Airbnb hiding cleaning fee in web search results - how widespread is this, utterly broken..

Pete28
Level 10
Seattle, WA

Airbnb hiding cleaning fee in web search results - how widespread is this, utterly broken..

 

Try doing doing a web search for a specific date, price range and number of guests in your locale. As of yesterday it is no longer including the cleaning fee or Airbnb fee. This makes it impossible to search by total price without scrolling over 100s of listings.

 

How many people are seeing this ? Thx !. 

 

Screenshot shows own new format, note that the search is not done on total price but on base price :

 

 

image.png

 

7 Replies 7
Colleen47
Level 10
Frisco, CO

I actually had a guest very upset about this last night. She was super confused when she went to book and kept saying math didn’t add up. She didn’t end up booking as she thought I was shady. @Pete28

@Colleen47 Airbnbhelp claims this is the new normal - it worked properly last week.

 

Makes me sad that Airbnb feels in has to mislead guests on cost when some of us are happy to have low cleaning fee and provide affordable accommodation.

Agreed @Pete28

Elena87
Level 10
СПБ, Russia

Why not just ditch the price per night and simply and clearly leave just the total price visible?

 

 

John1080
Level 10
Westcliffe, CO

I noticed this change a few days ago, and afterward, reinstated my cleaning fee which I had taken off a few months back. 

 

At least the total shows up in smaller numbers underneath the nightly rate and the summary can be viewed when one clicks on the question mark, but I do sense this has been done to try to increase bookings by hiding the actual nightly price. 

 @Colleen47

@John1080

 

The problem is as a guest you can't actually find anything by price, I was looking at Xmas in LAX and it's a complete cluster - 400 listings under $100, but they are all over $100 with fee. You just give up and figure it's all a giant scheme to rip you off.

 

Ive had to add cleaning fee just to show up in search results again and get bookings. How much $$ have we all lost in the week or more this has been going on. I had to dump thanksgiving at $68/night to get a booking, last 2 yrs $90+

 

The EU has also been clear they can't display results like this - so why switch to doing it ahead of the two biggest Holidays ?!

 

 

I actually just figured this out. This opens up opportunities for hosts to lower their nightly rate and increase their cleaning fees to get more exposure from the search. If you lower your base price enough, you could the few that shows up when a guest is filtering by low prices. I do agree with the fact that this is a terrible change, but I'm going to do what I need to do in order to get more bookings.