Comment by vmarsy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vmarsy | Hacker News Reader

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> Ugly - Alot of owners now are pulling a perfectly legal scam of listing a place at a certain price point and then charging an extremely high cleaning fee. When booking it, you are then shocked by the extreme fees, one place (5 days stay) was charging $400 for their cleaning fee.

I'm not sure I follow here, the cleaning fee is announced before you confirm the booking isn't it? In a way it's similar to airlines having cheap tickets to then adding seat-choosing fee, bagage fee, etc. The initial low price is slightly deceptive to appear cheaper on aggregators, isn't it?

Here the "scam" is they use same deceptive practice to appear cheaper on the Airbnb map?

For any serious booking, people explore their options and open a few tabs of different listings to pick, since they have to check other things (smoker/non-smoker, pets/no pets, etc). The cleaning fee for the trip is listed there.

Some owners prefer long term stays, so putting a flat higher cleaning fee is a good mechanism to incentivise longer stays imo, as yes, cleaning is time consuming.

Maybe the Map itself could improve to show the total price for the trip instead of base-rate-per-night.

> seat-choosing fee, bagage fee

Those are optional, cleaning fees are not. They should be included in the price shown on the map.

> They should be included in the price shown on the map.

Completely agree, that would make the experience more user-friendly for the person looking to rent.

This is an AirBnb platform issue, not necessarily a owner "scam".

Not a trivial engineering problem as the dynamic price based on length of your stay can't be cached easily as base-price-per-night, and I assume caching prices per listing is what makes the map quick to load and responsive, but it'd be a welcome change!

This is not a platform issue, it is done on purpose to deceive the customer, especially the less tech- or financially savvy customers. People have been complaining about the cleaning fee ridiculousness forever. Airbnb could and should limit the total allowable cleaning expenses (for type of house, room, location etc., in one word: localization), but they don't do it because it would decrease revenue, not because of technical difficulties, please.

The base price could be cached and then multiplied by the number of nights plus the cleaning fee before the map is rendered. I can't imagine that would be too expensive to calculate on the front end.

The price is included in Europe because EU asked them to.

When I search the map shows me a price per night for the amount of nights I picked including the corresponding part of the cleaning and service fees.

So it is not an "engineering problem" but a 100% deliberate "dark pattern" choice on AirBNB's part.

> the cleaning fee is announced before you confirm the booking isn't it?

That is correct, my issue is I am looking for places in a certain price point per day, say $200, so in my example I see a place for $200 a day I want 5 days, so $1000 plus a small cleaning fee and other fees(maybe $100 or slightly more). This place after I click on it and prepare to book then totals it up before I reserve, then comes to $1600. It has a $400 cleaning fee and there were also other fees attached. So an unsuspecting person could then get taken by this nonsense.

A possible fix is airbnb could add in all the fees and add that to the daily price, a simple UI fix that would stop this unscrupulous behavior by hosts. So instead of showing as $200 a day it now shows as $320 a day.

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