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Comment by wanderr | Hacker News Reader

As a user, Airbnb is hostile. The price you see is never the price you pay. It's impossible to tell which listings are actually the cheaper or more expensive than others. The only reason to use them is selection, they have properties that VRBO & others don't. So focusing on improvements for their hosts is smart, but feels like it will still bite them in the long run. I already avoid Airbnb when possible.

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use airbnb.com.au. they are legally required to display the real price, and break it down in search results :)

Just did a quick test. The US version has the nightly price as the first number with the total under it, and the AU site has the total price listed instead.

Interestingly, the AU price was a couple dollars more than the US price. Threw together a quick side-by-side: https://imgur.com/a/DJwG5z9

You linked a screenshot after you already selected a property. If you are back on the property search page, it shows a nightly price and a total price on hover, but when you click the total price goes up by the cleaning fee and the service fee. And those seem to be completely random so it's not like you can just add $100 in your head to every price. Anywhere they show a price, it should be the total price.

Same goes for hotels + resort fees, though. It seems like the only place I can really see the actual price is on airline websites?

EDIT: I just tried to repro and now the total is always matching. I swear I was just raging about this 4 days ago when I booked a trip... gah.

Also US and I see the nightly and total. That’s good enough for me. Lets me understand what an additional day will cost. Basically they give you the full y=m*x+b instead of just y.

Aussie here, never realised this was a complaint. Everything I see across nearly every site is always the total price.

Do they still show properties sans filter criteria (i.e. air conditioning striked out)?

This same issue is true of hotels, although some websites do a better job of surfacing it than others.

It’s much more egregious with ABNB. A hotel might charge you some small local taxes and fees, but with ABNB you get those plus a whopper of a “cleaning fee”, which can be hundreds of dollars, even for short stays.

The "cleaning fees" on Airbnb are super reminiscent of the the "shipping fees" on early 2000s e-bay. The only difference is that it was a somewhat fresh concept with e-bay. The people who built Airbnb should know better.

I've had hotel fees in the hundreds of dollars, it's not uncommon.

But I do agree, the fees are generally a higher percentage.

Don't forget "resort fees".

You only really see that in the US (as far as I know).

You may encounter a city tax of a couple Euro in most European cities as an add on, but nothing in the range of dozens of Euro.

I think it's nothing less than a scam and should be made illegal. Period.

Good point! I just stayed at a hotel in hollywood and was charged $20/day "destination charge" and I've had similar resort charges at hotels in hawaii. Hotels are no better than airbnb with these extra fees.

Wholeheartedly agree, except that I travel almost exclusively with Airbnb because hotels suck and VRBO has less listings and at the end of the day airbnb is amazing for traveling. If you work at Airbnb, please fix these dark patterns. From a loyal user.

Also sometimes even which listings are still active. I've had a few times where I've booked and the host responded not even knowing their listing had been up.

Exactly, not seeing the actual cost easily is why I switched back to “hotels”

The second sentence doesn't support the first. Airbnb is just doing the minimum to keep up with everything else. Having additional charges is very common inside and outside of booking places to stay. The actual price usually falls somewhere between 2% and 30% extra, so it's not like there's no relationship between quoted prices and the final prices. The exception on AirBnb is cleaning fees. For that, they're helping out their hosts, who would otherwise feel pressured to charge $0 for a cleaning fee, which just isn't fair. Another exception is airline fees, which is solved by showing the total price. Often a cheap flight will have a laughably small airfare, sometimes less than $10. There must be some regulation that has the airlines show the price including taxes. This doesn't apply to many other things though, including cell phone bills.

Hotels don’t do this! Hotels might tack on taxes but that’s it.

Expedia sure does, it subtracts money from whatever points you have.

Hotels are on Booking.com and to a lesser extent AirBnb.

They often charge parking fees and wifi fees too.

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