I can guarantee you can get a pretty nice hotel for less than that without bullshit fees. Anyone still using Airbnb or any of the other short term rentals deserve what they get.
The major thing that keeps me from trying Airbnb is the fact that you have to clean up after yourself. I go on vacation to relax, not clean.
Also bedbugs.
Why clean, if you’re gonna pay a cleaning fee anyway? Do they send the AirBNB police after you?
They can have an extra fee added to your bill if you don’t accomplish certain tasks…
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In general, AirBnB is where we get places where we want to sleep 10 or 12 in one place.
Sure, but this is 2 guests unless they’re planning on lying about it. In which case, double whammy when they get hit with another fee for extra people.
Sorry it wasn’t a rebuttal. Rather, I was agreeing thatvfor situations like this a hotel is better, bit it’s hard to match AirBnB when you want to sleep lots of people in one place.
Not for this one but when you say anyone… families get a better deal with Airbnb than hotels generally.
And when you have a baby or a toddler a kitchen is pretty much mandatory.
There are plenty of hotels with kitchens, though? I know they’re often called extended stay hotels, but you can still just book a few nights.
Are you kidding? It’s totally common for hotels to charge 50 bucks a night in bullshit fees
I have never had a hotel charge bullshit fees. Rental rate and tax are all I have ever paid.
Lots of hotels tack on “amenity fees” or “resort fees” separate from those. It’s pretty obnoxious, especially since they don’t show them to you til you’re halfway through booking.
Parking (at a remote resort with no other reasonable way of accessing) comes to mind as one of the bullshit’ish fees I’ve had to pay, but most of the rest are usually fees passed up from the municipality etc
Big city mandatory valet comes to my mind.
In the US it is common to have an amenities fee that you will only know, in most cases, the day of your check in. The fee applies whether you use the amenities or not.
California just passed a law banning any mandatory fee if it isn’t included in the advertised rates; the ban goes into force starting middle of next year.
The new law, which takes effect on July 1, 2024, “make[s] unlawful advertising, displaying, or offering a price for a good or service that does not include all mandatory fees or charges other than taxes or fees imposed by a government on the transaction.” If a fee is not optional and cannot be removed from a bill, the fee has to be disclosed from the top.
That being said, I would imagine that there is some wiggle room on “mandatory”. Like, a hotel is going to be allowed to charge for use of items in a minibar, for example – that’s not a mandatory fee. I don’t know what the bar is for notification that a given action will incur a fee.
That’s great for California.
Right turn on red didn’t exist anywhere until some states started allowing it; a lot of people thought that it would be too dangerous. Then it worked out okay, and other states added it, and eventually essentially everyone was doing it.
Just saying that it sounds like the direction things are going right now is to legislatively-restricting what hotels can charge without disclosure.
From my skim online, it sounds like the addition of hotel fees like this is relatively recent, and so this is something of a backlash.
California is so big that often, when they make a law, companies follow it nationally. It can be cheaper than having to maintain different rules for sifferent states
Around 2004-5 I regularly stayed at a large chain hotel near Tucson airport (something like Doubletree, but I’m not sure if it was that one). They charged a daily fee for the phone in your room. Not for using it, mind you, just for the phone being there. And no, they did not have rooms without phones.
Last week I stayed in a hotel for 3 days at a said and done price that was still about $100 cheaper than this 2 night Airbnb’s base price, not even adding in their fees.
Ok? That tells us nothing without comparing location, etc.
Haven’t used airbnb in years, hotels are so much better and usually cheaper
And you don’t have to put the sheets in the wash, run the dishwasher, and take the trash out.
Seriously. This year for a similar amount per night, while I didn’t get a whole house to myself,
Just a two bed room, bathroom, desk, mini fridge, microwave, and coffee maker to myself.
I got an actually good free breakfast every day, a pool, a gym, free room cleaning, free Internet, and there was like a mini food store next to the front-desk if I needed food in the middle of the night.
Sure there are crap hotels, but if you read reviews it’s not too hard to find decent ones. And there’s usually no surprise extra fees.
Pretty much the only issue I ran into was at one hotel, the claimed free breakfast was watered down coffee, a waffle maker, cereal, and frozen solid orange juice. Had to go out for breakfast every morning which was annoying.
Yeah, but at a hotel, do you have to wash the dishes, change the bedsheet, take out your trash, mow the lawn, retile the roof and breastfeed the house baby while paying the same amount of more like in an Airbnb?
Thought so.
I have to eat out in a hotel, I save money by cooking in the Abnb
Are they also paying $57 for a service egg?
I know it is supposed to say “Service Fee” but after reading your comment my brain is unable to read anything other than Service Egg now …
I couldn’t ever see anything but egg! Fee didn’t occur to me.
Yep, and you don’t even get a measly half-dozen, just the one and it’s 🐔-sized.
Host fees
They love to make it look like the fees are being charged by anyone except them
Stop using Airbnb FFS
I don’t get it. Are you saying these fees are from Airbnb, but made to look like the host? (Apart from the fact this is an obvious bug)
I actually work in this industry, looking after properties for owners when they’re not being rented.
I will not work with Airbnb properties.
On every single other property rental site, the fee you see is the fee you pay, it includes everything from the booking agent’s percentage to the property owner’s cut of the rental
Airbnb try to split it up to make it look less, and they can shove their site up their arse.
Use local rental agencies in the place you’re staying. Cheaper for you and more money for the owner.
Stop feeding billionaires!
Can you give some pointers on how to find these agencies? People keep using Airbnb because it’s the only one they know (aside from traditional hotels)
They key term you want to Google for is “[city name] vacation rentals”. Some alternatives include VRBO, booking.com, FlipKey, HomeStay, 9flats…
Yep, they’ll be on the first search page along with Arbnbullshit
Go to the second, third and fourth pages for the actual local agencies. People who live there and know the area.
The days of “If it’s not on the first page of Google, I’m not interested” were five years ago. Now the first page or two are paid ads.
Try Kagi search. New but getting there
Also, find the area on Maps and search for rental agencies “in this area”
Yeah, I’ve got a few different sites that I avoid using that are often high up on searches, but I haven’t had issues just scrolling past them.
Going with a top result just means your results will be biased towards sites with good SEO. Bad SEO or ignoring it doesn’t mean the product, service, or site will be bad. IMO they could be better because the owner isn’t obsessed with doing everything they can to maximise money.
Ah, fair enough. That’s actually illegal in many countries because it’s considered false or deceptive advertising.
Late booking + early booking = booking. Math checks out. I don’t see the problem here.
but if late and early cancel each other out, wouldn’t the result be 2*booking?
Double booking. What is this, an airline?
Look at the picture again… Its for 2 people.
Hm. Good point.
I assume it’s a fee for early checkin at the beginning and late checkout at the end of the stay.
Why? It says late booking, not checkout.
I think amenities fees should be illegal. When I asked what amenities, they said “housekeeping, the free wifi, the exercise room”.
I started using the Australian site (it can still be used for searching elsewhere), because they’re required by law to list the final price as the listing price
You can sort by price and all the bullshit fees are built into it
We’re travelling in the US at the moment, and as an Australian this habit of posting prices that aren’t actually the price really grinds my gears.
In Australia, the listed price is the price you’ll pay. The only exception is if they specify that it excludes GST, in which case the total price will be 10% higher.
In the US, the listed price is the starting price. Then you’ll have a city tax, a state tax, a federal tax, a congestion fee, a service fee, a minimum gratuity, and then of course the optional (but not really) additional tip on top with a suggested minimum of 25%.
It’s making buying things a really sour experience. Just yesterday I bought some clothing that came in a little under $250 and I had $300 cash on me. Easy, that’ll cover it. Nope… ended up having to bust out the card because the total was closer to $320 once all the fees and taxes got thrown on top.
In order, fine, that’s not free, and we both know I’m not going to use it.
They charged an amenity fee for “free wifi”?
I think they meant fee (without the ‘r’) wifi
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It was VRBO actually, have never booked with them so have no idea if that’s an error or some insane "this is normal business approach. Didn’t book. Most times I’m tempted to do a house rental after looking at the prices, fees and amenities it almost never pencils out unless it’s a huge group trip.
They’ve got to switch that terminology to “parasite”
in my country you could get a whole villa with a pool and play court for 3-4 days for that amount of money
Country?
Gary, Indiana.
I guess one guest booked it late and the other booked it early
This was on the page to book the res., it hadn’t been booked yet.
