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Comment by asdff | Hacker News Reader

Another dark pattern is hiding the price until you are nearly booking the place. Most people want a cheap stay close to where they need to be, so they look on the prices on the map, which fail to include fees which can be all over the place depending on the host.

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And the fees can be extreme. I recently tried to book a place before covid and the cleaning fees etc ended up being $400. I feel like this is a scheme landlords on airbnb are perpetrating which are similar to what used to go down on ebay years ago.

For ebay they did not take a cut of the shipping cost(typically their cut was around 10% of the final sale of an item) so sellers would list items at rock bottom prices but with shipping like 5x of what it should be so they could receive a maximum amount of money. I assume airbnb does not take a cut of cleaning costs?

Some Ebay sellers still engage in this type of behavior and it's infuriating. Also sellers who use USPS but still won't ship to a PO BOX. I don't get it.

This hasn't been the case for years. If you choose the dates, the full price (including any fees) is included in the total.

It’s not included in the list/map view for your search, so you can’t really compare the actual price without individually visiting each listing

I just checked and it absolutely is included as long as you add dates. Of course it can't give you exact prices if they don't know when you'll be staying, prices change based on demand.

You’re right. They must have added it between the last time I used Airbnb. BUT I just checked it and the total price they display doesn’t include occupancy taxes and fees (so I saw an example listing go $420->$501). They still don’t let you filter by total price, only exposing nightly rate for that filter. It’s definitely better than it was but still not ideal. In fairness it’s been so long since I booked a non-expenses hotel I don’t even remember if it’s customary to exclude occupancy taxes+fees from the sticker price there

This was outlawed in Germany / the EU. So the price you see on the map includes cleaning and platform fees.

Chesky mentioned at one point he would look into this. I don’t see what’s so hard about computing the average price per day in the aggregate view though...

The cancellation policies are nuts too.

What’s nuts about the cancellation policies? Genuinely curious as I lead that team.

As a user it’s just frustrating to find a place you like and then see that you need to give them say two months notice. Or you can’t cancel at all.

It’s made me go back to hotels where you can usually cancel pretty freely.

There’s probably nothing you can do about that.

There’s a range of flexibility offered including many homes that have free cancellation until 5 or 1 day before check-in. Some are on Stricter policies that are more strict than what you would find with hotels but homeowners also have different risk profiles and the policies help balance that risk out.

In my experience flexible cancellation policies are extremely rare. At least hotels have that one advantage.

I used to never care much but in 2020 it’s been a big deal. Will the main attraction in the area I’m visiting decide to close down or impose unreasonable restrictions? Will the entire state close down or make me quarantine?

There’s so much uncertainty with traveling these days.

I'm not even sure if that is a dark pattern rather than just poor design. In the end, you're just going to frustrate users who think they are paying $50/night over 7 nights but when they divide their final price by 7 it is $100/night.

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