Extra Guest Fees

[Noor-En-Mat0]

I just found out my guests could pay up to 20% extra fees. Surely I knew that I pay between 3-5 % as a host on every booking but these guest fees are excessive in my opinion. I base my pricing on what I think is an acceptable nightly price for guests. I would now need to reconsider my pricing 😞 . It also makes airbnb no cheaper than other booking sites. Does anyone share these concerns?

[Lisa723]

Airbnb's fee structure is not transparent, but it is what it is. Guests of course are free to shop different booking sites.

[Noor-En-Mat0]

Thanks Lisa! I never booked as a guest so I didn’t know about is being non transparant ans so expensive in fees. Surely guests can shop around but our listing is only on airbnb, becasue of the community, personal aspect of it compared to other sites like booking.com and homeaway ... maybe I need to investigate their competition...

[Ana1136]

@Noor-En-Mat0 yes and I believe guests know that but some Airbnb homes even with the % that they add are still cheaper than hotels. And there are plenty of sites online that do price comparisons so guests can check if some property is on any other page and they can book there. Hosts usually calculate the prices to match on every site they rent, other sites get up to 20% from hosts and normally the host will set up the price higher there just to get the same ammount of money.

[Noor-En-Mat0]

 That’s true Ana ... but we’re not on other sites and for us it just doesn’t feel right setting a reasonable nightly price which airbnb wacks up with 20%. I thought that airbnb, as a community, would be different to all the other, commercial, booking sites ... 

[Ana1136]

@Noor-En-Mat0 they all take their chunk whether it is from the host or from the guest.  Don't think too much into it, guests know what they are paying, just set up the price to reflect your property and what you offer and you are good to go 🙂

[Noor-En-Mat0]

You’re probably right Ana

if i find euro 100 p/n reasonable but it costs my guest actually euro 120 p/n ... that makes a huge difference, so there is a change a potential guest finds it too expensive and if I start to take that into account, I need to lower my nightly price.

But I’ll try not to think about it and see how it goes. Our bookings are low (although vieuwings are good) at the moment (after a great 7 months) but we havn’t had a full year so it’s to early to draw any conclusions

[Sarah977]

@Noor-En-Mat0   Guests do see a breakdown of the total cost when they make a booking or booking request, so they can see how much you are charging and how much Airbnb's service charges are. So if they're paying attention, they would know that you yourself aren't charging that much for an extra guest.

[Brad189]

The Airbnb fee structure is archaic in the  extreme. To quote the support response. The guest fee is randomly applied 0-20% and cannot be calculated until the guest accepts the booking. 

So, as stated in the conversation thread, as hosts we have no power over setting our believed "market" price. Airbnb may always be higher and so we may loose customers. A loose-loose scenario. 

Airbnb should publish its formula for setting fees so we can set our price. In the end the fees come out of this total, regardless of what we call them (host fees or guest fees & these potentially add up to 25%)

[Huma0]

As a guest I would find it extremely annoying to see one price in the search results without knowing what that's roughly going to work out in total. I think the Airbnb guest fee should be a fixed percentage. When I started hosting about 2.5 years ago, I kept seeing info that the fee was between 6-12% but quickly learnt it was very rarely closer to 6% and actually often closer to 20%! Then there's the cleaning fees no longer being factored in to the search result price.

Airbnb, just pick a fixed percentage for the guest fee so that it's more transparent and the guest, once they're a bit more experienced, can roughly gage what they are going to pay when they research.

@Noor-En-Mat0however, you cannot be out of pocket by compensating guests for the amount Airbnb takes, so you just need to decide what are fair prices for you for this to be worth it and also check out your local competition. If you are charging a fair price, guests will mostly appreciate this, as the extra charges are being added on for all Airbnb bookings, not just yours.

It is true though that some guests are surprised by this and don't realise that it's not the host that's upping the price. I have had guests mark me down on Value because they said the price they originally saw advertised was not the price they ended up having to pay, as if I had lied about it.

[A-Casa-Da-Martino0]

Dear All, 

do you know when Airbnb instroduce this new Extra Guest Fees? Honeslty I did read the new terms and conditions. 

Thank you

Bray

[Sarah977]

@A-Casa-Da-Martino0   Hosts set their own extra guest fees, not Airbnb.