Tell HN: Airbnb’s transparent pricing is a lie
I made a booking at Crowne Plaza Times Square on July 22, 2023. Set the option to show all prices and paid $1500 for it. At checking, in presented with a bill for city and state taxes and “resort fees” totaling $552 and a $500 security deposit. Doesn’t seem very transparent since they specially state that you’d see all taxes when you pay on Airbnb.
I called support when I was doing checkin, and they just said it was on the hotels terms/fine print in the listing and I should have read more carefully. Well, I assumed the value of Airbnb was to protect users from this, otherwise they’re just a middle man collecting a tax.
This is the listing btw. You’ll pay 30% more than advertised, so factor that in when comparing to other places. Also, weren’t security deposits unnecessary with Airbnb because they handle charging customers for things like damage, and aren’t listings insured?
Finally I use Airbnb a lot, so trust wise there should not be any red flags what’s justify security deposits.
175 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 222 ms ] threadAnd yet somehow you failed to notice this ...
> otherwise they’re just a middle man collecting a tax.
Booking fee, cleaning fee, fee, fee, fee, fee.
I'm surprised OP has used Airbnb a lot and not noticed this. It's in almost every posting lol.
I've certainly seen that sort of thing¹, but not nearly on “almost every posting”. It is likely to vary between locations, so perhaps OP has been lucky and only used the service for places where it is rare.
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[1] I've never booked somewhere with extras like that though, I too read the details before booking and that² is a red flag for me.
[2] disingenuously deflating the headline price
Its also in their pitch deck so its not like they are trying to fool anyone.
Ideally banks would identify it as fraud and charge them all back automatically but they rely on co-branded credit cards (especially Chase and AMEX).
Perhaps Discover and Citibank would like to start a hilarious proxy war using Marriott, Hilton and IHG as pawns?
Hotel room night tax rates are almost always much higher than general sales tax rates. The hotel might pocket more if they sell a room for $200 + hotel tax + $50 resort fee + sales tax rather than $250 + hotel tax.
Of course, the calculation is not that clean, since maybe the resort fee is also used to obfuscate prices which results in people paying more.
As for the tax collector, resort fees and whatnot have been commonplace for the 20+ years of my adult life, so either the tax collector is a corrupt idiot, or the hotels have a legitimate claim that the entire cost of staying at a hotel is not subject to lodging taxes.
The complaint is not that the fee is problematic in and of itself, it's that the fee isn't revealed until after your booking is made, usually not until check-in.
Maybe I'm wrong, I don't want to put words in that user's mouth, but my interpretation was that they'd called resort fees are a scam because they only show up after you've booked your stay. That's the scammy/fraudy/dishonest part of the transaction; without it I'm not sure there's anything to complain about.
But I also consider them a scam in practice because hotels & OTAs go to such lengths to hide them during the search process. By advertising a rate that doesn't include these fees they are advertising a rate that simply doesn't exist.
It is (sadly) the default practice in the states to advertise the price of basically everything pre-tax, so at a minimum consumers here expect for tax to be added (though folks new to booking a hotel probably don't know about occupancy taxes). But for a hotel or OTA to advertise 2 different hotels, one with a $30 / night resort fee, as both being $199 / night is also a scam.
Hotels do this for banquet & convention services as well. Everything is "plus plus", meaning plus tax plus a service fee %, usually 20% in my experience. Your $10k banquet hall rental is really $13k if the tax on it is 10%.
My understanding is that when you book through an online travel agent, the regular room rate is subject to a commission of up to 30%, while the resort/destination fee is not. That's why many hotel chains provide incentives for customers to book directly with them.
I've heard in some jurisdictions outside of the US, hotels are required to show the total price including all taxes and fees when advertising rates. So if AirBnb isn't doing this, it could be a problem.
According to the newspapers in Las Vegas, which report on this frequently since it's the resort fee capitol of the world, the resort fees are used to lower the base price of the hotel rooms so they look more attractive on third-party web sites.
Resort fees are still taxable.
(Not blaming the customer, and I completely agree that a "total price display" that leaves out fees that Airbnb knows about is predatory.)
Booking isn’t perfect but it is definitely my go to for travel accommodations. Their customer service is always helpful and easy to get in contact with from anywhere I have traveled to.
Definitely keep an eye on your transactions, I had an additional fraud $1500 transaction from Booking.com Netherlands shortly after I booked a stay in Norway.
I reported it to my credit card and all was fine but there are probably some bad apples working at Booking.com.
I recently had an apartment (in the Netherlands also) request that I pay them directly with a bank transfer before I arrived but it seemed dodge to me so I booked with another
I then got a fraud charge a couple days later. I never gave my credit card info directly to the Norway property (not sure if Booking shares it with them?) but I'm more inclined to suspect someone at Booking who had access to their saved credit card database OR superuser access to book some other resort using my saved payment info.
What could have happened is someone compromised the hotel's side of the extranet and grabbed your (and other) bookings' virtual cards and attempted to start racking charges against them which would then go back on your card you gave for the reservation to Booking.
While there's supposed to be fraud controls on the cards, who knows what could have let the extra charges fly.
Edit: Another reason is that Airbnb simply provides more eyeballs for hotels. Sites like Booking.com is very crowded already.
It's anecdotal, but I've not personally found it to be worth the extra hassle.
https://www.ihg.com/content/us/en/customer-care/best-price-g...
https://www.hilton.com/p/price-match-guarantee/
https://www.hyatt.com/info/best-rate-guarantee/
https://help.marriott.com/s/article/Article-22050
https://www.choicehotels.com/deals/best-rate
https://www.wyndhamhotels.com/hotel-deals/best-rate-guarante...
IME, not really. Hotel web site first, then Airbnb if I'm staying in a place where there are no hotels.
Third choice is booking.com, which has the ability to book motels in some small towns I frequent that don't show up anywhere else, and the motels use booking.com as their sole room management system.
I had assumed that it was a way to avoid paying the parent/franchising company, or paying commission on it to booking sites, which I think might be the case, especially the latter since they generally collect it on premises not through the booking engine.
...much further down the page in small font...
Total Price (tm) is our proprietary number we just make up because we actually hate you, our customer, and want to bamboozle you into spending far more than expected.
There are likely several reasons for why and not. One for why not might be that it could be seen as legitimising a competitor, one which various interests from within & without the industry are actively lobbying against.
Another at a more local level could be that AirBnB is garnering negative press in many areas due to further marginalising local residents¹ and some companies might not want to associate with that if it goes against an image they try to portray.
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[1] or potential local residents who are more priced out of an area by AirBnB² on top of more traditional holiday lets and second homes.
[2] I'm thinking twice about using the service after seeing a recent increase in AirBnB & similar activity locally (often standing idle a significant amount of the time) while friends are struggling to find affordable places to rent or buy.
Many industries go through this, especially retail. It's cyclical.
- The business establishes its brand and develops a loyal following.
- Some consultant or middle manager or other rocket surgeon decides "We should be everywhere! Then we'll sell more!"
- Increases sales for a little bit, then it doesn't because the product becomes a commodity that people can get anywhere, and so people start buying the competitors because the they're all viewed as being the same, since they're everywhere and right next to one another on a web site or store shelf. The company then has to compete on price rather than quality while still paying the middlemen, causing profit margins shrink.
- Management realizes it's bought into a bunch of lies, and starts to let the co-marketing agreements expire so that it can get better control of its product.
- New generation of managers come in and repeat the same mistake.
Agreed. Especially since the hotels I've inquired with freely admit they put middlemen/broker bookings into the bad rooms (noisy, bad floors, bad views, bad location, not renovated, next to the exhaust of the restaurant next door, old electronics and furniture, etc.) first, until those fill up.
Keeping hosts happy is the game.
AirBNB is a good example. They didn’t lose their soul when they made it big - they never had one to begin with.
I am conflicted about uber though. Many, many people I know (mostly women) have had their life completely transformed post uber. It ushered in a mobility revolution that would likely only be smaller than the car or bicycle in terms of liberating some populations and increasing their freedom. It was all built on lies and masquerades though.
Perhaps that's not new however? All of history seems to have been built on ideas that robbed Paul to pay Peter anyways.
Huge advantage being able to go at my own pace when I didn’t know how functional I would be on any given day
Not saying it’s a good company, but saved my family.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK209321/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6094347/
https://journals.lww.com/jtrauma/Abstract/2006/08000/Prevent...
https://www.futuremedicine.com/doi/full/10.2217/cnc-2016-001...
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17461391.2018.15...
I've always avoided Cabs (largely because of lack of trust), while Uber basically fixes cabs' problems for me.
I can say with confidence that I don't trust an Uber driver any more than a car/cab driver. Sure, ive been in sketch cabs and cars with intoxicated drivers or some dick who runs the meter up after you fall asleep - those are rare and I can count them on one hand.
Uber gives you the illusion of being abetter cab service while being markedly worse in some ways. Okay, you voted out a shitty driver with one star - there are a 1000 more waiting to fill that position. I've been in numerous filthy Ubers, drivers who are possibly intoxicated, drivers who got their license in a cereal box, and cars who's mechanical status is questionable (severely worn suspension, squealing brakes, etc.) You vote one out and another scurries in.
Don't get me wrong, I use Uber and Lyft mostly because its tough getting car service as many went out of business. But its no utopia and the safety and quality of the rides is not better in any way.
* will the cab arrive? When? * will they overcharge me? How can I make sure it doesn't happen.
With Uber there aren't a problem. I haven't been worried about my safety too much (maybe I should).
There was a brief few years where a couple of big US taxi franchises had "computer-dispatch" labels and you could use that to select between alternatives.
Unfortunately, Uber disrupted the industry in so many wild and interesting ways. The most useful franchise I was aware of with "computer-dispatched" taxis in multiple cities I traveled between apparently broke apart competing with Uber and some of the franchise cities just outsourced the work to Uber or Lyft or other competitor or built entirely new names/brands separate from the old national franchises and figuring out which one is which is so much more challenging than it was for a brief few years in my experiences before Uber started up.
(In the mid-oughts, I used to have a "Yellow Cab" phone number memorized that was the same 7 digit number in multiple cities, you just swapped the local area code you were standing in. That number is basically out of service in one of those cities and goes to very different branded taxi companies in the rest, some of which then just have messages telling you to book them on Uber or Lyft or Some Random App.)
I mean you just pressed a few more buttons and told the cab company where you were headed and they'd show up in a reasonable 15 min or so. I'm an NYC native and took a lot of cabs and car services - not saying it was perfect - but it wasn't a dystopia. I can only once recall having trouble getting a cab from park slope to ozone park - there were no cars around.
Waiting was simply due to the nature of the cab/car market back then - cabs were radio dispatched and yellow cabs only cared about Manhattan and JFK/LaGuardia leaving us outlier schmucks with a paltry selection of mom and pop car services with few cars.
Uber and Lyft introduced an option there (and in many similar towns and cities) that did not, or effectively did not, exist at the time.
Were those usable? Certainly not in my part of the world (SV). Where are you from?
They do not. When you toggle the setting for "total price" when searching it specifically says "Includes all fees, before taxes" right next to it.
I also just tried to book the hotel you mentioned (https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/801588170672441756) and there is no security deposit or resort fee.
*******
▶ Mandatory fees
You’ll be asked to pay the following charges at check-in or check-out:
• A damage deposit of $350 will be collected by credit card. You should be reimbursed within 7 days of check-out. Your deposit will be refunded in full by credit card, subject to an inspection of the property.
• A resort fee of $40.16 per night
• There will be taxes and fees that need to be paid at the front desk
▶ Optional Extra
• This property allows pets however there is a $350 pet deposit per stay. 50 USD is kept for a deep cleaning fee, and the remainder is refunded if there is no pet damage.
• Parking $78 for 24 hrs and $93 for oversized. no in and out
https://mashable.com/article/airbnb-actual-price-listing-fee...
It's insanity to have to search through each listing and add random fees to compare the prices of different listings against each other. I don't think the OP disputes that this appears in the terms and conditions.
Airbnb giving you a toggle to show "With all fees" (but without taxes) is better than every other booking site out there.
Remember back in the 2000s when Spirit Airlines would advertise $9 flights, that only at the very last moment of the checkout stage would have a government compliance fee, all taxes, gas costs, flight attendant costs, etc added on to make a $120 flight?
That's what hotel pricing feels like today. The FTC needs to step in and make advertised pricing equal the all-in fee for everything mandatory at a hotel.
It is only travel agent/third party websites that try to hide total cost.
Agreed. My usual mode of search is to go to hotels.com or booking.com depending on the destination and find out what's available and to price compare. Then I go to the actual hotel's site to book the reservation. I'll end up paying the same rate either way but having a direct booking reduces the chances of there being a problem down the line since there's no third party to shift blame or act as the middleman in resolving the issue.
Right now for the same room on the same dates at Hilton Waikiki Beach, Hilton.com shows 9 different rates (all of which don't directly include resort fee or taxes).
And when a resort charges for parking, that fee is almost never included.
And as soon as you choose a room type, Hilton shows you the total price. Perhaps not the best they could do, but not worth complaining about in my opinion.
Parking is often not included or desired, so it makes no sense to include that in the price, but it is listed prominently on the final page.
No, it shows you 9 possible per-night prices, with a small note underneath about resort fee and tax. You'd have to select one to get to the total price, and you still have to figure out some confusing terms... what is "semi-flex" rate? Which is better, deluxe mountain view or a premium mountain view?
And of course, the prices might all be different if you visit the site next week.
It seems pretty easy for those that want a straightforward reservation to choose quick book, and for those that want more nuance, to choose more rates and figure out what they want.
We were talking about websites
Edit: The website shows the same options as the app, a "quick book" price and "more options" underneath.
The point is, price discrimination and obfuscation is an integral part of hotel revenue maximization strategy. The premise that they guarantee a "best rate" is a largely empty one.
https://imgur.com/a/quVPzWX
>The premise that they guarantee a "best rate" is a largely empty one.
I have never found a hotel room as cheap as the rewards member pricing from a third party, and that is what a guarantee is. Does not seem empty to me, they deliver what they promise, and being a rewards member is free, and zero cost since they already have all your information anyway.
And, this isn't the "scam pioneering" airlines like Spirit, this happened to me with American. When I was so busy trying to figure out the total costs once I get out of Google Flights, then I neglected to read the fine print. I have a ticket I called to change two weeks ago, and was told if I don't take that flight, I lose the value completely with zero recourse.
The airlines are actively waging war on their customers. It's awful.
In other words, ticket purchasers are not their costumers anymore.
[0] https://abroaden.substack.com/p/the-strange-way-airlines-are...
But even the non-budget ones like Delta save the taxes and 9/11 Fees for the end.
Southwest is the only one that shows you the actual price.
Any additional "fees" should be optional. I should be able to say "I'm not using the resort, I'm not paying this".
If it's mandatory it should be priced in.
Even taxes should be included in prices.
And this has to be a top-down, legal thing, rather than something companies can opt-in to, because I think the business consequences of being the only one in your industry with transparent pricing would generally be lethal, and I've heard stories of restaurants going out of business due to including taxes in their prices. People want to pay less, and they'll go to the place they think will charge less. So this has to be enforced top-down.
Many people are dumb as bricks and hold insanely weird beliefs such as "if the displayed prices include tax, you will become desensitized and won't notice it if the government increases the tax rate!" or "I want to know exactly how much is going to the business and how much is going to the government!" Some US states have even codified this and explicitly ban tax-included pricing.
This is also why people will fight tooth-and-nail against very obvious methods to drastically simplify things, such as by having the IRS handle your taxes for you and simply send you an "is this correct or do you need to make changes?" form every year.
Which is also a weird position to have, since nobody suggested getting rid of the price breakdown that gets shown at checkout. I'm sure companies would still love to show tax if half of their price is tax.
I’d argue you could do the same with anything, in the case of restaurants just show the actual total on the menu and include a breakdown on the receipt so people who care can see how much is going to taxes and such.
OP is not going to get my sympathy for booking a chain hotel via Airbnb of all places. Next time book direct with IHG if you want to stay at a Crown Plaza.
AirBnB's hidden fee situation has completely and utterly jumped the shark / taken the piss. It's unfathomably bad.
I did a quick search for something, and the AirBNB fee was slightly higher ($20) than the US website for the same listing (dates, people, etc.)
Which is nice. Avoid the weird incentives hosts have to set a low night price and then jack up all sort of fees instead.
There is a 𝐅𝐚𝐜𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐅𝐞𝐞 𝐨𝐟 $𝟒𝟎.𝟏𝟔 𝐩𝐞𝐫 𝐧𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 that will be charged upon arrival. This includes WIFI, local and long distance calls, fitness center access, 1 Citi bike daily pass, and a $10 Food and Beverage credit daily.
The other arbitrage opportunities include breakfast and other facilities. Either way check direct before ever choosing another option like Airbnb.
I booked on a website advertising a room weeks in advance for $130 a night (only one night).
Arrived at the hotel, and sure enough, I had a reservation - that was not paid for. The company I booked through was charging $130 for them to call the hotel and put my name down on the books.
At that point, I checked out and moved to the mountains.
If booking doesn't have deposit disclosure I usually just tell the staff I can deposit this little cash, take it or leave it, should've declared deposit amount and I will find another hotel + complain to booking customer support. (Not in USA)
Other deceitful line items:
* Paying for a cleaning fee and then in the terms and conditions they charge additional fees if you don't clean the listing * Terms and conditions that add additional liability, binding arbitration, and all kinds of additional items that were never disclosed in the listing * The above items were never disclosed and vaguely referenced in some random fine print that was not provided before you booked and then airbnb will not issue a refund if you cancel.
Honestly, the problem with airbnb is that they are a middleman that sits between the host and you. They really won't do much to help you when you call customer service, and they won't help you in ways most hotels would help you if you called and had a problem. It's really not a great experience as soon as you need customer service from them. The hosts add all kinds of nonsense rules when you show up or after you book that are never disclosed and they do nothing about it. There is even a news article where the CEO spent a bunch of time living in airbnbs and said he experienced all this nonsense, but still nothing is done about it.
I really enjoy the authentic experiences at airbnb, but I've been burned too many times and think it's outrageous to spend thousands of dollars on high end airbnbs and pay fees for things like cleaning and then be expected to clean on my vacation or be subject to some nonsensical rule and worry my whole vacation. I'm really torn about whether it's a good service or whether it sucks but you should know what you're getting into.