I’ve been hosting STR for a decade. Began in Australia, then moved overseas, but I continued hosting at my Australian listing remotely. You MIGHT think it would be easy to just change the country of your hosting account. How hard can it be? VERY hard lol.
I just won £200 compensation from VRBO, after having spent a LOT of time on their support line, related to me moving country. Issue still isn’t resolved, but at least this significant compensation has held me off cancelling them entirely. VRBO is a much smaller player, but good to have diversity and not have only Airbnb and BookingCom as the big players. We already lost Tripadvisor for STR this year too…
Moving country means issues with:
- Tax Country of residence
- Managing existing bookings - can be challenging. BC and VRBO both make it extremely difficult, or near impossible to change ‘the country’ of your account. Airbnb is a breeze here and fully flexible though.
- Bank account country may be locked to the property listing country, or the STR account listing country. BookingCom limits to property location except changes within EU are ok. VRBO can support different country bank account to listing, but not ‘easily’. Airbnb gives total freedom to pay you in any country, regardless of listing country OR account ownership country. Yay!
Some highlights of my ongoing drama sorting my admin with VRBO:
I have dozens of reviews with VRBO in Australia, and wanted them kept ideally, when moving to UK. I could not CHANGE my VRBO country, so I opened a new UK VRBO hosting account. VRBO support advised that to get paid using my new UK account, I have to:
- DO NOT accept any new VRBO guest bookings for now
- Wait till the last booked guests leave mid 2025 (more than 6 months away)
- THEN Close my Australian VRBO account, and open my new UK account for bookings on my Australian property
- OR I can contact ALL my VRBO guests booked in the next half a year, ask them to cancel their booking, and then rebook under my new UK VRBO listing. Yes, their support actually suggested this as an option. Eeeik!
Neither option seems very good, and these are messy, or will annoy guests a lot.
Additionally, VRBO sent a very blunt email two weeks ago stating that they had locked my payment account, and would not release any more payments ‘till the issue was resolved’. Many calls to their support was unable to resolve this, or even identify what the problem was. I was unable to speak to their elusive ‘billing department’. But each call I was told my case was being escalated, which became painful to hear as I called each few days and kept getting the same response.
Very ironically now - after so much hassle and threat to just close my VRBO account forever, I was given a £200 compensation payment by VRBO. Ironic, as the sole reason they paid this, was that they were unable to resolve why I could not get ‘paid’ normally for hosting, or even advise what was wrong.
£200 (or about $400 Australian) is not a small amount. It has given me enough hope to continue battling on with their payment problems, and I will continue hosting with them, after this suitably appropriate amount of compensation.
Has any other host had similar issues moving country? Trying to change the country of payments for listings to the new country you moved to? Or encountering very complicated VAT payments on platform fees due to where you move, or where your account it registered if you are a company?
Airbnb seems the easiest to ‘move country’, and note that this is NOT just updating your Airbnb profile address to a new country, as the ‘Country of residence’ is an internal value that you can’t see or change as a user, but Airbnb Support will tell you if you ask, or you can review your VAT invoices - if they even send any (they do not bill me VAT at all since I uploaded my VAT ID)
BookingCom and VRBO seem to be SO challenging to move country. Though at least now I got paid a bonus £200 compensation for my efforts in TRYING to change my VRBO Account Country lol… The saga continues on this one though, but it’s more promising at long last 
