Different price charged to guests!

Hi,

I have a problem with Airbnb charging different price per night to my guests compared to the price that I set in my calendar.

For example I set €30 per night and if I go to Airbnb the booking form shows €32 per night. Then when I receive the reservation, it of course shows again only €30!! I get paid €30 minus the fees, while the host pays €32 per night. Thus the guests are charged more and Airbnb makes hidden profit on this. There is no cleaning fee just to let you know and of course Airbnb also adds their Service fee.

I contacted Airbnb via help form but got only some generic reply that they are checking it and that was a week ago and no reply since then even though I urged them couple of times.

This really annoys me and is not fair. Anyone else with the same problem? Is there any solution?

I’m wondering if it could be a currency conversion thing? If, for example, a guest booked in pounds, then the amount would be converted to euros. Because rates change all the time, could that explain it?

Hi @jaquo,

No, I’m familiar with roundoff issues. I see them here all the time. An Airbnb rep once sent me a (typically incoherent) message saying that Airbnb uses only dollars in its backend software, and rounds everything off to the nearest dollar. He/she didn’t explain why they couldn’t use cents like normal people. Maybe they haven’t heard of them. Anyway, the upshot is that when working with other currency you get minor roundoff changes which mean that payouts from one trip to another are never the same even when the price and trip length remain exactly the same. But a €2 variation is too large to be explained by that. Any roundoff by definition would have to be less than 50 cents. Think about it.

@dev22, it is possible that there are some taxes in there? But it sounds like you’ve covered that possibility.

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Just to make it clear, the prices in calendar are set in EUR and I am checking as guest also in EUR.

The only idea on my mind is some weird connection to Payout currency which is actually different but Airbnb converts the payments from EUR to this currency at the time of payment only, so it shouldnt be an issue when booking.

Really weird…

no, the difference is in the base price per night, taxes and fees are normally added and have no influece.

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Sounds like Airbnb is screwing up. But do realise they’ll (probably) try to ignore you till you go away. That’s been my experience with them when dealing with similar issues. And I get the strong impression that their customer service genuinely does not know what is going on. And there appears to be little or no communication between them and the tech backend people. Assuming there are any, and Airbnb isn’t be run by some 12 year old kid out of his garage. Which would explain a lot, actually.

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here are some screenshots:

price in calendar

and price shown to guests

for higher prices the difference continously grows to 2 or 3€

They add the cleaning rate into the total per night price. They want the guest to get an accurate picture of what the total will be.

like i wrote Cleaning fee is 0€.

I have had overseas guests say they were charged a 3% conversion on top of their commission fee. But all of that is invisible to hosts. It’s very weird that anything on YOUR personal calendar should change or jump around.

Yes I have that too, I’ve had it from the beginning. For example my place is currently listed at $125. Guests pay $129, and I get $122 (I think - something likes that). I understood it was just the percentage fees, which work both ways. I’ve never questioned it but I remember when seeing the breakdown in the reservation it all made sense

It is normal.

You pay a smal fee, and the guest pays a fee. Together it will add up to about 12-13%.

Booking.com does it differntly. The guests gets your price, and you will have to pay 13% fee.

VRBO charges 8% to the host and about 5% to the guest.

So in the end it always adds up to about 13%.

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Hi @dev22,

You earlier wrote that your price was €30, but your screenshots show €22/23. Which is it?

If you go into the details of the listing it shows it more clearly. You will have to click on the ‘drop-down’ arrows to show everything. Here is an example:


I was a little confused by the conversion rate at first (not applicable to the OP in this case, but might be helpful if someone else that is non-USA finds it confusing).

It shows my rate, then how much I will get paid in CAD (Canadian currency) after my fees.

Note that it also shows how much the guest will pay, but it is in USD, and it adds in the Airbnb fee.

I suspect the additional 2 Euros is for the 5% Airbnb fee. Looks like they’ve rounded up the 1.50 Euro to 2. So they are actually making 6.666% instead of 5% by rounding up. I wonder if your rate was 29 Euro how much the end cost to the guest would be? i.e. would they round down?

that was just an example, normally it is €30 but now it is lower because of lower demand.

no it is not normal, I pay the standard 3% host fee from the revenue made and the guests pay the “Service fee” around 10% on top of the total price.

This is however different, it charges different price per night, no matter the fees. I have checked other listings from some friends and it doesnt happen to their listings.

yes this is normal, but my problem is different, it shows different price than what i set in the calendar.

Yes this is what I’m talking about. When I search my listing as if I was a guest (not logged in) it shows $129. In my calendar I set it at $125

That is the problem you are having.

I believe in another thread you said you were in Prague, so you certainly receive currency in CZK, which means Airbnb will have to convert the money collected from your guests in EUR (per your example) to the payout you will receive as CZK.

To be clear: this is not a cleaning fee, this is not a service fee, this is not any fee documented on Airbnb’s quote. This is included in the base reservation amount (number of nights * average nightly rate).

Only guests paying “natively” in CZK would not be charged that fee.

I discovered this working on a feature for my business’s product (which gives quotes to guests in their currency) and obviously has to be dead accurate for the price on the guest’s perspective (always different that the nightly rate hosts set, and very hard to reproduce from the host’s perspective). I kept having issue within a few units. I have not found a clear explanation of this in their Payment Terms of Service, but there is a conversion fee when guest pay in a different currency than their host’s payout is received.

To be clear, this adds a cost on the guest’s side, if the guest is not paying their reservation in your payout currency. Same for a EUR guest to a USD host, and vice versa, and any combination of currencies.

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