Looking for advice on accessing VAT invoices

[Rich-and-Yan0]

Good morning, fellow hosts,

We have a property in Portugal and have been hosting on Airbnb for nearly 6 years.

Recently, the Portuguese government made some changes to their laws in which they now want Airbnb hosts to show more transparency of their earnings. In our case, they want us to provide a VAT invoice for each guest showing specifically what Airbnb takes as a commission from us for each guest that we host.

We contacted Airbnb support about this, and in the beginning, everything went well. They told us that to do this, we would need to add our VAT identification number to our listing. We followed their instructions and received notification from them not long afterwards that our VAT number had been successfully verified and added onto our listing.

This is when things started to get weird. When we first contacted them about this, the agent we were dealing with (who was very helpful) assured us that once we had registered our VAT number, we would henceforth see the VAT invoice on the Airbnb platform under our part of the earnings for each guest--exactly like what is showing on the screenshot we have attached below. (The VAT invoice part is highlighted in green.)

However, when the next guest stayed at our property, this VAT invoice was not showing, and so we contacted them again. This time, we got a very unhelpful agent--we would even call her "rude"--who first responded to us and told us that we had been given wrong information from this first agent and that, no, we were not privy to any information about our earnings after all.

We then showed her this screenshot, which is from a host in Portugal ("Fatura com IVA" means "VAT invoice" in English), and we explained that, according to our accountants, other Airbnb hosts that they are doing the books for in Portugal have been able to access these invoices.

After waiting nearly an hour for a response, she finally came back and tried to say that we could not access these invoices without the guests' permission. To that, we responded that her response made no sense, since this has nothing to do with the guests. What we, our accountants and the Portuguese government need is evidence showing the commission that they (Airbnb) take from our earnings--not the commission that they take from the guests' payments. 

This has continued back and forth for the past few days, and with two different support agents. We do not seem to be getting through to them, and so we have run into a roadblock here.

We explained all this to our accountants, and they said the same thing that we said: that Airbnb does provide these invoices to other hosts in Portugal, and that the commission that Airbnb takes from the guests' payments has very little to do with the commission that Airbnb takes from our earnings. However, Airbnb is still not listening, and the agents we have been talking to still do not seem to understand what we need.

So, we were wondering if any other hosts have ever run into this problem, and if so, were you able to resolve it? If you were, we would be really grateful for any advice you could give us on this matter.

Thank you in advance. 

[Rich-and-Yan0]

Thanks again, @Shelley159. So you know, we've looked through all of that: taxes, payouts, you name it. We have combed through our account with a fine tooth comb looking for some kind of lead on accessing VAT invoices--and we've come up empty-handed every single time. 

As we've also stated, the support agents from Airbnb don't have any answers for us. The only one who "sort of" sounded like she knew something about this was the first one who told us to upload our VAT registration number to the platform. But that yielded no results, and as you have already made clear, it wasn't even necessary for you to do in order to be able to access your VAT invoices.

Clearly, we are at an impasse here. It's now been almost a week since our case was (supposedly) forwarded to this "specialised team member," and we have heard nothing. We tried contacting Airbnb support again the other day, and they told us that we simply need to wait until this person contacts us. 

So yes, frustrated we are indeed. However, it sounds like we'll just have to wait it out and hope that someone who actually has a clue about these matters can help us. 

Thanks again for your comments, though. We do appreciate them a lot.