Sammie and I had a frustrating incident today.
We had a group of guests check in at one of our listings with a cat.
We send all our guests an external registration form with a question asking if the guests will bring a pet. This guest filled out the form and did indicate they were bringing a pet.
In our listings "Other things note" section, we put some verbiage concerning pets, namely, that we will charge an extra $75/pet surcharge.
Unfortunately, we discovered that on the mobile app version of the listings, the "Other Things to Note" and "Getting Around" sections do NOT appear.
On the Desktop Web browser, those sections DO display, but when our guests checked in and called us about bringing the cat, they had just assumed pets were allowed for free.
We asked them if they read our listing and house rules (admittedly, we missed out the pet surcharge in our house rules - something we will add), they said "Yes," and after realizing the omission on the mobile app, we waived the pet surcharge. It wouldn't be fair to the guest to charge them a fee that they didn't know about because the mobile app didn't display it.
Still - it was a bit of an unnecessary and awkward communication and it's a pretty big miss on AirBNB's end to have an entire section that shows up on the Desktop website NOT show up on the mobile app. (We mostly manage and preview our listings on our desktop).
Furthermore, I wish AirBNB would put in an ability to enter additional fees, such as pet cleaning fees, extra guests cleaning fees, extra rooms or other extra amenities and services.
As it stands, it's very frustrating trying to offer extra amenities to guests (like pet accomodations) that require one time fees , it's something I think both airBNB, hosts, and guests could really benefit from.
For us, for example, we offer suites, but we would like the ability to offer individual rooms + common areas, as opposed to the entire suite.
For example, for a suite with 3 bedrooms, only give bookings with 1 guest access to 1 room, the kitchen, washroom, living room, while we lock the other 2 rooms. We would like to be able to offer a cleaning fee to reflect the services we offered to our guest, but as it stands, there's no direct way to do so.
