Hi all, I've been hosting on Airbnb for the last 10 years, all of my homes have hot tubs as amenities and we do not charge any additional fees to heat the hot tub, these are amenities that we offer to attract more guest, we roll the cost of those items into the prices we charge to stay at the home. I have also been traveling with airbnb for many many years and I have noticed that often when I travel to California and Arizona hosts are charging fees outside of the app to heat their pool or hot tubs which they have listed as amenities.
This weekend I am traveling with a group of 10 to the Coachella festival in Palm Springs. We booked a beautiful house for this trip several months ago that we where all very excited about. This morning I received a text message from the owner stating that they charge $30 per day to turn the heat on the hot tub and $90 per day to turn the heat on in the heated pool both listed as amenities, neither of these fees where disclosed in their listing at the time of booking. So now I am supposed to go to each of the $10 guest and explain the situation and collect whatever amount of $$ so that they can use the amenities listed on the property, it is a pain. if it where just rolled into the pricing everyone would know and it would be clear at the time of booking.
I've visited many other homes that disclose this fees clearly in the listing and just gone ahead and paid them, even though it seemed wrong. This host pointed out a line in the rules and policies that said " There is an additional fee PER DAY to heat the hot tub and pool" the hidden message about the hidden fee did not disclose any amount, also this has been a topic of contention amongst social media groups and many of you may have noticed a smear campaign against airbnb lately where a lot of people are complaining about these kinds of hidden fees. It' not good for hosts or share holders to have this bad reputation - so this time I decided to call airbnb to verify if that line was actually there at the time of booking.
The customer service representative informed me that in fact it was not there and had been edited into the listing after the booking. They said they would reach out to the host to mediate. I said okay but asked them to please not cancel the trip, if it came down to it we would just pay the fee. so about 30 minutes later I received a notification that my stay had been canceled, 2 days before check in during Coachella. one of the biggest music festivals and definitely the biggest in Palm Springs. There is hardly anything else available to book.
After spending all day looking and hours on hours with customer service we finally had to settle on a much less desirable property and it cost us almost $1500 more than the initial property. major let down after all these guest have already paid tens of thousands of dollar on plane tickets and the $750 Coachella tickets. There is nothing else I can do here. so after repeated calls to customer service all day airbnb finally offers me a coupon code for my next booking. $425 the offered us for cancelling a $4500 booking. we ended up having to rebook a property for $5900 with less beds than the original property. as much as I have been loyal to airbnb all these years I think this might be my last time booking a stay with them unless they do something more to make this right. I know as a host that if I cancel a booking last minute on a guest I am charged a %50 cancellation fee. so that would be $2250 on a $4500 stay. I assume airbnb charged that same fee and is just taking the profits from it while we are left scrambling for a place to stay. kind of disgraceful IMO.
Also The refund takes 3-5 days to go back to my card so now I have expended over $10,000 of credit to get a new booking last minute. imagine if I where a young person and didn't have much or any credit. what if I had spent all I had on this trip and something like this happened. I would probably loose all my money I spent on plane and concert tickets all my friends could potentially loose what the spent also. this just isn't right.
Is this the reputation you guys want the platform to be known for @Brian @catherinepowell ? do you think that a $425 coupon is sufficient compensation for the time and stress related to this issue when I ended up having to spend and additional $1500 to book a smaller house with less beds?
How about the rest of the community, are you experiencing this and do you think that these hidden fees are acceptable?
