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They have really lost their minds. It really gets my blood boiling when I even think about that company.
They jacked up their credit card fees under the guise of now accepting American Express. To the best of my knowledge, they still do not accept it. Just a flat out lie. Someone correct me if this has changed.
They lower you in searches if you refuse to take payment using their credit card system, yet they provide the owner zero protection from a frivolous credit card chargeback. At least Air claims to eat the chargeback if you have already been paid. Notice I used the word âclaims.â
If a guest wants to cancel their booking, the owner must cancel and is knocked down on their acceptance rate. Owner is penalized for doing nothing wrong.
They disregard ownersâ concerns over whether Homeaway is paying taxes on the new booking fees charged to travelers. Many owners fear a future audit if the taxing authorities later go after Homeaway for taxes owed. Nobody needs to deal with an audit.
For those who do use their payment system, and therefore now have the booking fee added to their ratesâŚHomeaway also wants to charge them an annual fee of $349. I donât believe for one second their statement that the booking fee will never go higher than 9%. Some owners are claiming that theirs is at 10%. So basically Homeaway will keep pushing that commission higher and higher, all the while still expecting to receive money for an annual subscription.
They will be introducing methods for owners to boost their search resultsâŚlol. Yeah, keep finding more and more ways to squeeze the owner dry.
If you donât use their payment system, then you can pay them $499 at renewal timeâŚan increase of $100 from last yearâs basic subscription. Then they can still hide your listing like they do now.
I actually received an inquiry this morning noting they had found my listing on VRBO as well, but would prefer to book via Air due to those exorbitant fees.
Thatâs interesting. So the guest booking fees were cheaper on Air even though VRBO claims to have the lowest booking fees? I have not done any side by side comparison. I only read the comparisons on HA forum after they first came out when a few people did it. I donât doubt HA is slowing creeping them up since then.
Wimdu, Airbnb and Homeaway/VRBO are all merging into one. Each platform is adopting the worst features of the other platforms. Pretty soon Expedia will own ALL of them and that will be that.
Completely agree! The major sites will only have their glory days for so long. Once word spreads even more that travelers can save huge bucks by booking directly with owner, instead of via the sites, their traffic will go down. It may take a few years but look how quickly Air was able to build their brand into a household name.
I believe there is a good market for an aggregator site which allows you to search all of the different STR sites in one place. From there, you will be able to book through the site that has the best pricing and terms for your current trip.
This just confirms to me that I should either plan on investing in learning how to develop a good website and whatever it takes to advertise it, or not plan on renting my place out other than by word of mouth and my own personal social media sites. I refuse to hand over that much moola to any of these sites. I would rather spend double what HA wants for a subscription fee on doing my own advertising! But seriously, I only make a few K per year on this venture. I think itâs time for me to start socking every dollar earned back into my savings account so I can buy the new windows I want as well as some other upgrades. But I also use 30% of my earnings to send to my two nieces who are in college to help them with expenses. So yeahâŚHA is NOT getting that significant of a portion of my earnings, it will cut way too much into what I can send to my nieces. Not happening. Ever. And I hate expedia. With a passion. I donât even deal with that nonsense anymore! For airfare and hotels (when I stay in hotels), I just go straight to the airline site and the hotel site. Southwest, Jet Blue, Allegiant, American for airlines. Marriot and Hilton for hotels usually. Thatâs it. Makes my life so much easier and I really donât believe itâs costing me much more moola than going through expedia or kayak. My travel is limited but most of the time, I manage to figure out a way to write off at least some of it.
I think HA assumes that people with shared homes will just opt for their pay per booking. But for that plan they want 5% commission, 9% booking fee, plus the credit card fees, while offering no protection at all to the owner. And then if you are on Pay Per booking there is no guarantee that you will show up in search results. It depends on which market you are in. They have to delliver a certain number of bookings to those paying annual subscription, so that determines how often they can show your property.
I have my place listed in Airbnb, Wimdu, 9Flats, HouseTrip and Flipkey however almost 99% of my reservations come from Airbnb. I canât list on HA because their annual suscription fee is way too expensive for me and the Pay per Booking suscription donât allow me to apply for it. Seems that I must have a national ID issued from a short list of 16 countries.
I have seen other Bnb sites that were acquired by this mayor ones and in fact I recently heard that Tripadvisor (Flipkey) now owns HouseTrip so the market is even smaller. 9Flats have recently speak to the press that will run into bankrupcy with the new law of Berlin banning vacation rentals. So, yes, it is Airbnb and only Airbnb so it scares me a lot. The last changes Airbnb is making into their platform is much more in favor of them (guests) than on us (hosts). They are an advertising platform. I make all the work to keep my guests happy and use Airbnb to promote myself so in that order I need to get seen. Well, it is very clear for me that Airbnb âsuggestâ us to lose control over our places to gain exposure. You better waive your cancellation policy, you should better chose IB, you should better drop your prices. In simple words if you do everything you are opposed to then you will gain the desirable exposure. How can we be happy with this statement? I believe that in a very near future people will abandon Bnb platforms and they start promoting their places by their own.
Iâm normally not a violent person but when when I watched the Brian Sharples video announcement I wanted to punch his nose down his throat! Total BS! He should have just announced that âthey are paying me millions so I just have to say these stupid things.â
One thing I am not that worried about is the sales tax on the service fee situation. I pay my sales/occupancy taxes on my sales, the funds that I collect. I donât require or collect the service fee. It would be a waste of time for the tax auditors to try to go after individual owners, who are paying their taxes, for the unpaid tax due on the service fee, required and collected by HomeAway.
Years ago, when I rented through a property management company, they collected the money, charged me a commission and paid the taxes under their business account. So for a $1000 rental with a 10% commission and a 10% tax the company would take $100 for themselves, send the taxman $100 and send me $800 (minus the CC fee). In this case Homeaway is going to add $100 for themselves and send me $1000 (minus the CC fee) and I send in the $100 myself. The tax man is not going to go after me, and thousands of other individual owners, for the missing $10. If they have any brains they are going after HomeAway.
And once everyone does what they want them to doâŚit will just be something else to further lose control of your business. If everyone was on IB then no one gets any preference in search results. If everyone adopts a flexible cancellation policy, then again everyone is back to the same level playing field.
Thatâs exactly what Homeaway did. They got people to purchase higher subscriptions to move to the top. Then it was âuse our payment systemâ and you will be higher. Then use âBook it nowâ and you will be higher. Now they added a traveler fee on those listings, so now some have to reduce their rates to compensate for the fee. They implemented âbest matchâ which pushes your listing to the bottom pages if your calendar is getting booked. And if your area only had 50 listings, now it might have 400 overnight - since they are pulling in properties that are far away.
Soon they will be setting cancellation policies and no longer can you set your own. They will be moving to closed communication like Air. No more being able to google the phone number and email address to look for red flags before accepting a booking.
Then it will be âinstant bookingâ gets preference in search results. I could go on and on and on.
So did I. Luckily I finally realized I didnât have to watch the video and could read the announcement. It was having trouble loading and making me crazy.
Thankfully in NC the law is clear that if the facilitator does not give me the taxes within so many days after guest stay, then the facilitator becomes the liable party for the tax. And booking fees in NC are taxable. Air adds tax to my booking fee (like they are supposed to) but FK does not.
It will be interesting to see the next stunt they pull to find a way for owners to give more money for the boost in search results.
Air collects the Hawaii tax on their commission from the guest. Why wouldnât HA do the same? That part of the transaction has nothing to do with us. Maybe this is why HA didnât want to name the fee as coming from them!
There is only so much ABB can charge before they lose people. As for me I am trying them out. If I donât make enough to make it my worthwhile then I will go find it somewhere else.
Cabinhost - not to worry, if that happens some smart entrepreneur will create a comparable site with even lower fees than exist today for folks to use and everyone will switch.
Wow, I use both AIR and HA, and much prefer HA. HA has brought in a service fee, the same as AIR has (in fact HAâs is lower), so what is the problem?
AIR charges me a fee for processing, the 3%, same as HA.
I do not use the pay-per-booking, so my total cost is known through the annual subscription. And frankly, if $ 399 annual subscription is a problem for your business, then why are you bothering doing this?
HA is far better, far better customer service, and the guests are a class above AIR, in my opinion.
As to booking through the two, Last year AIR was 40% and HA was 60%; this year, HA is well past the 70%, and AIR is way down. I blame the drop in AIR bookings to the fact that lot of people are doing this now, and are offering just a far too low price. I wonât lower my price; because the truth is $ 80 a night people are not as good a guest as $ 130 a night guests.
HA (for now) is only charging a max of 9% in traveler fees. But others claim theirs is as high as 10% currently. I was shocked their last statement said they would âneverâ charge more than 9%. I think that was an error. HA is known to be ambiguous in all wording except for those who gobble up the spin they spew.
Do you recall when their co-founder Carl Shepherd said that they are old fashionedâŚand believe if the traveler is willing to pay 11% extra then that should go to the owner. After all the owner is the one paying the mortgage, maintenance, etc. If you would like me to find the quote I will. The company is deceitful. What about AMEX still not being offered? They jacked up the CC fees. They provide no protection to the owner whatsoever.
I have this weekend booked through VRBO so yes I am still using them. But also today they showed my property as having an average rate of $308. I clicked around and finally it returned to the correct average rate. Just another stunt they pull. I donât have the service fee on them because I boycotted their payment system and removed it. Now they are going to introduce ways to have you again compete for search position.
You are not just paying $399 a year. You are paying that plus the service fee, plus the credit card fees, and in addition you will now have to fork over more money to gain higher position. Air doesnât get a free pass from me either.
But that company that emerges may sell out like the owners of VRBO did. I donât blame them at all. I do wish I had the funds to start my own site and pull the best qualities from all sites, and hire the best to put the website together. And I would never sell out because I would be perfectly content making 10 million a yearâŚlol. (after taxes of course)
Meanwhile, Iâm staying far away from HA.