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Hi All, I have a question and if it’s already been answered elsewhere on this forum, apologies – I have done a search for that, I swear, but possibly not using the right search terms!
I’m in Sydney where there’s a 180 day limit on the number of days you can offer a short term rental (STR). However, stays of 3 weeks or longer are exempt from this limit.
Currently we have a stellar set of guests who have already extended their initial stay to 17 days. If they stay just 4 more days, then they hit the 21 day minimum and won’t count toward our 180 days total. So we’d like to offer to let them stay the additional 4 days for free. Might sound counterintuitive but since it would free up so many additional days that we can rent our flat, it is a win-win for everyone.
The only problem is I can’t figure out how to do a booking modification through Airbnb without charging them. I tried to do a reservation change and override the additional amount they wanted to charge, but it won’t let me. There’s got to be a way to do this – how, for example, do you offer someone a free night in exchange for some mishap?
I’ve been poking around on the Airbnb site and there’s instructions for how to ask for more money and how to offer a refund but I don’t want to do either – I don’t want to have to ask them for more money and then refund it because that starts to sound really scammy and I don’t want to ask that of my guests. And I need to book the additional 4 days either through Airbnb or else through a licensed real estate agent or else we wouldn’t be covered by my STR insurance.
I haven’t done this but I wonder if the following would work.
First, if you have instant booking, turn it off.
Second, set the price of the days you want to add to $0. If the system forces a price like $10, you can later refund that.
Third, send the guest a trip change request. See Modifying a reservation as a Host - Airbnb Help Center
Since I’ve never done this, it might be wise to wait for more answers. @JJD will likely know for sure.
Last, once the guest accepts, turn instant booking back on.
@HostAirbnbVRBO Glenn: great idea about turning off IB first. I can totally imagine a nightmare scenario where I set the price to nothing and open up those dates and then then someone else books in the 30 seconds before I can send the booking modification!
Okay, I’ve tried reducing the per-day price and Airbnb will not let me charge less than $16 per night, plus then it will add 17% to that, so in total to extend the stay by 4 days the guests would have to pay $75.
I could send them the money by PayPal before I send them the booking modification (I trust them to accept the booking modification – they aren’t the sort to swindle me for $75), or I suppose I could try to send a refund through Airbnb. I’ve never sent a guest a refund before – will Air take a bigger cut than their standard 17%?
I just wish I could make this more seamless for the guests so they don’t have to pull out their credit card and pay again. But I suppose that’s the cost of keeping things on platform.
Is anyone else here in Sydney or Newcastle or one of the towns in NSW that has this 180 day rule? I’m just wondering if anyone knows how the government monitors that. Just to be clear, I want to be compliant; I’m not asking how to break the law or anything. (I want to work within them to get the best outcomes for me! )
But I’m wondering: hypothetically, assuming I wasn’t worried about insurance coverage for three days, if I were to allow the current guests to extend their stay to the 21 days, but not do that through Airbnb, as long as I kept a personal record of that, would that be accepted by any hypothetical government auditors? Or does it all have to show on the platform?
@Debthecat I tried that first, but if I have marked the nights as unavailable, the system then will not allow me to extend the existing stay to include the unavailable nights.
Yes, I guess that’s why I need to know how / if the city audits this. If it’s just a matter of which dates are closed, then that’s actually a problem for us because we have closed off dates when we’re out of town and can’t manage the rental remotely! And there were days when we allowed friends or relatives to stay there as personal guests, not as paying guests. So closed dates don’t reflect the number of days we’re actually offering it as a short term rental. But if an auditor would accept personal records rather than just the Airbnb calendar, then we’d be set.
If you are on 3 OTAs plus you take direct bookings - like me. How would the auditor know from where the closed nights came from?
Each calendar “report “ would show the same closed dates- whether it was their booking or yours.
As long as your records are accurate you will be fine. You can prove everything you say. I think they will have to allow a margin…. You aren’t going to shut up shop suddenly and throw a guest out if they overstay a line in the sand?
Yes you go from 180 nights 201 nights and you get another 21 night booking- now you are at 222 nights- those 42 nights don’t count.
In my opinion, it would only be if someone complained, would they do a check.
(a) a way to not charge guests for extra days on platform (currently my best solution is to charge $16 per day);
(b) if that’s not possible, I’d like advice on whether it’s easy to refund the money through Airbnb or if I’m better off paying them off-platform (e.g. through PayPal); and
(c) if anyone knows the specific regulatory context in Australia, was wondering about how the 180-day rule gets audited, so I know whether the extension needs to be on platform or not.
If you do find out that you can meet the 180 day rule by booking off-platform, I would just offer them the days for free, and block those nights on your calendar, eliminating any booking platform business or the need for a refund. Then you could do up some kind of booking document with them to prove those dates were an off-platform extension of their original booking.
@muddy good idea – maybe I can find some sort of template document I can use to document the booking extension. Or maybe just an e-mail would suffice?
I realise it’s silly of me to assume that this platform will have people versed in the ins and outs of auditing the STRA legislation for a single city! I have just written to a government e-mail to ask them for clarification about audit and record-keeping requirements. I will report back here if and when they reply!
Yes I was using the website (which I do whenever possible since I’ve noticed a lot less functionality on the mobile app!) and I could see a place where I could change the total price – it’s just that it wouldn’t let me make that price less than $16 per day.
Thank you so much for alerting me to the fact that they would remove reviews from stays with an unusually low price! That’s weird but anyway good to know.
And very good to know that it’s easy to send money through the resolution centre on Airbnb – I will try that!
Yeah I don’t know why it didn’t work like that for me, but for some reason it wouldn’t let me charge less than $16 per additional night! Maybe it’s something I’m doing wrong; maybe it’s Airbnb; maybe it’s just Australia, I don’t know. Maybe it’s like that specifically to deter people from doing what I’m doing: tacking days onto the end of longer stays to reach the 21-day minimum.
Anyway, what I did was I first sent $80 to the guests through the resolution centre, and then I put in the booking modification request which they had to accept and pay $80. They did so promptly. I lost a little money (20% of the $80), but overall it was worth it to have an extra two weeks that we can rent the apartment. It was a little extra effort for our guests but they weren’t out of pocket and they didn’t complain. And now their 21-day stay is officially recognised on the platform, so all good!
For any curious Sydneysiders here, I got a response from the government agency that explained that Airbnb enters rented nights into some central government registry. I can only assume that other platforms (Stayz, etc) do the same. Local city councils have access to this registry so they can audit and pursue people who aren’t complying with the 180 day limit.
They expect anyone who is renting off-platform to enter those additional days into the registry, and sent me information about how to do that. (If anyone needs to know how to do that, contact me and I’ll send you the link.) So I asked them what would happen if I added days to the registry myself, contiguous with days that Airbnb had entered: would it recognise that as a 21-day stay, or as two stays? They couldn’t really answer that. They replied:
Unfortunately this isn’t a policy question but I do note it is an exempt policy and at your discretion to interpret the rules.
I don’t really know what it means to say “it is an exempt policy” but am guessing that what that means is it wouldn’t have looked like a 21-day stay but I could have argued it was if and when I got investigated by the city. Anyway, I’m happy I was able to do the extension on platform just to avoid the trouble.
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