@Paul13141
It’s not an easy question to answer. There’s a good chance there’s more than one explanation.
“Ever since I changed my pricing structure to follow the new format, I haven’t received a single booking.” doesn’t, by itself, establish a causal link.
If, at the same time, demand has changed, booking windows have shifted, overall availability in the area has increased or decreased, competitors have changed their prices, or we’re simply dealing with seasonality, I could easily be attributing to the new fee something that is actually being driven by the market.
At the very least, you’d want to look at how often your listing is being shown in search results, your views, your conversion rate and your bookings, comparing the figures before and after the change.
Have your views dropped, or has your conversion rate dropped?
Because if your views have stayed roughly the same but your bookings have fallen, then we’re probably looking at a conversion or perceived-price issue.
If, on the other hand, your views have dropped significantly, then the question may be one of positioning, the algorithm, or simply demand.
And if both have declined, things become even more complicated.
I don’t believe that the mere fact that guests no longer see a separate service fee can, by itself, explain a drop in bookings.
If anything, you might expect the opposite: Airbnb has removed that psychologically irritating moment when a guest gets to the final stage and thinks:
“Hang on, so I have to pay another XX dollars on top of that?”
That is, after all, precisely the rationale Airbnb gives for making the change.
I suspect the more interesting issue may be how hosts have responded to the new fee.
Airbnb has changed the fee structure, but it has left hosts to work out how to adjust their own pricing.
So instead of having a market where everyone’s prices move in the same direction at roughly the same time, you suddenly have hundreds of hosts in the same area making different decisions: some have absorbed the fee, some have passed the full cost on to the guest, and others have passed on only part of it.
And I think that is where you could get a genuine competitive shake-up.
Because there’s an important distinction between the final price a guest pays and the price they perceive while browsing and comparing listings.
Even if two properties ultimately cost the guest roughly the same amount, one of them may look significantly more expensive than the other during the search, at precisely the moment when the guest is deciding which listings are worth clicking on.
That could be particularly significant during this transition period. Some hosts have already built the new fee into their nightly rates, while others are still operating under the old split-fee structure.
So the guest isn’t necessarily comparing like with like.
And just to give you an idea of where things stand here in Italy: as an EEA country, the key date for us is 13 October 2026.
There is, however, an important caveat: that doesn’t necessarily mean that every Italian host will switch automatically to the new model on that exact day.
Hosts who have already changed their pricing may therefore find themselves in a transitional period in which different pricing strategies are competing side by side, while the wider switch is still underway.
Which means that Italian hosts still have another month of what I’d call a kind of “natural experiment” ahead of them.
And those who have already raised their prices voluntarily may, at least temporarily, find themselves at a competitive disadvantage compared with hosts who are still operating under the old split-fee structure.
