Charging for addtional guests.

[Sean44]

Hi, im looking for some guidance on potentially charging for extra guests.  My house caters for 4 people maximum, but I have had a few enquiries from parties of 5.  Having looked at similar properties to mine in the area it seems other hosts are not charging for additional people. 

Just looking for advice or general thoughts.  If people are charging what is the additional payment etc.

Thanks in advance

Sean

[Andrea9]

@Sean44

Just an idea: Use the basic rental fee for 2 ppl and charge an X amount for each guest extra.

If you are in communication for somebody who wants to exceed the 4 max and it's not a problem for your insurance or city regulations having more guests, you can do the following to amend your reservation:

Change the max guest settings of the listing to the no. you need;

Change the reservation and your guest will have to accept it.

Right after change has been sent off, you go back into settings and revert to 4 ppl. maximum.

The reservation change won't be affected since reverting back was done after the fact.

Playing around with the settings like that make it possible to accept diverse guest wishes if so desired, but work only after communicating with you.

[Andrea9]

There's no standard fee and is always determined by host according to extra usage and preparation work.

Another reason why having an extra charge is advantageous is that if you don't have one, your listing will show

"Extra guests: no charge" which according to Airbnb is logical, but the reality shows that guests interpret it as free for all.

[Peter516]

Thanks for this idea Andrea.  I can see how it would work but I do have a slight worry about it - which is that when a potential guest first sees my listing they will read that the charge for an Extra Guest is 'None' and I would much prefer to be up front about the additional charge. It's not a problem for most people, I imagine, but I have a particular problem.  My apartment is a relatively small one, with two bedrooms - one with a double bed and the other with a single bed. I advertise the property as 'sleeps 3'  but explain in the description that we can accommodate a 4th person as long as he or she doesn't mind sleeping on a folding bed (sometimes called a 'put-u-up' bed).  This is not quite as comfortable as the regular beds but many people have used without complaint. We wish to apply a small charge for this additional guest, mainly to cover the extra laundry cost (the room would be cleaned anyway). We would like to charge £2 per night, but are unable to make this clear on our listing because Airbnb's system will for some reason only accept a minimum charge of £4 per night, which we feel would be too much for the service offered.  I do not understand why this restriction has been applied so that we hosts cannot set our own rate (as we can for other things). I have  said in my property description that an extra charge of £14 per week will be levied for use of the folding bed "to be payable direct to the host" but in practice this is not very efficient as I am not present when the property is being rented out and entails making some special arrangment for the additional payment to reach me.   

[Kristin28]

We charge 10.00 for each additional charge for anyone older than 2 yrs. old.  We do not have any other additional charges for guests. (No cleaning fee etc.). We also supply a light breakfast.