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Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

This is completely solved on AirBnB's German website (and I think many others too). If you search for a place on airbnb.de the results page shows "€xx per night, €xxx total", where the total price includes all fees (cleaning fees, service fees, taxes), and the nightly price is just total price divided by the number of nights. When you click through to the listing it shows you a table how this breaks down.

Which just shows that using the misleading numbers on the US website is a business decision.

Screenshots:

https://i.imgur.com/70Mllu8.png

https://i.imgur.com/7xBXpMU.png

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Same happened to me with a rental cars. When I travelled to Scotland I reserved one from the US. When I picked up the car they added a ton of mandatory fees that almost tripled the price. The person working there told me that they do this only to people from the US. People from Europe get shown the correct price.

Same happens with cell phones here. You sign up for a price and the first bill has several fees added making it quite a bit more expensive.

I wish there was a law in the US that mandated that the paid price is the advertised price.

> Same happened to me with a rental cars. When I travelled to Scotland I reserved one from the US. When I picked up the car they added a ton of mandatory fees that almost tripled the price. The person working there told me that they do this only to people from the US. People from Europe get shown the correct price.

Wow. Somehow, that seems shadier than just showing a misleading price then piling on fees for everyone.

To me it just shows that a lot of companies will use dark patters if there are no regulations that prohibit them.

If one company doesn't, then the customers will take the cheapest they believe to get.

To me it just shows that sometimes strict regulation is the right thing to avoid the tragedy of commons.

It's a bit similar to restaurant prices in the US. Between tax and tips, you end up paying a lot more than displayed. This isn't the case in most of Europe.

>I wish there was a law in the US that mandated that the paid price is the advertised price.

Isn't Biden literally asking for congress to make a law to that effect? (Which is a really smart move on his part tbh)

High cleaning fees serves three purposes:

1) They artificially lower the listed price per night, causing the home to show up in more searches. This could easily be fixed by Airbnb.

2) It's used as a way to incentivize longer stays. This motivation probably won't go away. Many Airbnbs are empty during the weekdays.

3) It's a way for hosts (and Airbnb) to skirt taxes. This is the real reason Airbnb doesn't want to punish the practice.

Many municipalities in the U.S. tax Airbnbs as a percentage of their nightly rate, and cleaning fees aren't included in that calculation. If those savings are passed onto the guest, they would theoretically lower the effective cost per night.

> It's used as a way to incentivize longer stays.

And for many hosts, the main costs are the checking in/out/cleaning/laundry. So if they could charge $100 check in fee, plus $20/night, they would.

> 3) It's a way for hosts (and Airbnb) to skirt taxes. This is the real reason Airbnb doesn't want to punish the practice.

Why would shifting payment from nightly cost to cleaning fee have an effect on the hosts' tax liability? If they actually pay someone that much to clean the place, they get to deduct it from their business income either way. What you call it doesn't matter.

I would be curious if Airbnb takes a cut of the cleaning fees, or only the nightly rate. I could see how that might differ, and if so that it would incentivize hosts to shift toward the cleaning fees.

You're thinking income tax, some cities have further taxes on short term rentals.

And these only include the nightly rate, not the total rental amount?

Vrbo in the US does this, even let's you filter by total price instead of just nightly

I listed on both. Had six months of back to back bookings with Airbnb. One day a request for info came in on Vbro.

I had completely forgotten it was even listed there. Six months and one inquiry. I promptly deleted the listing.

Glad to be done with AirBNB, but it really helped out at a bad time.

I have used both VRBO amd AirBnB for many years now.

When COVID-19 travel bans proliferated in early 2020, AirBnB proactively refunded my money for a reservation that was nominally no longer cancellable.

VRBO told me to reach out to the host, which turned out to be this apartment rental agency that would ghost my emails for a few days, then offer future credit, then told me to get in line as they have many customers, and eventually processed the refund 3 months or so down the road.

Needless to say, I no longer use VRBO.

Have you left the business altogether or do you acquire customers a different way/via gmaps and the likes and a website? Asking because we managed to get most of the people to book directly via our homepage, using booking.com and similar only if we have to

It's the same in the UK, but that still doesn't do what I want: you can only filter by base price, so you'll get some hilariously overpriced apartments even if you search at a low price.

The German website filters based on total_price/number_of_nights.

It will include listings that are up to about €3/night more expensive than your filter setting, but listings that would qualify just on base price but not on total price are filtered out as you would expect.

Every single thread on airbnb seems to be dominated by this comment. I really don't understand the FUD.

It is "solved" in usa airbnb too , infact german one seems to have more fees/line items, not less.

example: https://imgur.com/a/FJaKHvS

https://imgur.com/a/1JJLpI0

can someone make a PSA to all the people making this "hosts pulling shit" comment on every single airbnb thread.

And yes you can also filter by total price.

To be fair, on the US site it's an "Early Access" feature that is in no way the default.

On airbnb.com.au, the full cost is the default view, and you can change the pricing to USD very easily in the bottom floating footer.

Just tried booking in the AirBnB app. The price shown on the map is the bullshit price, not the total including fees divided by the number of nights.

So, the PSA is “don’t listen to this bozo, it’s still shit”.

Can I filter by: “don’t have to deal with a long list of shit the host expects me to do before I leave?”

Guess how long the list is when I check out of a hotel:

1. Press the check out button on the app and leave

2. There is no number #2

In recent years, I don't even bother using an app or going to the front desk. Assuming I've stayed for my entire reservation, I just leave. Never had a problem so far!

Soon after I click the button, my receipt gets emailed. Before late last year, I was traveling more for work than personal.

sure you can just book hotels if you expect that experience. I don't understand 'airbnb should exactly be like a hotel' expectation.

It shouldn’t be worse

Airbnb is a different thing; it will be better in some ways and worse in others.

How is AirBnb in anyway better?

I frequently (multiple times per year) rent AirBnBs for the full kitchen and many bedrooms for group meetings where we live, work, and cook meals together.

That’s hard/impossible to find in hotels.

It’s a suite? Usually expensive in a hotel, but definitely exists.

I've never seen an 8 bedroom 6+ bathroom suite with a full kitchen in a hotel. I've only looked in a half-dozen cities or so where I've wanted to hold these team events, but I've never seen one.

Often in AirBnB you can find a stand alone house. In a hotel generally you have a hallway with rooms, one of those rooms is yours, and all the other rooms belong to other people.

The stand alone house can have a yard or a distance to the next house.

Sometimes you can find AirBnb right near a place you need to be in the next morning whereas a hotel might need to be a long ways away and travel between the locations can be problematic.

I can rent a weekend in a tiny cabin on a working farm and drink the milk I milked myself while learning how to milk a cow.

airbnbs are cheaper if you don't mind sharing the bathroom with other guests/host and cook all your meals in host's kitchen. This has saved me a ton of money traveling over the years.

why not ?

Does the US version show the total price while browsing search results or only when checking out?

yes while searching also

https://imgur.com/a/1JJLpI0

But it's not really the "total price". It doesn't include taxes.

which site includes taxes though? I don't see it on amazon.com, even physical stores don't have taxes included.

Why do you have such spl expectation for just airbnb?

Airlines are required to do it [1], it's time to force lodging to do it with legislation. These sites will not do it otherwise.

"You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing after they have tried everything else.” -- Winston Churchill

[1] https://www.transportation.gov/individuals/aviation-consumer...

Yes because AirBnb hosts will surely follow the law and local ordinances this time…

Your recourse is against Airbnb proper if they do not abide by federal statute or FTC rules. Hosts will have no choice in the matter.

How has that recourse worked on the local and state levels so far?

No, because they’re not the federal government?

the airbnb.com.au version does because AU law requires it.

I use it to search in the US as it’s the only way to know all in cost, which the US version always tries to obfuscate

No, this is an early access thing that they have been rolling out slowly.

I went to Airbnb.com just now, and got this banner: https://i.imgur.com/zasryfr.png

So it's a new thing.

It includes the cleaning fee and Airbnb service fee, but inexplicably, excludes taxes.

nothing in USA includes taxes in the list price, except airlines.

FWIW, before Amazon started collecting taxes on 3rd party seller sales you could sort by total including tax when listing all seller options of a product.

The reason it makes more sense to do it for hotels is that many cities have 15+% or $$/night taxes. The highest rate is 20%.

https://hvs.com/article/8911-2020-HVS-Lodging-Tax-Report-USA

In general, hotel and rental car sites will let you display whether they do so by default or not.

I would think it matters more with hotels/Airbnbs than many other goods because hotel taxes can vary a lot when you cross city lines

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