All, this is typical of a company who is trying to do the right thing, but doesn't understand how to handle taxes. It sounds like they are charging 7% (SC state fee) of the rental + airbnb service fee + plus other misc fees.
For those of use that pay additional local town fee (HHI is 3% on top of SC tax) we have to collect this seperately.
Had they used an industry best practice (VRBO and Flipkey) this could have been so much simpler on us and airbnb. The other sites allow you to add a tax line item to your quote. For instance I charge 10% (7% state and 3% Hilton Head).
They then send the tax money to the owner to pay taxes themselves. airbnb doesn't have to be in the tax collection or payment business. Can you imagine the burden they have created on their IT to manage lodging taxes ? Think about having to monitor this to ensure you catch a change when a local government increases taxes.
Yes, you may have some people who don't pay, but typically they don't charge taxes either. For those of us who are honest tax payers in SC they have created a huge burden on us. I now have to pay HHI on my own, while explaining to them that airbnb SC calculation is wrong (charging tax on service fees).
And, on top of that we have to track which renters we're collecting taxes from on other sites vs one airbnb is now collecting for.
