Guest Fee waived but HOSTS now automatically charged 15% commission by Airbnb

[Melanie818]

Email received from Airbnb September 2nd 2020

Starting 11/1/2020, we’ll be switching your listings to simplified pricing—a new service fee structure that gives you more control of your final price.

What’s changing Today, there are 2 service fee structures: split-fee pricing with the service fee shared between hosts and guests, and simplified pricing with the entire service fee covered by the host.

After 11/1/2020, split-fee pricing will no longer be available.

That means a 15% service fee will be deducted from your payouts, and no fee will be charged to your guests—what you set is what guests will pay. Why we’re making this change We introduced simplified pricing last year, and hosts who tried it out and priced competitively across websites got an average of 17%* more bookings. We heard that removing the guest fee made it easier for hosts to price competitively, and we saw that guests preferred to book places that didn’t have a guest fee.

This is especially important for your listings, since guests usually don’t pay fees on other booking platforms in your region. What will happen next?

This change will happen automatically on 11/01/2020 and will be applied to any bookings that you get after that date.

We’ll send you a reminder 7 days before this change, along with a guide to walk you through changes you may want to make to your prices. Here’s a summary of what will change:

• Your service fee settings will automatically change on 11/1/2020 for all your listings
• We’ll deduct a flat 15% host service fee from each payout and won’t charge a guest service fee
• This won’t affect any existing bookings you have and will only apply to any bookings you get after 11/1/2020
• Using Airbnb after 11/01/2020 means that you’ve accepted this new service fee structure

[Lizzie]

Hello everyone,

Thanks for your comments here. 

We wanted to clarify any confusion about changes to our service fee structure. Since this summer, we have been requiring small groups of software-connected professional hosts in select countries to adopt a simplified fee structure, in response to requests for this model. It's rolling out country by country, and is limited to software-connected hosts only. If you've received the email, your country is included.

This simplified fee model gives these hosts more control over their final price and ensures that the price hosts set is the price guests pay. We are also offering these hosts resources and tools to help hosts update their pricing to ensure their earnings don't change. Beyond this group, we are offering this option to a handful of other hosts to see whether they like it.

I hope this helps to clarify things. If you see any other talk on this in the Community Center, if you could direct them to this post, that would be amazing. Thank you so much.

Take care and speak to you soon.

Lizzie

@Melanie818, @Sarah977, @Sally221, @Inna22, @Helen868, @Rajan2, @Kelly149, @Fred13, @Debra300, @Ann72, @Robin4, @Super47, @Sandra126, @Mike-And-Jane0, @Anonymous, @Anna9170, @Ute42, 

[Colleen253]

"We wanted to clarify any confusion." Statements such as this appear so often. Wouldn't it be far better for Airbnb to eliminate the possibility for confusion right out of the gate, rather than allow it to arise and fester in the first place?

I don't remember exacty where I first read about this change (not in this thread), but I'm pretty sure it was something written by Airbnb in the summer, and it was definitely not as specific as this clarification. 

[Ute42]

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@Colleen253  

It is very difficult to retrieve airbnb announcements. The main problem being: They often assign thread-titles to their announcements which are completely meaningless. E.g:

• Get guests you can trust— every time

What's the main topic in this thread. The maintopic is:

• „anytime you give a guest 3 stars or less,
  that guest will not be able to instantly book“

Why not call the thread:

• How to block guests from Instand Book
  

Also, it is a complete lie that we can trust guests everytime. We can't even trust them most of the time. And we can't trust airbnb either.

Why use a lie as a thread-titel? That makes the entire statement incredible. Well that was a thread from 2018. Now we've got Cathrine Powell and I think things will change.

[Lizzie]

Thanks @Colleen253 and @Ute42 for your additional insight. Yeah, I think the ideal outcome for everyone would be to have as much clarity on something as possible and make sure everyone is aware of what's going on. We can certainly do more to help this, but as we know from news we see floating around on the internet and elsewhere that it's easy for the indented message to change considerably as it passes from one person to another. 

This fee structure applies to a very small group of Professional hosts and they were notified directly, so having a global announcement to all hosts when it doesn't apply to them, I think may add even more confusion. So it's complicated to get right, but we will continue to try and I'm definitely up for hearing any ideas you might have. 

Here in the CC we will always try to provide more clarity where needed and I'm glad you have found this update useful. 🙂 

Thanks so much, 

Lizzie

[Ute42]

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Hi @Lizzie  

one of the new threads from Cathrine Powell is entitled:

• Updates about our extenuating circumstances policy in the latest Host Update

That's the way it should be. The thread-titel says what the content of the thread is. This is a positive move. I appreciate that.

[Ute42]

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@Lizzie  

As far as the fee-structure goes: A platform like airbnb is offering a service and that service needs to be payed for somehow. You can either charge the guest or You can charge the host. But no matter what You do the point is, that in the end the guest will always pay for it, may it be directely or indirectely.

I can only hope that airbnb guests are not so starry-eyed to believe, the fact that they don't see the service fee on their breakdown means that they are getting the service for free.

[Fred13]

Good to hear @Lizzie; I for one consider that 3% as perfect; just send me the contact & collect the money and I take care of the rest. I have never expected anything more - for 3%.

[Rajan2]

What commission percentage do guests currently pay for their service fee? I think we the hosts pay 13% last I checked and this would be taking an additional 2% out of our payments.

[Mike-And-Jane0]

@Rajan2 Hosts fees are typically 3% + tax, guest fees 15%+tax although there are variations.

@Fred13 The effective fee that is charged by Airbnb for finding you guests is nearer 20% than 3%. 

[Rajan2]

@Mike-And-Jane0 I recalculated, it is 3%. So they are going to try and charge us 15% now?

[Mike-And-Jane0]

@Rajan2 No - they are only doing it for big hosts who use some sort of software platform to manage their listings. Even if they do it means that the guest will be charged no fees so you would just put your prices up by 10-15% and the net cost to the guest and payment to you would be the same.

[Lizzie]

Hello @Rajan2,

Nice to meet you. Just to step in here as I know it's quite easy to go down a rabbit hole. 🙂

I posted an update on this above, that the change to the fee structure is just  for a small groups of software-connected professional hosts in select countries at the moment. So there is no change for hosts outside of this. 

I hope this helps. 

Thanks,
Lizzie

[Rajan2]

Thanks @Lizzie @Mike-And-Jane0 I will re-read the post. I was getting worried since it has been extremely hard to host through Covid, The City of Los Angeles Permit Process for Airbnb and my worry about any other changes. Thanks for clarifying!

[Fred13]

@Mike-And-Jane0 The absolute cost when considering everyone & everything may be 20%, but I am not playing two roles at once - only that of the host. 

[Fred13]

Speaking generally, Airbnb in all likelihood thought originally - let's charge less in host fees than everyone else and the hosting world will beat a path to our doors; once they did accomplish that, then maybe, just maybe their present thinking is -   "surely'" less host customer service should be expected of us since we are only charging the host a mere 3%. This way of thinking is very common and it is not necessarily 'wrong', but it is an economic argument, which makes it the hardest to effectively convey to most. 

Compounding the issue is that their basic model is very risqué as is, and they do adore being 'micro-managers'.