Some of my experiences with airbnb, always a guest not an owner:
Bads - Had a really bad house with cabinet doors torn off the cabinets, trash in the garage, place was a total dump. Stayed one day and got the rest of my money back. Another place had a bad mouse infestation, this was dealt with by the owner but it was still pretty shocking as I have never lived or stayed in a place that had a single mouse my entire life.
Goods - Right before the pandemic hit had a really good string of excellent airbnbs that were all cancelled last minute, the thing with airbnb is, great places are always booked, we just got lucky as people were scared and stopped traveling(early march).
Ugly - Alot of owners now are pulling a perfectly legal scam of listing a place at a certain price point and then charging an extremely high cleaning fee. When booking it, you are then shocked by the extreme fees, one place (5 days stay) was charging $400 for their cleaning fee.
Takeaways - If you do your own cooking and don't mind cleaning up airbnb is great for you. As a parent its great as I don't have to deal with a hotel lobby or elevators(I always book standalone houses). As for price its roughly even with hotels, a few years back it was typically 40-50% cheaper.
> Ugly - Alot of owners now are pulling a perfectly legal scam of listing a place at a certain price point and then charging an extremely high cleaning fee. When booking it, you are then shocked by the extreme fees, one place (5 days stay) was charging $400 for their cleaning fee.
I'm not sure I follow here, the cleaning fee is announced before you confirm the booking isn't it?
In a way it's similar to airlines having cheap tickets to then adding seat-choosing fee, bagage fee, etc. The initial low price is slightly deceptive to appear cheaper on aggregators, isn't it?
Here the "scam" is they use same deceptive practice to appear cheaper on the Airbnb map?
For any serious booking, people explore their options and open a few tabs of different listings to pick, since they have to check other things (smoker/non-smoker, pets/no pets, etc). The cleaning fee for the trip is listed there.
Some owners prefer long term stays, so putting a flat higher cleaning fee is a good mechanism to incentivise longer stays imo, as yes, cleaning is time consuming.
Maybe the Map itself could improve to show the total price for the trip instead of base-rate-per-night.
> They should be included in the price shown on the map.
Completely agree, that would make the experience more user-friendly for the person looking to rent.
This is an AirBnb platform issue, not necessarily a owner "scam".
Not a trivial engineering problem as the dynamic price based on length of your stay can't be cached easily as base-price-per-night, and I assume caching prices per listing is what makes the map quick to load and responsive, but it'd be a welcome change!
This is not a platform issue, it is done on purpose to deceive the customer, especially the less tech- or financially savvy customers.
People have been complaining about the cleaning fee ridiculousness forever. Airbnb could and should limit the total allowable cleaning expenses (for type of house, room, location etc., in one word: localization), but they don't do it because it would decrease revenue, not because of technical difficulties, please.
The base price could be cached and then multiplied by the number of nights plus the cleaning fee before the map is rendered. I can't imagine that would be too expensive to calculate on the front end.
> the cleaning fee is announced before you confirm the booking isn't it?
That is correct, my issue is I am looking for places in a certain price point per day, say $200, so in my example I see a place for $200 a day I want 5 days, so $1000 plus a small cleaning fee and other fees(maybe $100 or slightly more). This place after I click on it and prepare to book then totals it up before I reserve, then comes to $1600. It has a $400 cleaning fee and there were also other fees attached. So an unsuspecting person could then get taken by this nonsense.
A possible fix is airbnb could add in all the fees and add that to the daily price, a simple UI fix that would stop this unscrupulous behavior by hosts. So instead of showing as $200 a day it now shows as $320 a day.
Exorbitant fees not shown in the search function is the most annoying part about searching Airbnb, because it makes the prices in the search page prices look artificially low. I think it's designed encouraging owners to do so, since it makes it seem like airbnbs are way cheaper than hotels.
Yeah the particularly annoying thing about the cleaning fee is that it isn't included in refunds. They advertise a 50% refund if you can't go on short notice. But actually it doesn't include the first night or the cleaning fee so it's more like 10-20% in practice.
the most annoying thing to me about airbnb is that for some reason there is no way to search by bed size. last time I used airbnb I had to resort to using a scraper library to search keywords relating to king beds. I felt like a hacker but it was still far from easy or clean
Bads - Had a really bad house with cabinet doors torn off the cabinets, trash in the garage, place was a total dump. Stayed one day and got the rest of my money back. Another place had a bad mouse infestation, this was dealt with by the owner but it was still pretty shocking as I have never lived or stayed in a place that had a single mouse my entire life.
Goods - Right before the pandemic hit had a really good string of excellent airbnbs that were all cancelled last minute, the thing with airbnb is, great places are always booked, we just got lucky as people were scared and stopped traveling(early march).
Ugly - Alot of owners now are pulling a perfectly legal scam of listing a place at a certain price point and then charging an extremely high cleaning fee. When booking it, you are then shocked by the extreme fees, one place (5 days stay) was charging $400 for their cleaning fee.
Takeaways - If you do your own cooking and don't mind cleaning up airbnb is great for you. As a parent its great as I don't have to deal with a hotel lobby or elevators(I always book standalone houses). As for price its roughly even with hotels, a few years back it was typically 40-50% cheaper.