is similar: local taxes generally don't apply to cleaning fees. Airbnb does take a cut of them though, so it's unlikely they'll lead the push to punish the practice like eBay did.
- LegitShady 4y ago
  I still have this problem on reverb.com which makes me not use it. Something being $15 cheaper and $75 shipping isn't helpful and wastes my time, so I stop using the site.
- goosedragons 4y ago
  And then eBay implemented the Global Shipping Program and so now a $5 game has $15 shipping from Buffalo to Toronto because it needs a pitstop through Kentucky and needs to be rummaged and possibly damaged by a Pitney Bowes employee first!
  - chongli 4y ago
geraldwhen 4y ago
As a solo traveler it’s a terrible value. But for a family of 4 it’s extremely useful. You really have to go with well reviewed hosts.
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  I mean, it depends on what you’re booking. Having private bedrooms as an option can work out nicely for a solo traveller. Cheaper than a hotel, fewer issues than a hostel.
tbruckner 4y ago
Doesn't the article's mention of Upfront pricing resolve this? or is that different/something else?
- bluetidepro 4y ago
  I added a note about this. Yes and now, I still find how it's done a bit overwhelming than what it should be. However, technically they do now show a "total" price in the search results. It still feels like a small step, way too late though.
alsodumb 4y ago
They did implement this option last year, even prioritizing in search based on total cost. They made a big deal out of it: https://news.airbnb.com/airbnb-is-introducing-total-price-display-and-updating-guest-checkout/ https://news.airbnb.com/airbnb-is-introducing-total-price-di...
- bluetidepro 4y ago
  See my 2nd note added. I still think it's very poorly done personally.
mathattack 4y ago
Same issue with airlines and aggregators. No way to know the true cost on Travelocity until you’ve finished the purchase.
- no_wizard 4y ago
  Best thing I ever did personally was get a mileage credit card[0]. Made booking flights so much more transparent. I can see the total round trip price up front, and compare them easily, and never get a surprise on the final price. Its really nice. [0]: mines through Capital One Venture but there's many ones out there, research which works for you!
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    Google flight search and the airlines’ direct websites have shown total costs when you search for as long as I have been buying flights (mid 2000s).
jitl 4y ago
This isn't much of a consolation, but you've always been able to see the true "all in" total price in search and on the map by browsing https://airbnb.com.au https://airbnb.com.au as this is legally required in Australia. It's been that way since at least 2015. More notes on using this technique here: https://jake.tl/notes/2022-05-how-to-airbnb https://jake.tl/notes/2022-05-how-to-airbnb
wongarsu 4y ago
This is completely solved on AirBnB's German website (and I think many others too). If you search for a place on airbnb.de the results page shows "€xx per night, €xxx total", where the total price includes all fees (cleaning fees, service fees, taxes), and the nightly price is just total price divided by the number of nights. When you click through to the listing it shows you a table how this breaks down. Which just shows that using the misleading numbers on the US website is a business decision. Screenshots: https://i.imgur.com/70Mllu8.png https://i.imgur.com/70Mllu8.png https://i.imgur.com/7xBXpMU.png https://i.imgur.com/7xBXpMU.png
- mFixman 4y ago
  It's the same in the UK, but that still doesn't do what I want: you can only filter by base price, so you'll get some hilariously overpriced apartments even if you search at a low price.
  - wongarsu 4y ago
    The German website filters based on total_price/number_of_nights. 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.
- tayo42 4y ago
  Vrbo in the US does this, even let's you filter by total price instead of just nightly
  - treeman79 4y ago
    I listed on both. Had six months of back to back bookings with Airbnb. One day a request for info came in on Vbro. 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.
    - 4y ago
dougSF70 4y ago
Airbnb is what you get after 10+ years of low interest rates. You also get a template of behaviors seen amongst SF rental landlords: the professional landlords run a tightship and are reasonable to deal with, the landlords that inherited a singlefamily home or want to rent out their own place tend to be a neurotic bunch, just like airbnb hosts vs hotel managers.
- dpflan 4y ago
  Low Interest Rates --> capitalism applied to every possible market while in search of returns?
  - CalRobert 4y ago
    Low interest rates combined with strict regulatory regimes that prevent capitalists from building more housing in response to price signals while also making it unappealing to rent to permanent tenants?
  - dougSF70 4y ago
    Turns people in to rent seekers,
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - Spooky23 4y ago
    That and too much cheap capital. It was trivial to get money, which encourages businesses that shouldn’t exist.
  - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
    I almost wonder if a "proper" capitalism should never see ultra low interest rates for greater than 1-2 years. It destroys consumer saving and savings habits, it encourages rapacious leverage acquisition behavior (which we're seeing in the fucking consumer housing market how nuts is that). 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".
turdprincess 4y ago
To be fair, this is something that hotels do as well. Ive been traveling to NYC a lot recently, and I consistently find that the nightly price seen in the search is usually about 20% less than the final price I pay due to taxes, fees, and resort fees.
ghaff 4y ago
>They should kill fees all together. 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.
- rightbyte 4y ago
  If they only do one cleaning it makes sense though to charge once for it. Usually businesses tries to hide their pricing mechanism and give opaque "sales". y = k*x + m Is nicer.
zmgsabst 4y ago
I appreciate the cleaning fee is separate — AirBnB ends up being cheaper for extended stays due to that. I regularly stay for a two weeks to a month.
jiayo 4y ago
"Double ticketing" (presenting one price to attract consumers and another price at checkout) is illegal in Canada. Airbnb lost a class action lawsuit in Canada over this. [0] https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/airbnb-settles-6-million-class-action-lawsuit-some-canadians-eligible-for-up-to-45-credit-1.5778567 https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/airbnb-settles-6-million-cla...
shp0ngle 4y ago
just use booking.com and book an actual hotel, problem solved.
no_wizard 4y ago
I think alot of this is a symptom of both things Airbnb could definitely do better, as you outlined, as well a symptom of outside pressure on hosts. 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.
- loandbehold 4y ago
  Hotel room rates shot up by more than 36% in last 3 years
  - brewdad 4y ago
    3 years ago you couldn't give away a hotel room. Remember COVID?
enoch_r 4y ago
> They should kill fees all together. Have it just leave that at the hands of the host to bake into a single cost that they want to charge per night, and simplify it. 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.
irrational 4y ago
By law, websites must show the final price in Australia. Set the location to australia, but the currency to USD. Now you are seeing the final price upfront. Not that it matters. We haven't used AirBnB in ages because the fees are exorbitant.
magnuspaaske 4y ago
All the things people dislike about Airbnb comes down to hosts not being able to leverage economics of scale for their rentals in any coherent way. Typically hosts will manage a bunch of places across town and so a late or early checkout could easily see them have to redo their logistics plans for the whole day. On the other hand hotels get more efficient with scale since the reception is there 24/7 anyways and they can just make a not that certain rooms need to be cleaned a bit later and the cleaning staff is never too far away.
twelve40 4y ago
They've been called out on this many times, e.g.: https://twitter.com/pitdesi/status/1579138509449097221 https://twitter.com/pitdesi/status/1579138509449097221 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-transparency-is-now-top-priority/ https://skift.com/2022/10/10/airbnb-ceo-says-fee-transparenc...
baby 4y ago
I browse the website in .com.au or .fr to see the final prices, then switch to .com to pay. It’s so dumb but that’s the American culture not necessarily Airbnb
jfzoid 4y ago
For what it's worth, I logged into AirBnb just now and it showed me an option to "Display total price: all fees before taxes"
- teraflop 4y ago
  It's listed as an "early access" feature on the US website, and seems to be only available if you're logged in. 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.
biztos 4y ago
My favorite AirBnB trick, which I've encountered in both Germany and Spain, is the "extra fee due in cash on arrival." 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!
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  I’ve had this in Barcelona even when booking a hotel directly through its website. 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?
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Mandatory "resort fees" are pretty common at some types of properties in the US and they're often not very clearly spelled out up-front.
- swalling 4y ago
  I have also encountered this in Spain, and my counter was to refuse the cash extortion after I had arrived and had the keys in hand. They will grumble or threaten you, but they know they can't force you to pay since it violates Airbnb policies. Even local occupancy taxes must be collected via the platform. 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.
anigbrowl 4y ago
I don't understand why Airbnb is still on the side of hosts with this. 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.
breischl 4y ago
> 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.
- hgsgm 4y ago
  Google fixed this for flight search years ago. Do they show wrong prices for hotels?
  - breischl 4y ago
    Even if the Google Hotel Search feature fixed it, it doesn't help for other search results, or if people just run a quick search on each site and notice the prices are much higher on one than on the other. 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.
dfxm12 4y ago
Also of note is fees hosts expect you to pay in cash outside of the platform. For example, paying the cleaning person. That won't appear in the price and may be hidden in the listing's "house rules".
- loandbehold 4y ago
  Cash transactions outside the platform are prohibited by AirBnb. Report these hosts.
Spooky23 4y ago
EBay had the same issue. It's difficult to walk away from all of that cash. Some people are price conscious until they make a decision, then they don't care. It's unfortunate, as they had a good thing going for a short time.
facet1ous 4y ago
Hosts don't have any say in the Airbnb pricing model, I don't know where you're getting the impression they are in cahoots with hosts. Airbnb simply makes more money and gets more bookings with the "hidden" fee structure for obvious reasons.
acchow 4y ago
It's also hilarious how you don't know what the checkout instructions will be when you pay for the reservation. Sometimes you don't find out until you're physically inside the Airbnb.
charles_f 4y ago
> 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. 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.
madaxe_again 4y ago
I host on Airbnb, just two properties which are my holiday homes, and it’s also my biggest frustration. 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.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
emadda 4y ago
I built an AirBnB search engine to show accurate prices: https://stay100.app https://stay100.app
dawnerd 4y ago
I've seen plenty of airbnbs that require you to do all the cleaning but STILL charge a 200+ dollar cleaning fee. I'm done with it, there's just too much risk involved.
thetopher 4y ago
Same here. 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.
foerster 4y ago
I'm curious, what kind of fees are hosts charging? I have a rental condo on AirBNB, our cleaning fee is $180, which is exactly what my cleaning company charges me to perform the clean.
- hraedon 4y ago
  The median in April 2020 was supposedly around $75 (1), but it of course wildly varies from host to host. The common perception is that they significantly increased during and after the pandemic, but that as far as I know isn't reflected in more recent data (2). 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-charge/ https://bnbfacts.com/airbnb-cleaning-fee-how-much-hosts-char... 2: https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/travel/airbnb-has-a-plan-to-fix-cleaning-fees https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/travel/airbnb-has-a-plan-...
bluecalm 4y ago
They are on the side of hosts on many other things. Removing reviews, not caring when the place booked is completely off in comparison to the description. It's by design they want your money and keeping many dishonest hosts on the site makes more money (at least short term).

PaulHoule 4y ago

Myself I came to the conclusion I could usually find a hotel I liked better than an AirBNB for a similar price, but with much less risk that anything goes wrong.

Espressosaurus 4y ago

AirBNB is relying on the bait and switch; why would they change unless they were forced to by regulation?

ipaddr 4y ago
Customers choosing another provider
spacemadness 4y ago
I refuse to use them ever again as I’m tired of their business tactics and their entitled hosts’ attitudes, but the real judge is if people stop using them due to the bait and switch baked into their product. If not, they’ll just carry on as usual.

xivzgrev 4y ago

Exactly. There was a time I preferred Airbnb but now I choose hotels unless I am looking for some kind of experience 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.

no_wizard 4y ago
If at all. Never had a host bring anything to us whenever we stayed in Airbnbs. Often, never saw the host at all (they'd just text a code to get in and out of the places I've stayed)
- colordrops 4y ago
  You've seen a host before? I've never seen one.
  - jedberg 4y ago
    Mostly in Europe and Africa. When we stayed in AirBnBs in Europe we've met the host almost every time. One helped me park my oversized rental van and then paid for the parking since it didn't fit in the spot that came with the house. Another was there to show us all the amenities. Another was there to tell us to pretend we were his friend because rentals weren't allowed. And the one in Africa did a whole grocery shopping for us because she knew we were arriving late with kids and wouldn't have any food to feed them in the morning. But yeah I've only ever met one host in the USA, and that was because they lived next door.
  - no_wizard 4y ago
    Once, when I stayed in Petaluma many years ago (I think 2014 or 2015?) but it was maybe 5 minutes? 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.
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago

roflyear 4y ago

My favorite is the hosts who charge $nnn for cleaning fees but then expect you to basically clean everything including doing laundry, sweeping, etc.. then they complain when you have dirt on their floor mats asking for even more $$$ Why isn't cleaning part of staying somewhere???

kevincox 4y ago
> 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.
- potatolicious 4y ago
  > "Where do you draw the line." 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.
- tshaddox 4y ago
  > Where do you draw the line. 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.
  - kevincox 4y ago

jedberg 4y ago

eBay had (maybe still has I don't use it) that problem too. Sellers would list something with a Buy-It-Now price of $5, but when you got to the last step, you'd see that shipping was $25. 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-shipping-costs?id=4655 https://www.ebay.com/help/selling/shipping-items/maximum-shi...

dumpsterlid 4y ago
[dead]
hijinks 4y ago
in the late 90s i sold dave matthews band bootlegs from their concerts on ebay. Ya not legal but I did it in college to make money since I had a cd burner. 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
- jedberg 4y ago
  Yep, that was part of why people did it.
tempoponet 4y ago
I feel transparency in pricing is more valuable to the users. I've sold items that cost more to ship than they were worth; the problem is that if they choose to return the item I would eat the shipping cost if I offered "free shipping". 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.
- jedberg 4y ago
  But you can just charge for shipping a return. 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.

chongli 4y ago

EBay went through a similar problem where people would list an item very cheap and then charge a fortune for shipping. Now eBay shows you the price and the shipping charges from the search result list and even lets you sort by “lowest price + shipping”. This makes the experience of using eBay infinitely better!

digianarchist 4y ago
Large shipping costs were a way to circumvent eBay's fees. They didn't charge fees on shipping costs if I recall correctly.
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  This is it. I’d sell stuff for 1 cent and put the $5 S&H in the title itself. (This was for video games that would cost me like $1 to ship).
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 4y ago
  With Airbnbs it is similar: local taxes generally don't apply to cleaning fees. Airbnb does take a cut of them though, so it's unlikely they'll lead the push to punish the practice like eBay did.
LegitShady 4y ago
I still have this problem on reverb.com which makes me not use it. Something being $15 cheaper and $75 shipping isn't helpful and wastes my time, so I stop using the site.
goosedragons 4y ago
And then eBay implemented the Global Shipping Program and so now a $5 game has $15 shipping from Buffalo to Toronto because it needs a pitstop through Kentucky and needs to be rummaged and possibly damaged by a Pitney Bowes employee first!
- chongli 4y ago

geraldwhen 4y ago

As a solo traveler it’s a terrible value. But for a family of 4 it’s extremely useful. You really have to go with well reviewed hosts.

Scoundreller 4y ago
I mean, it depends on what you’re booking. Having private bedrooms as an option can work out nicely for a solo traveller. Cheaper than a hotel, fewer issues than a hostel.

tbruckner 4y ago

Doesn't the article's mention of Upfront pricing resolve this? or is that different/something else?

bluetidepro 4y ago
I added a note about this. Yes and now, I still find how it's done a bit overwhelming than what it should be. However, technically they do now show a "total" price in the search results. It still feels like a small step, way too late though.

alsodumb 4y ago

They did implement this option last year, even prioritizing in search based on total cost. They made a big deal out of it: https://news.airbnb.com/airbnb-is-introducing-total-price-display-and-updating-guest-checkout/ https://news.airbnb.com/airbnb-is-introducing-total-price-di...

bluetidepro 4y ago
See my 2nd note added. I still think it's very poorly done personally.

mathattack 4y ago

Same issue with airlines and aggregators. No way to know the true cost on Travelocity until you’ve finished the purchase.

no_wizard 4y ago
Best thing I ever did personally was get a mileage credit card[0]. Made booking flights so much more transparent. I can see the total round trip price up front, and compare them easily, and never get a surprise on the final price. Its really nice. [0]: mines through Capital One Venture but there's many ones out there, research which works for you!
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  Google flight search and the airlines’ direct websites have shown total costs when you search for as long as I have been buying flights (mid 2000s).

jitl 4y ago

This isn't much of a consolation, but you've always been able to see the true "all in" total price in search and on the map by browsing https://airbnb.com.au https://airbnb.com.au as this is legally required in Australia. It's been that way since at least 2015. More notes on using this technique here: https://jake.tl/notes/2022-05-how-to-airbnb https://jake.tl/notes/2022-05-how-to-airbnb

wongarsu 4y ago

This is completely solved on AirBnB's German website (and I think many others too). If you search for a place on airbnb.de the results page shows "€xx per night, €xxx total", where the total price includes all fees (cleaning fees, service fees, taxes), and the nightly price is just total price divided by the number of nights. When you click through to the listing it shows you a table how this breaks down. Which just shows that using the misleading numbers on the US website is a business decision. Screenshots: https://i.imgur.com/70Mllu8.png https://i.imgur.com/70Mllu8.png https://i.imgur.com/7xBXpMU.png https://i.imgur.com/7xBXpMU.png

mFixman 4y ago
It's the same in the UK, but that still doesn't do what I want: you can only filter by base price, so you'll get some hilariously overpriced apartments even if you search at a low price.
- wongarsu 4y ago
  The German website filters based on total_price/number_of_nights. 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.
tayo42 4y ago
Vrbo in the US does this, even let's you filter by total price instead of just nightly
- treeman79 4y ago
  I listed on both. Had six months of back to back bookings with Airbnb. One day a request for info came in on Vbro. 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.
  - 4y ago

dougSF70 4y ago

Airbnb is what you get after 10+ years of low interest rates. You also get a template of behaviors seen amongst SF rental landlords: the professional landlords run a tightship and are reasonable to deal with, the landlords that inherited a singlefamily home or want to rent out their own place tend to be a neurotic bunch, just like airbnb hosts vs hotel managers.

dpflan 4y ago
Low Interest Rates --> capitalism applied to every possible market while in search of returns?
- CalRobert 4y ago
  Low interest rates combined with strict regulatory regimes that prevent capitalists from building more housing in response to price signals while also making it unappealing to rent to permanent tenants?
- dougSF70 4y ago
  Turns people in to rent seekers,
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- Spooky23 4y ago
  That and too much cheap capital. It was trivial to get money, which encourages businesses that shouldn’t exist.
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  I almost wonder if a "proper" capitalism should never see ultra low interest rates for greater than 1-2 years. It destroys consumer saving and savings habits, it encourages rapacious leverage acquisition behavior (which we're seeing in the fucking consumer housing market how nuts is that). 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".

turdprincess 4y ago

To be fair, this is something that hotels do as well. Ive been traveling to NYC a lot recently, and I consistently find that the nightly price seen in the search is usually about 20% less than the final price I pay due to taxes, fees, and resort fees.

ghaff 4y ago

>They should kill fees all together. 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.

rightbyte 4y ago
If they only do one cleaning it makes sense though to charge once for it. Usually businesses tries to hide their pricing mechanism and give opaque "sales". y = k*x + m Is nicer.

zmgsabst 4y ago

I appreciate the cleaning fee is separate — AirBnB ends up being cheaper for extended stays due to that. I regularly stay for a two weeks to a month.

jiayo 4y ago

"Double ticketing" (presenting one price to attract consumers and another price at checkout) is illegal in Canada. Airbnb lost a class action lawsuit in Canada over this. [0] https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/airbnb-settles-6-million-class-action-lawsuit-some-canadians-eligible-for-up-to-45-credit-1.5778567 https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/airbnb-settles-6-million-cla...

shp0ngle 4y ago

just use booking.com and book an actual hotel, problem solved.

no_wizard 4y ago

I think alot of this is a symptom of both things Airbnb could definitely do better, as you outlined, as well a symptom of outside pressure on hosts. 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.

loandbehold 4y ago
Hotel room rates shot up by more than 36% in last 3 years
- brewdad 4y ago
  3 years ago you couldn't give away a hotel room. Remember COVID?

enoch_r 4y ago

> They should kill fees all together. Have it just leave that at the hands of the host to bake into a single cost that they want to charge per night, and simplify it. 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.

irrational 4y ago

By law, websites must show the final price in Australia. Set the location to australia, but the currency to USD. Now you are seeing the final price upfront. Not that it matters. We haven't used AirBnB in ages because the fees are exorbitant.

magnuspaaske 4y ago

All the things people dislike about Airbnb comes down to hosts not being able to leverage economics of scale for their rentals in any coherent way. Typically hosts will manage a bunch of places across town and so a late or early checkout could easily see them have to redo their logistics plans for the whole day. On the other hand hotels get more efficient with scale since the reception is there 24/7 anyways and they can just make a not that certain rooms need to be cleaned a bit later and the cleaning staff is never too far away.

twelve40 4y ago

They've been called out on this many times, e.g.: https://twitter.com/pitdesi/status/1579138509449097221 https://twitter.com/pitdesi/status/1579138509449097221 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-transparency-is-now-top-priority/ https://skift.com/2022/10/10/airbnb-ceo-says-fee-transparenc...

baby 4y ago

I browse the website in .com.au or .fr to see the final prices, then switch to .com to pay. It’s so dumb but that’s the American culture not necessarily Airbnb

jfzoid 4y ago

For what it's worth, I logged into AirBnb just now and it showed me an option to "Display total price: all fees before taxes"

teraflop 4y ago
It's listed as an "early access" feature on the US website, and seems to be only available if you're logged in. 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.

biztos 4y ago

My favorite AirBnB trick, which I've encountered in both Germany and Spain, is the "extra fee due in cash on arrival." 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!

Scoundreller 4y ago
I’ve had this in Barcelona even when booking a hotel directly through its website. 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?
- ghaff 4y ago
  Mandatory "resort fees" are pretty common at some types of properties in the US and they're often not very clearly spelled out up-front.
swalling 4y ago
I have also encountered this in Spain, and my counter was to refuse the cash extortion after I had arrived and had the keys in hand. They will grumble or threaten you, but they know they can't force you to pay since it violates Airbnb policies. Even local occupancy taxes must be collected via the platform. 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.

anigbrowl 4y ago

I don't understand why Airbnb is still on the side of hosts with this. 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.

breischl 4y ago

> 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.

hgsgm 4y ago
Google fixed this for flight search years ago. Do they show wrong prices for hotels?
- breischl 4y ago
  Even if the Google Hotel Search feature fixed it, it doesn't help for other search results, or if people just run a quick search on each site and notice the prices are much higher on one than on the other. 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.

dfxm12 4y ago

Also of note is fees hosts expect you to pay in cash outside of the platform. For example, paying the cleaning person. That won't appear in the price and may be hidden in the listing's "house rules".

loandbehold 4y ago
Cash transactions outside the platform are prohibited by AirBnb. Report these hosts.

Spooky23 4y ago

EBay had the same issue. It's difficult to walk away from all of that cash. Some people are price conscious until they make a decision, then they don't care. It's unfortunate, as they had a good thing going for a short time.

facet1ous 4y ago

Hosts don't have any say in the Airbnb pricing model, I don't know where you're getting the impression they are in cahoots with hosts. Airbnb simply makes more money and gets more bookings with the "hidden" fee structure for obvious reasons.

acchow 4y ago

It's also hilarious how you don't know what the checkout instructions will be when you pay for the reservation. Sometimes you don't find out until you're physically inside the Airbnb.

charles_f 4y ago

> 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. 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.

madaxe_again 4y ago

I host on Airbnb, just two properties which are my holiday homes, and it’s also my biggest frustration. 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.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

emadda 4y ago

I built an AirBnB search engine to show accurate prices: https://stay100.app https://stay100.app

dawnerd 4y ago

I've seen plenty of airbnbs that require you to do all the cleaning but STILL charge a 200+ dollar cleaning fee. I'm done with it, there's just too much risk involved.

thetopher 4y ago

Same here. 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.

foerster 4y ago

I'm curious, what kind of fees are hosts charging? I have a rental condo on AirBNB, our cleaning fee is $180, which is exactly what my cleaning company charges me to perform the clean.

hraedon 4y ago
The median in April 2020 was supposedly around $75 (1), but it of course wildly varies from host to host. The common perception is that they significantly increased during and after the pandemic, but that as far as I know isn't reflected in more recent data (2). 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-charge/ https://bnbfacts.com/airbnb-cleaning-fee-how-much-hosts-char... 2: https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/travel/airbnb-has-a-plan-to-fix-cleaning-fees https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/travel/airbnb-has-a-plan-...

bluecalm 4y ago

They are on the side of hosts on many other things. Removing reviews, not caring when the place booked is completely off in comparison to the description. It's by design they want your money and keeping many dishonest hosts on the site makes more money (at least short term).