Transparency of prices

[Emiel1]

If a reservation has multiple additions like VAT, Tourist Tax then Airbnb is summing it up into 1 amount.

So the separate amounts are not made clear to the guest

But also the host is seeing only 1 total in Transaction History, named "pass through" , which is very inconvenient.

If a reservation is extended or shortended, it gives you even more a puzzle to solve !

When downloading the CSV file containing all earnings in 2020 i have to split ALL the "pass through" amounts manually for EVERY reservation

This week i wanted to make a special offer to a potential guest, and on request i summed up the individual surcharges in the message.

And guess what: Airbnb changed almost every amount mentioned in the message into "phone number hidden"....  😠

[Pat271]

Yes, these are some of the frustrations of Airbnb for sure! 

An additional headache is that they can only put “pass through” amounts (which for me tend to be taxes) into 1 default account.  So if you have more than 1 property with each tied to a separate bank as I do, you can’t keep these pass through amounts together with their properties. I can’t imagine why Airbnb felt they had to design it like this. 

[Sarah977]

@Pat271 " I can’t imagine why Airbnb felt they had to design it like this. "

Because the people who program this stuff are techies, not hosts. They have no idea how to design things in ways that work for hosts, nor do they care, as evidenced by how they change and move things around on our hosting pages without consultation or explanation.

[Pat271]

@Sarah977   Maybe *these* techies have no idea and don’t care. That’s a function of how the projects are managed and how much investment and focus is being committed to user-centric design. Airbnb should be constantly canvassing customers, analyzing how they use the interface and determining what they need, putting resulting new function in front of beta customers, getting feedback, refining, retesting, lather, rinse, repeat. I agree with you that the evidence clearly shows that Airbnb needs to focus more of their attention on that! 

I have been a techie my entire career, the last 22 years with IBM. We *have* to know and care about this stuff! 🙂 It’s extremely irritating to me to see so many glitches and poor design decisions slipping out to real customers.

[Sarah977]

@Pat271  I didn't mean to suggest that all techies are clueless about creating user friendly programming- most websites seem to understand what works for their users and do their best to make using a site easy and intuitive to the average person.

Airbnb seems to do the opposite- finding where things are hidden (and why should they be hidden?) is far from intuitive for most hosts. There isn't even respect shown in the form of letting us know where something has been moved to when they revamp things- we are left to waste time scouting around trying to find calendar views that they have disappeared, etc.

So I agree, it is management's fault, just as it is management's fault that their CS reps know less about Airbnb policies than most hosts do.

The platform needs to focus on more than raking in the money.