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The country in your address profile is one of the signals they use to determine your deemed country. And while I totally agree support reps can be wrong - but are you saying the system was wrong? My VAT invoices are there. How can they keep changing the rate and VAT country? I never changed my Profile country, though perhaps I should have. It kept saying Australia for years as I didn’t even think to change it. But reviewing the VAT invoices - they keep changing.
Can you think of a reason the VAT rate and country may be changing on my official Airbnb invoices, when my property hasn’t changed country? This is the query - not what they think, or I think - but what VAT I am charged. Why IS it changing a lot?
This would not wonder me too much since I’ve already seen a lot of funny/stupid things on Airbnb side… I will not expand them here, it’s a matter of responsible disclosure .They hardly work on them, you know… “Rest assured we do our best…”
I’m sure they are strong on the markets where they are forced to comply by the authorities. But the authorities have only requests and no technical idea about how these systems are built… I’m sure it is raining with “requests” since Airbnb compete with the powerful network of big hotels… Airbnb have power and they are evolving quickly but it looks like their evolution is awkwardly dancing regionally on the music of the complains they “gain”. Anyway, the subject is very interesting and deserves further attention …
No, I never use a VPN unless it’s the only choice - e.g. I was in Cuba and you can’t use Airbnb when there to book, or do remote banking etc without a VPN.
I don’t need to fake my location, and regardless there are multiple ways to detect your location even without IP. E.g. the time zone of your device, the air pressure and temp changes, your mobile provider, your wifi SSN. You can go down a rabbit hole and worry about all that stuff but … who has the time lol. Better to put your energy into being a good host than worrying about the online calamities
Muddy! Goodness. I’d worry others would think I was silly if I needed to insinuate things personally with such comments - relax! We are all hosts here, and supporting each other. Sticking to the facts, you see my VAT invoices from Airbnb, and they PRINT the country there. See it keeps changing? This is not me changing my country… If we could then everyone would set their country of residence to USA and have no VAT bills at all, but it doesn’t work that way.
If you want to add more value to the thread, can I ask your opinion on the printed country on these VAT invoices. Why do my invoices magically say Sweden after I spend over 6 months there, and then magically say UK when I’ve been there over six months. I don’t change my ‘country’ - they do. Automatically. Not my profile country, but my ‘detected’ country.
Same thing too with tax - after spending over six months in USA they said I could not get payouts till I filled out a USA Taxpayer form. I had not told them I was in the USA at this time, but they ‘detected’ it.
I am thus inclined to believe the several support reps that have very clearly explained how and why Country of Residence is set. I do not believe you or anyone else can answer the question of HOW the country of residence for BOTH VAT and Tax are magically updated by Airbnb, without them having some way to automatically detect your country of residence, which is also what they directly say they do.
Often, the simplest answer is the correct one. If you stay a long time in a country, the platform deems you to have moved for VAT and TAX, and this is also done by Google as well as others. My Play store account was updated to Sweden by Google after a year living there. They said their systems had ‘detected’ I was now living in Sweden, so they needed to update their privacy and agreement policies to match EU requirements.
IP Address is perhaps the most common way of identifying your country of residence. Netflix for example use this to block content that isn’t licensed in your current country, and my bank uses it to block access to their services while I was living in Cuba.
The IP address changes yes, but the COUNTRY of the IP address doesn’t change in the same way - it’s more stable. IP address ranges are allocated more regionally, so it’s very easy to detect which country you are from the IP range, not the actual IP itself. And even if you use a VPN, there are ways to detect that - e.g. your latency may increase if you are trying to pretend you are in Australia with a VPN, but you are in USA and your data has to go a long way to the Australian VPN server first.
Airbnb support have told me more than once they use IP address to detect your country of residence. It makes sense. Most all big players online use IP address to detect country. It’s normal and widely used to control legal agreements, tax, content licensing and many more things. It’s very normal
I can confirm that I have the same “Curiosity” here, as long as indeed, Airbnb is issuing my invoices as an individual, even if I provided all the data of my company and I run my hosting side gig as an small authorized company who is not registered for VAT. They should simply replace my name with my company data in that invoice who should wear the same VAT quota…
In my opinion they are just poorly advised on fiscal matter, or just play dumb keeping they breath not to disperse the smog
I was saying it would be funny to detect the country of residence only based on IP address after a single check… The country of residence is a really serious thing, and in my country it is mandatory under a fine to register it with authorities, so if you are a resident here your identity documents are proving that… (I was pretty sure that it is the same everywhere, and it is better to inform yourself wherever you are… ).
What I said was that it would be stupid to detect only based on IP since the usage of VPN is slightly becoming a normality in all the areas where you are forced to use the WiFi of someone else or a public WiFi. That’s just one scenario. But people use VPN not only for watching movies, there are a lot of other good reasons when you need to use VPN (and you might forget it on)…
There is no such residence register for Australia or USA or UK. We can come and go and live and nobody minds, so long as you have a visa, or residency permission. So we can live in any of such countries and move between without notifying in general. Technically you are meant to notify tax authorities if you leave I think, but nobody cares so much about this - of course you should pay tax, but Nobody I know has ever needed or been asked about this - it’s more that when you submit tax, you do so in the country you were in for over six months of the year usually. I am glad it’s not so onerous, as in Sweden I had to register I was living there.
Also out of interest, I just deleted my VAT number this morning, to see what would happen with the next booking. One came an hour later, and it was interesting to see that immediately the billing entity has been changed to me personally, and the tax country has changed to Australia (I got to Sydney yesterday in fact for a visit), but the VAT rate is null ‘–’, where sometimes it shows 10% but still no fee, and sometimes 10% and there is a fee. Kind of a VAT lucky dip really… you never really know what you will get, but I am slowly learning more about how their system classifies your ‘VAT’ country of residence.
I just discovered I am not being charged VAT / GST by VRBO either.
This was only after I MOVED my VRBO account to the UK, where my company is registered. So now that this has been done - recently - I was pleased to see VAT is now showing ZERO for VRBO as well.
To recap. My VAT is now ZERO for all Airbnb, and all VRBO
This is both for properties in the country, as well as out, as I have both.
But BookingCom still charges 10% GST, even with a UK registered BDC account.
Weird, but I am not complaining. I did try to figure it all out as to why, and even asked Australian tax authorities - but seems nobody was interested to respond other than very broadly, so I gave up. I assumed I should have to pay some VAT somewhere… but seems I fall through the cracks somehow.
.They hardly work on them, you know… “Rest assured we do our best…”
