Looking for Insight on New Fee Policy – Concerns for Longer Stays

[Dylan143]

Hi everyone,

I’m hoping to get some guidance or insight from fellow hosts regarding the new upcoming Airbnb policy (see attached image) that will prevent us from requesting additional pet fees after a booking is made.

Currently, for our listings, we charge a pet fee on a per-night basis ($15–$20 depending on the property), and we offer discounted rates for longer stays. For example, a 60-day snowbird booking wouldn’t be charged $1,200 in pet fees, that would be excessive, so we adjust accordingly.

Since there's no built-in toggle or tiered option for pet fees on long-term stays, our current method has been to clearly outline our pet fee structure in the listing and then send a fee request after the booking is confirmed. This has worked so far, but with the new policy coming, we’re facing a challenge.

As I see it, our only two options under the new rules would be:

1. Flat Pet Fee – But this doesn’t scale. A one-night guest with a pet would pay the same as a 120-night guest, which doesn't feel fair or feasible.

2. Per-Night Pet Fee – This works fine for short stays ($15–$20/night seems reasonable), but it becomes excessive on longer stays unless we apply some kind of discount, which it doesn’t look like the platform currently supports.

My Questions:

• Will Airbnb be introducing any kind of long-stay pet fee structure or options for prorated/discounted pet fees?

• Is there any flexibility or exception process being discussed for longer stays?

• Has anyone found a creative workaround that complies with the new policy but still fairly accounts for the increased wear and tear of long-term stays with pets?

• For example, if I set a base pet fee of $50, would I have any way to charge more (like $100+) for month-long bookings to fairly cover the added cost?

Any ideas or input would be greatly appreciated! I’d love to hear how others are planning to adapt.

Thanks in advance!
Dylan

 

[Robin488]

We are having the same dilemma, because we have 2 seasons, typical vacation in summer and snowbirds in the winter, search engines will overprice or drastically underprice longer stays. Additionally, we offer multiple pet and length of stay discounts, with the options currently available there is no clear path to support our guests with the discounts we offer.  It would be helpful if a couple of longer stay options were available under pet fees (similar to the long stay cleaning options). 

[Lorina14]

@Dylan143 

I don’t allow pets at our listings but understand your conundrum - I don’t understand why one can’t be flexible for these cases. What if a guest ends up bringing multiple pets but only registered one (to try to avoid a pet fee per pet) this usually would be addressed with a claim in the resolution center. Would that not be allowed with the new policies?

I would submit this to Airbnb feedback and hopefully if many other hosts do this as well then it will hit a critical threshold where they will look at the policy and potentially alter it. This has happened with some suggestions fellow hosts have made, but not for others. Unfortunately you cannot track what happens to your request (unless the feature somehow magically appears in an update). They say that Airbnb looks through the requests and sends it to the appropriate team if relevant. I once submitted a feedback about how the scheduled messages was missing key messages when a guest last minute booked and I had to manually send them to guests and within a week of submission and hosts talking about it on the community center there was an option to always send certain scheduled messages (but it was not messaged out to hosts of the change immediately). @Joan2709  suggested a host bulletin board so we could see any new feature updates that we should be aware of instead of things just appearing or features we were using disappearing without knowing why. This unfortunately has not been added yet either.

I know I asked for a short, mid and long term cleaning fee as currently they only have 2 day cleaning fee (short) and anything over 2 nights (regular) cleaning fee. This does not cover the hosts who have long term rentals where there may be deeper cleaning needed. I asked for a 2 nights or less (short), 3 nights - couple of weeks (mid term) to >28 days (long term).

Other hosts in the US were asking for itemizing all fees upon checkout as it shows full fees and when you click on a small button on checkout it only itemizes taxes but not the cleaning fee, pet fee, resort fee, nightly fee, airbnb service fee. So it looks like a host is charging a high nightly rate when the other fees (including the airbnb service fee) is included in the “nightly” fee.

Hopefully if enough hosts complain, provide constructive feedback with rationale why the new policies do not address their concerns we can have new features that benefit us implemented. 

@Rebecca @Elisa @Bhumika (community managers who moderate the boards but are not directly Airbnb support) can you send Dylan’s concern to the correct team for support? Thx!

[Dylan143]

Thank you so much for the thoughtful and detailed response, I really appreciate you taking the time to share your insights and experiences.

You bring up a great point about the resolution center and guests underreporting pets. That’s definitely another layer of complexity, especially if policy changes limit our ability to recover additional fees. I’ll have to look into whether those types of claims will still be supported under the new guidelines, hopefully Airbnb provides clarity on that.

I also completely agree with your suggestion about submitting feedback directly to Airbnb. I will go ahead and did that, and I encourage other hosts to do the same. It’s encouraging to hear that host feedback has actually led to real changes, like the scheduled messages update you mentioned, even if the communication around it wasn’t ideal.

Thanks again for tagging the community managers too, I’m hoping this reaches the right team and sparks some discussion at Airbnb. These small updates would make a big difference for hosts trying to stay fair and flexible within the platform’s rules.

Thanks again!