**[Private conversation removed in line with Community Center Guidelines]
My husband and I are going into our 7th year with this vacation rental website and have ongoing issues with their billing system for their lack of transparency and for not offering an itemized list for each and every charge to our guests.
Also, it it extremely frustrating that hosts are placed with the burden of adding routine charges especially AFTER a potential guest makes an initial inquiry. When guests put in all of the information that is requested by the website (dates, number of guests, pets...) they expect that an accurate quote will immediately be generated. The current system gives the impression of 'hidden costs' and does not give a good first impression. And we all know that first impressions are vital to our reputation as caring and conscientious.
With the current system we have to recalculate the entire invoice if they are bringing a pet and/or going over the guest limit that we have set.
When a guest instant books this opens up a huge issue because the entire booking needs to be cancelled and started over because Airbnb does not allow hosts to make any modifications (adding dates, guests, pets...) once the booking is confirmed.
We have talked to the customer service reps and written complaints to the support team ad nauseam since the 2014. All to no avail! We are so tired of getting the same auto-reply verbiage and email messages that state, "We are always working to improve our website....blah, blah, blah".
The current booking and billing system is inefficient and misleading. Where's the transparency? It makes no sense to us why this practice continues and is extremely frustrating. It seems like any company would gladly add these features so that your customers can have a smooth transaction and the website service fees would increase in revenue.
We appreciate the service that this platform provides to some of your participants. Our hope is that maybe, just maybe we can rally enough attention to finally get something done for a situation that is very problematic and could be easily resolved. Please, please consider this correspondence as a plea to fix these ongoing issues that have plagued our relationship with this specific vacation rental website.
Please post your comments if you would like to see some resolutions to these billing/booking issues. Thank you in advance for your time and consideration!
Monica & John, The Red Cottage in Black Mountain, NC USA
