People did the same thing on eBay by making the items almost free but the shipping expensive, until they fixed the eBay interface, e.g. by letting you sort by price + shipping and showing shipping fees before you click.
There’s a longer story to this: eBay used to exempt shipping fees from its commissions.
So sellers would be screwing eBay and, being an efficient market, as it often is on eBay, the savings would be passed onto the buyer.
I’d sell games for 1 cent with $10 shipping (cost to me: ~$2) and put the shipping cost in the title for clarity. If you didn’t like it, fine, pay more to buy from someone else.
Now they charge it on the whole purchase, which sucks when they take a ~15% commission on sales taxes and shipping and sellers can’t easily tack on a premium to these. So they get lower net proceeds when selling to someone that has high sales taxes or shipping fees.
This really discourages sellers from shipping internationally where those costs are higher.
Now that eBay charges percentage fees for “promoting” your item and getting visibility, bulk sellers will often post the exact same item, unpromoted, for less if you can be bothered to go through their “other items for sale”.
Have seen some wild examples where a seller sold one item at very different prices. They must have had items with 50% promotion fees, 25%, 5% and 0% (evidently passed onto the customer through different pricing) to capture the whole market.
Refund would always be minus postage costs, so you'd get 1 cent back for your $10.01 purchase when returning (i.e. no point)
Been a while since it came up for me (always sold stuff as “final sale” and if I avoid buying fragile stuff). Once had a hard time repaying a buyer that returned an item where I didn’t describe it correctly (screw you apple for having nearly identical LCDs but with slightly different camera cable lengths)
There was a lot of that too. I’m sure it’s sometimes emotional: sellers wouldn’t want to “subsidize” shipping, so they’d fix the shipping fee to what the max could be for anywhere in the country.
What grinds me as an international buyer is when sellers offer “free” shipping domestically, but don’t subsidize int’l shipping by the same dollar amount. Though there can be other time costs for int’l shipping. It depends.
The most consumer friendly thing would be for AirBnB to just explicitly have a fixed "stay" fee and a per-day fee.
That said, AirBnB's site shows the total cost for a stay when browsing, so I don't really see this as particularly deceptive. I don't care how the host itemizes the bill as long as I know what I'm paying when selecting a place.
Ah, but companies have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to be as shitty to their customers as they can get away with.
Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. - https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/13-354
> While it is certainly true that a central objective of for-profit corporations is to make money, modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so. For-profit corporations, with ownership approval, support a wide variety of charitable causes, and it is not at all uncommon for such corporations to further humanitarian and other altruistic objectives. Many examples come readily to mind. So long as its owners agree, a for-profit corporation may take costly pollution-control and energy-conservation measures that go beyond what the law requires. A for-profit corporation that operates facilities in other countries may exceed the requirements of local law regarding working conditions and benefits. If for-profit corporations may pursue such worthy objectives, there is no apparent reason why they may not further religious objectives as well.
Are you happy now?
This depends on which site you’re browsing on. I don’t think US does this, but you can browse the AU or Canada version and set your price in $USD because those geographic “editions” have to post the all-in cost up-front.
While not a scam, it definitely feels like a dark pattern.
Stuff that you explained can happen because initially IP-to-Country isn't 100% precise (later in booking/checkout stage you provide country and then it knows for sure).
Other case I've seen is that meta (comparison) website you came from showed you prices without including everything even though they should've.
And then booking platform tries to transition you into correct pricing in between their pages.
But to many other comments, there's probably at least some element of advertising a relatively low nightly price and tacking on a stay fee that may not be as immediately obvious.
Edit: At most latter is possible with complex rule sets. But I'm really not sure: https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/2061
What I do see is some booking automation that will dynamically set minimum stay lengths to avoid filling, say, a 3 day gap with a 1 or 2 day booking if it’s far enough out and set minimum stays to the duration of the gap.
I rent out our cabin. If you stay 1 day or 7 days, it's the same amount of work for me and same costs in cleaning. That's impossible to price fairly without having a flat fee.
In my market the customer sees the total price up front. I think this is the best solution for all parties.
Airbnb's UI needs to guide prospective guests toward specifying what they are looking for so that prices (and price sorting) actually meets their expectations. If you search for a specific date range with # of guests, pets, etc., the sort order needs to be on all-in costs, not daily cost. Maybe they could offer pre-baked "personas" - e.g., I am looking for a hotel alternative vs I am looking for a unique experience.
"parking space included" - show up, no parking
"wifi included" - show up, wifi is sitting next to window and stealing from neighbor
listed on quiet road - after booking address is changed to unit on busy road
heater is so loud it sounds like a vacuum cleaner making getting any sleep hard
I no longer use AirBnB period. Hotels have extra rooms, reception, cleaning, etc. I'm not saying hotels are perfect but at least for me, the positive experience rate is 90% vs AirBnB which is 50%
AirBnb also lost the price wars, at least as the places I've looked.
For normal people, they are not aware of this different form of rented lodging and if you’re hosting a big family vacation or a retreat, Airbnb is not a bad option.
It’s the bottom of the Airbnb market that is completely screwed up.
Hotels have a star rating so that I never go to a two-star hotel expecting a four-star experience. These star ratings are done independently, and I don't trust Airbnb to provide objectivity when the owners are going to strongly push back against an "unfair" rating, and Airbnb will capitulate especially for superhosts and others who have influence.
Sometimes I’ve just bought individual items from several sellers as a workaround.
I wish users could order stuff by sea for a discount. Sometimes I’m buying camping or sports stuff for another season and don’t need it coming airmail. Arriving months later can actually be beneficial. But I understand, too many people will lose their minds.
I'm more annoyed by 90% of the search results disappearing when I sort by anything other than "best match".
There are no good guys here.
It's generally written somewhere, but on aggregation sites like hotels.com and booking.com it seems the hotel can't alter the advertised price directly.
Example: https://www.hotels.com/ho119759/maritim-hotel-koln-cologne-g...
> A city tax is imposed by the city of Cologne. Business travellers with proof of business-related travel are exempt from this tax. For more details, please contact the property using the information on the reservation confirmation received after booking.
> An effective city/local tax rate of 5.00 per cent will be charged
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-tel
> K-tel was founded by Philip Kives,[4] a demonstration salesman from Oungre, Saskatchewan.[5][6] Kives had worked at a number of jobs as a young man, including selling cookware door-to-door and in a department store, and as a pitch-man on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City.
Idk in the US but I know nobody who still use eBay for anything, I don’t know how they are still alive.
eBay is an undertold story in failure (to innovate).
For sure, still a going concern, but odd of such a large company taking the Craigslist approach of “let’s stay small and just do enough to keep it working comfortably for all of us”
eBay practically invented online shopping at scale and had a huge head start but failed to maintain marketshare.
It’s still the catch-all for products that don’t fit in other marketplaces. For me, it’s a place to buy a lot of Amazon items but at a lower price (at some convenience cost). Or niche/used items. Amazon has overly regionalized (sometimes I can get items in Canada from Amazon.com cheaper than amazon.ca for example), while eBay is still a generally global interface.
But, as another commenter said, they can be used as a way to encourage longer stays, as with most places you only pay a single cleaning fee regardless of the length of your stay. But, again, it's just a fact that these rentals are usually just cleaned between guests (as opposed to a hotel when cleaning is done daily so it can be rolled into the nightly rate).
How much should the price increase per night to cover the cost of cleaning?
So either too low for people staying one night or too high for people staying multiple nights. Why is it better?
AirBnBs have definitely normalized a significant per-stay charge that isn't the norm in the hotel/inn business.
Averaging
If you don't like it, fine, just don't use it. But pricing it to what people actually use, is fairest for everyone.
No it can't because the hosts are trying to charge a fixed fee per reservation.
However, in my market customers only see the total, calculated to an avg nightly price. So it all works out and is fair for everyone.
AirBnb hosts have had their hands on the scale for too long now because the company is terrified of a mass exodus of hosts (many of whom act just as entitled as your average landlord, who will beat every penny out of you). It used to be a much better service for the users.
FWIW I think pretty much every vacation rental I booked pre-AirBnB (or, for that matter, pre-Internet) charged a cleaning fee in a similar manner.
At least last time I booked on AirBnB it was clearly displayed as part of the total reservation price if you entered dates.
Oh right, averaging.
I think getting shocked by cleaning fees is like getting shocked that there is a sales tax.. Every time you go to the store.
Showing the total with cleaning fees at the end is inconvenient and user hostile, but in no way a "scam".
As someone else in the thread pointed out, some locales do require that AirBNB and similar list prices with the fees included, and they comply in those regions. And not including tax is kind of a con when the rate can vary between states, cities and even parts of cities. Nobody can be expected to know the particulars everywhere they go, while businesses are legally required to know in order to collect.
>Nobody can be expected to know the particulars everywhere they go, while businesses are legally required to know in order to collect.
Which is why they tell customers exactly what the total is and fee/tax breakdown before purchase.
I think scam implies that something is deceptive, but not everything that annoys me is a scam. If users are completely aware of something and expect it, it is hard to claim they are being duped, in my opinion.
And a less charitable interpretation is that it's a scam because it's deceptive advertising to show a lower nightly rate.
I'm willing to pay a cleaning fee (though really it should be rolled into the cost of the stay) but not also be required to do the cleaning myself.
So yeah, the law and custom both cover this angle.
If you can't efficiently get cleaning services for your rented out room, maybe you should get out of the hotel business!
But those paying cash, no taxes, low salary abusing people, should remain in business?
What an insane take.