Not redundant advice at all! But yes, we do this regularly ourselves, plus having Wheelhouse and Lodgify in the background. Himself works in the IT industry, so no chance of not having a sophisticated set up in this house. Not that I profess to understand though… My role is on the behavioural side of the equation!
I have been back in this morning to show Himself, and am now questioning my sanity; did I imagine it? Did I see what I wanted to see?? Or do Airbnb have snoopers? I am sure I saw “Guest service fees” yesterday. If anyone else knows where this can (now…) be found, you will have my eternal gratitude.
I know you see it when you enter the information to book and you can do this on your own listing and experiment with different lengths of stay. I also thought I’d seen it in the past tense but don’t know where.
On old email confirmations it said “guest pays” with an amount that doesn’t include the airbnb service fees the guest pays. So they used to lie. As a guest, the fees are listed on the reciept/itinerary. I have an upcoming trip and the airbnb room is $310, the fee is $40 so 13%. When a enter a one night stay for my own room at $37 a night the fee is $5 so I’m not seeing much difference in those fees. I put in a couple of other places at much higher rates (over $1000) and the fee was 11.4%.
Funny. I literally just had, for the first time ever, a guest make an instant reservation for one and message me that they also have a dog and second person. I sent an alteration request with $15 pet fee and $8 second person charge. They messaged back that it was over their budget with all the fees. My fees are disclosed in the listing. They are experienced airbnber’s with 27 reviews. It really makes me wonder if Airbnb has increased their fees and we have no way to easily check. In the last year El Paso started collecting tax as well. The fall is slower than last fall without a doubt. I haven’t checked the competition in months because I didn’t need to but I’ve now turned on price tips. I may have to lower my second person fee or my pet fee.
Edit: I just checked reciepts for last year’s airbnb trips and I paid closer to 11% for similar priced listings.
Just search for a place similar in price to yours, put in dates and voila you will see the service fees and total cost. Looks like they added 20% in this case.
Yes, I’ve done that on my place and on others. If they were really transparent I would be able to go back and look at any receipt/itinerary and see what they paid. For example I’d like to know what the total was for the guest who booked and cancelled this morning and I can’t do that without going in and trying to inquire about my own place. I don’t even know off the top of my head if they are charging fees on the pet fee. I can figure all this out, just not easily, which is annoying.
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20% on a one night booking??? WTH.
And, their official policy is different, copied from their help center. Gotta love em, Not!
Guest service fees
When a reservation is confirmed, we charge guests a service fee between 5% and 15% of the reservation subtotal. Guests see this fee on the checkout page before they book a reservation.
In areas where we’re required to collect VAT, we’ll combine the service fee and VAT amounts on the checkout page, so the service fee may appear to be greater than 15%.
Guest service fees are calculated using a variety of factors including, but not limited to, the reservation subtotal, the length of the reservation, and characteristics of the listing. In general, higher reservation subtotals have lower guest service fee percentages.
Yeah from 13% to 11% even though the booking is 20x more? I compared a $40 booking to a $1000 booking and the drop was less than 2% on the fees. It was speculated that new host boost includes lower fees but we have no way to test that.
I suspect that part of the 20% is transient occupancy tax.
If so they should break it down in the price.
Actually, the price is $60.00 including the cleaning fee. $8.00 is a little over 13% of $60.00.
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We have no transient occupancy tax on Airbnb in nyc.