Split service fee or simplified pricing option?

1

What do most hosts put their service fee setting as? It seems more customer friendly to use simplified, but in looking at other listings it seems more hosts are using the split service fee option. I would like to know your strategy if you’d like to share.

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I do what my competitors do. Since most of them do not use simplified pricing, I don’t either. My nightly rate is already higher than most of them, and using simplified pricing would make it look worse.

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3

Do you find that most guests searching don’t pay as much attention to the “total you pay” instead of nightly rate?

4

I don’t know. But I assume they pay a lot of attention to the nightly rate, based on all the publicity with complaints about cleaning and other fees.

AirBnB now has an option to show the total amount instead of the nightly rate, but it’s an option you have to turn on. If it were the default with an option to turn it off, I might consider using the simplified pricing.

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It depends on where you’re located as to whether you have to turn on total price- I’m pretty sure that in Europe, all prices are displayed in total- it’s EU regs.

@Tluttre I use the split fee option. My listing is a private room and budget priced for my area, so the service fee the guest pays doesn’t have a shocking sticker price. In reality, the guest service fee is more or less the same percentage of the nightly fee whether budget or high-end listing, but psychologically, there’s a difference between a guest seeing a service fee of $20, or one of $200. So my guests have never mentioned anything about high service fees.

Another reason I prefer the split fee option is for transparency- I want guests to see how much $ is going into Airbnb’s coffers, not think the total they pay is all going into the host’s pocket.

I think other online platforms use host pays all service fees across the board. That Airbnb has 2 different fee structures makes no sense- it should be either all split fee or all simplified, otherwise some places look more expensive than others, when in fact they’re not.

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Thank you @muddy. In the US they recently started sharing totals automatically in parenthesis, but I’m not sure if it’s noticed. As a guest that’s what I pay attention to. Thank you for your insight, it makes sense for the transparency.

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