Massive Pricing Flaws for Reservation Extensions

[Devon88]

Yesterday, I had a guest wanting to extend her reservation by 30 days (this is a 30 day minimum rental and she has already been there for 52 nights). There are no discounts offered on this property because I have a 99% occupancy rate and quite frankly don't need discounts to entice bookings.

She originally put in a new reservation request and I prompted her to use the change reservation feature in the app to alter her dates so that we could keep the same message conversation, reservation number etc. Upon reading her request to extend for 30 days, I realized the payout math was not remotely adding up... to the tune of $2,200. I told the guest something wasn't right and I contacted Airbnb and explained the situation. The customer service representative couldn't understand what I was trying to explain and said there were no errors. I explained that if a new guest were to request the same dates, my payout would be $4500 as opposed to the $2300 reflected in the change request. Once again... no dice. 

Apparently Airbnb contacted the guest to discuss and allegedly threw me under the bus saying that there were no issues in their system which made the guest irate and she came after me basically saying I was price gouging her. 

Just for fun, I started to play around with numbers in the change reservation feature and to my surprise found out that if my guest hypothetically wanted to extend one night, I would OWE her $1900. I changed the dates again to the EXACT SAME DATES as her original stay (Jan 1 - March 1) and it said my new payout would be $2000 less than the original payout.

I use Pricelabs and do not touch my pricing whatsoever. There are no discounts applied in either Pricelabs or the Airbnb calendar feature. Can someone please explain to me what retroactive pricing voodoo calculations Airbnb is doing? 

This is insanely concerning for a number of reasons and has me wondering how many of my hundreds of reservations has been affected by this insanely flawed system... I have guests request extensions all the time. (Thanks, Scottsdale weather!) Also, the complete and utter lack of professionalism from the Airbnb customer service rep has me irate. 

I really need someone to help me make this sense of this because I banged my head against a keyboard for 7 hours yesterday trying to figure it out. 

[Mike-And-Jane0]

@Devon88 Does Pricelabs set the nightly price? As soon as you integrate 2 systems the chance of finding what is causing strange effects reduces massively.

[Devon88]

Yes, that is correct. I find Airbnb default pricing for our area to be wildly inaccurate and don't know a single host that doesn't use Pricelabs. I suppose there could be an API error on Pricelabs' part. Hopefully their customer service is more helpful than Airbnbs lackluster CS team. 

[Devon88]

Update: I wanted to test out if it was an API pull request issue with Pricelabs and unsynced the listing from Pricelabs. I did a few price changes to ensure they weren't pushing to Airbnb (they weren't so clearly they aren't synced), cleared my cache, and tried to alter the reservation again and it is still coming back showing that I owe my guest nearly $2k if she were to extend her stay for one night. I will continue to test it but this leads me to believe Pricelabs is not the issue unless I'm approaching this all wrong...

[Russell366]

Wow, any updates to this? This is exactly the procedure I would do with someone, maybe it's because the length of stay is so long, but man, I would hope their system is more resilient. 

[Zheng49]

Maybe the flaw is on pricelabs side?