Burden of service fees shifting further to hosts?

[Lisa723]

http://www.vhrnetwork.com/news.13

[Kris76]

This is an interesting discussion! I use both Airbnb and Booking.com and adjust my pricing accordingly so I as a host recieve the same net amount - this seems to work well for me although this means I have to a certain level of juggling and mangement of the various portals...

[Wendy117]

A really interesting discussion and one to watch developments closely to make sure we continue to run a viable business.  Rates low enough to still get bookings but high enough to still make a living. Here in Sydney Australia we are facing legislative changes for short term rentals.  How onerous they will be will depend on who wins our upcoming election. From reading this forum i see that many countries, states and local authorities have rules, charges or taxes for short term rental. Some have multiple   We have been lucky so far but it was bound to happen.  One more thing to stay on top of.

[Jayesh0]

@Lisa723 

This could also be because if you are using a channel manager it is so much easier to just hook up an existing price that you use on other platforms.  A couple of clicks and you have rate parity.  The calculations for what makes the booking the same net amount are a nightmare and not always necessarily correct so this is a great feature for those who pump out pricing on multiple platforms that want the same net rate on each.  Some platforms want you to have price parity and may guarantee price parity.  How can you begin to do that when you do not know what the service fee will be.  Strangely enough Siteminder has a minimum $7 cleaning fee so this makes us $7 per stay more expensive than other sites but does not seem to make much difference.

Lisa

[Lisa723]

@Jayesh0 I sincerely doubt it but in any case there's nothing stopping Airbnb from making this an option for hosts. (I have multiple listings on multiple channels and pricing is set automatically by usewheelhouse.com.  They explicitly do *not* aim to price different channels identically because the market is different for each.)

[Jayesh0]

@Lisa723 

That's completely different to Australia I guess.  We have to specifically sign a contract that we guarantee price parity or will do a price match on the lowest rate visible to guests except for our own website.  Maybe different countries have different regulations.  I will keep this in mind.  Never occured to me it would be different in other countries!  Thank you for the info, Lisa

[Lisa723]

@Jayesh0 you mean it's a legal requirement? I thought you said it was a requirement of some booking platforms. In any case it sounds really difficult to manage!

[Jayesh0]

@Lisa723 

No, it is not a legal requirement.  It is in the contract that you have with the OTA.  They send out new ones from time to time when things change and are a real chore to read through!!

I don't know how or why but our profiles are a test case for our area so we are the only ones with the option to have the 14% fee at the moment.  They are still charging just over 17% so looking forward to having that sorted.  I think they are still trying to correct all the kinks before they release it here.

For us this is system is much much better as we are exempt from paying GST on the service fee so for the accounting it is much less work.  They don't seem to have one total of the GST you have been charged so you have to add up every individual booking to get the total.  Tedious!  Lisa