I hate it - I don't CARE where the money is going, just charge me the price and don't try to pretend that various "fees" are affecting it. It's bad enough with listing various taxes, but made up "surcharges" are just accounting trickery.
If you want $250 a night, then list $250 a night. Don't try and pull a fast one with some bullshit fees at the checkout.
People often lament the lack of practical training for things like personal finance and media literacy in schools. We should add consumer awareness to that list. We are raising kids to become obedient little consumers.
This just sets up Amazon to charge a flat fee while they lower their costs and reap all the benefits.
The goal isn't to dupe them by falsely advertising lower prices, it's to get them to support lower taxes on your business.
Likewise, it's anti-big-government politicians that want to keep sales tax separate in America.
And weirdly it's the same right-wing guys in each country including the tax in Chile and breaking it out in US. In USA of course they want the citizens to hate taxes because taxes in USA support democracy, and they figure by making it a painful hidden cost they will get me, for instance, to hate taxes instead of putting them first. And I did in fact hate them when I visited, the trick worked on me, despite being an excellent math student.
In Chile, it's because the state needs money from somewhere for concrete, courts and cops (the three things right-wing guys actually think taxes are good for) and also for incredibly shitty orphanages and "albergues" whose purpose is be able to construct arguments around that there are in fact already orphanages and "albergues" to deny real assistance...So they have regressive taxes, mostly paid for by VAT. So poor people and to a lesser extent the middle class don't protest that they're the tax base, they hide the tax. And in fact if you look at fancy magazines like Ed, an interior design magazine in Chile, they do break out the tax to communicate that you can get out of paying it, tee hee, or split it with the seller, on a $4000 USD Ottoman.
It's more that if you're not a child you're almost never spending the exact full contents of your wallet.
It also incentivises longer stays, which is obviously in they interests to make it disproportionate, so I'm not saying that there's no ulterior motive, but it's not axiomatically unfair to reward longer lets (or penalise shorter lets) that don't incur so many one-off costs.
My qualm is that they sometimes aren't included in the advertised price of the listing, which makes comparing listings much more difficult, and incentivizes owners to create huge cleaning fees to artificially lower their advertised price-per-night.
But Airbnb is a "tech" company. So anything goes.
Entry Prep Fee: 19.95 (Basically shipping and handling through the port, even though UPS has an automated system for this)
Bond Fee: 6.00 (A surcharge to get more money in case charging all these BS fees causes you to not want to pay the fees)
COD/Online Fee: 5.00 (An additional surcharge to try and cover the risk of charging you so many surcharges)
Customs GST: 4.98 (the real number)
CA BC PST: 6.97 (the other half of the real number)
Brokerage GST/HST: 1.30 (taxes on the majority of their BS fees)
COD GST: .25 (taxes on their COD surcharge)
When I'm being asked to pay taxes on BS charges your company isn't actually paying... that's when I get truly irate. (Just a PSA for anyone shipping to Canada, please send packages via USPS not a fancy package carrier, CanadaPost is amazing compared to all the private companies up here)
I certainly do.