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Comment by koolba | Hacker News Reader

That’s because it is a dark pattern of hiding the true price through death by a thousand fees.

They try to get you from every angle. They mark up the price. They add a service fee. They add a delivery fee. They add a tip (which is its own can of worms...)

If it was just “Buy whatever you want at regular price but we’ll throw on $40” a lot of people would balk.

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Airbnb is also a very big user of this pattern. You can't search by total price, including fees, just the base nightly rate: which makes it difficult to compare options, since one host might have a $20 cleaning fee, and another has a $250 one.

That can make a big difference in total price for short (2-3 night) stays.

I end up with 40 browser tabs. Oh, and if you want to book via mobile app, they charge more for that. Have to use a web browser for the best price.

I think if you specify your dates and length of stay you can search by the total cost but I agree its certainly frustrating and for short trips makes the service annoying and nearly useless/cost prohibitive.

Overall, I think its better to have the cleaning fee separate, otherwise you penalize people who stay long and don't get cleaning service during their stay.

The cleaning fees charged by hosts are not optional. You cannot opt out of them. If Airbnb wanted to empower users, they could permit enabling/disabling those fees while querying.

>I think if you specify your dates and length of stay you can search by the total cost but I agree its certainly frustrating and for short trips makes the service annoying and nearly useless/cost prohibitive.

Unfortunately, they leave out taxes in these "totals", so you're not quite getting the full picture in the search results.

The challenge with very specific filters with Airbnb is that you will get a lot fewer results. The prices are not exactly standardized since the host's set them.

Without dates, you cannot see the true price because prices fluctuate between dates and ranges. If set the dates, and number of guests, you can see the total price and breakdown on the search page. The search page price doesn't include the taxes (I guess it's a common practice in the US), but you can see it on the listing page. The prices should be the same on mobile and web unless you search different days and the prices have fluctuated or there is a caching issue.

I built a browser extension to help mitigate this type of issue. A lot of people like to think about the cost of lodging in terms of nightly price as opposed to the total, so the extension shows the true nightly price of a stay, after account for all fees, taxes, etc. Unfortunately, right now there's not a great way to get the true* totals to show up in search results, but the extension will show you the real price per night of your stay once you're on a place's listing page.

Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/airbnb-price-per-n...

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/airbnb-price-...

And it's completely open source: https://github.com/davidsawyer/airbnb-price-per-night-correc...

*Airbnb leaves out taxes in their "totals", which can skew the true total by a significant amount

I'm more forgiving about taxes being left out, only because it's an equal percentage for each listing. If I have a map of 10 listings, and they're all N% less than they should be -- I can still somewhat easily compare them, as they are all equally wrong.

There might be edge cases to my thinking, as if you map view listings along a jurisdictional boundary, there may be taxes in one city and not another.

This is awesome! Thank you so much for doing this :)

>Oh, and if you want to book via mobile app, they charge more for that.

Source?

This wasn't from an article or written source, it is from personal experience. I took the exact same listing, guest count, and dates, and got different prices in my browser vs Airbnb iOS app. I checked a 2nd listing, same story. This was about a year ago; I have not checked recently if it's still the case.

Airbnb is the ultimate scam in my book. No better than booking.com.

i've ordered from them pre-pandemic and they use just about every dark pattern and asshole design in the book. amazing really.

I've done part-time work for one delivery service. For certain pick-up locations, they instruct the deliverers to not give the receipt to the customer.

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