Bloody air bnb and their stupid fees!

[ohdizzy]

Looking for a holiday cottage..."£60 a night for your dates"....oh great, click reserve....oh that'll be £120 cleaning fee and £96 service fees. Just fuck off and list the prices properly!

Yes I know they add on cleaning fees and a service charge, but I've never had them this high. Bloody annoying.

We have an Airbnb booked for 6 adults & a child for 3 nights in August, Sat-Tue, in the Cotswolds, and it’s £180 per head. (Service fee was £155, no cleaning charge).
There are 2 more adults in the party, who took us over capacity for the house, & they’re booked in a nice old hotel in the same town at £190 per head (but they do get a proper breakfast - I’m quite jealous of that!)
So in this situation the 2 are directly comparable for price. Up to now we’ve been quite happy using Airbnb, Wed always rather be in a whole property than a couple of bedrooms, and they’re generally far more flexible over cancellations than eg Vrbo or any of the holiday cottage companies - this booking can be cancelled by us at no charge up to 2 days before arrival. (Of course this could possibly bite us on the bum the other way round…🤔)

We don't want an hotel though, we want a two bed cottage.

DH and DD booked an Air BnB in Edinburgh. He said the electrics were downright dangerous (he was an electrician). He rang the hosts, who were a couple of clueless foreign students and told them they needed to make it safe. He told Air BnB and he and DD decided to move to a hotel. The apartment was back on Air BnB the next day, no doubt with dangerous electrics.

Sounds like they were subletting. Edinburgh is like the wild west for airbnb.

I’ve been using Airbnb here in nz for the last 7 weeks. All good no ridiculous rules or cleaning fees that I was aware of.

the only rule was that we had to seperate our rubbish and recyclables. Otherwise the hosts get fined apparently by the local authorities.

You can't possibly pay more that in baggage and seats per person unless you're you need two seats and have 7 large cases.
Plus why use skyscanner when you can use Ryanair Discovery?

Use booking.com

You can often find the same property for rent on other sites, or even better direct from the owner, far cheaper than Airbnb. I've no idea why so many people use them really.

Sites like cottages.com are almost always cheaper. Or look at local holiday cottage companies where you want to go. Once you've identified somewhere, Google to see if the owners rent directly. It's easy to save several hundred £ on a cottage rental that way.

Agree with you @averylongtimeago

Also, local tourist information offices can put you in touch with owners in the area.

Or as a pp said at least people like Sykes are a bit more regulated.

With booking.com, even hotel rooms are marked up. I've just put together a multi leg trip for summer and each bit was cheaper to book directly with hotels than via any of the third party sites. Unsurprising as they have to make money somehow I guess. Ime the only time it's better to use a 3rd party is if you're staying in one place and you can get a good package deal.

I've no idea why so many people use them really.

Massive companies spend so much money and efforts in getting their brand known and into people's heads, that it becomes instinctive to many people, even if there are much better (usually far less 'in your face') alternatives waiting for you right there online. Once they've achieved that, there's no need for them to be anything more than 'just good enough' for enough people to stick with them.

I've no idea why so many people use Google to search online and freely give away all their private information to be tracked, sold and commodified, rather than StartPage or DuckDuckGo; but then, 'to DuckDuckGo' isn't commonly used as a verb....

I hate it when any business doesn't quote the all-in price that you will pay upfront - whether they leave out cleaning fees, booking fees (what are they even for anyway? A charge to be allowed to buy something?), compulsory insurances, added on service charges (even if technically optional), VAT or whatever. Fine if it's a truly optional additional cost for a truly optional additional service or upgrade.

Your job as a business is to factor in all of your costs, margins, taxes and profits and then present me with a total offer price that I can pay you in order to get the tendered goods and/or service from you, if I decide to. The customer isn't the one running your business; you are. How would you like it if I agreed to your price and then told you I required a discount because I will have to spend money on petrol to travel to your place and you should have realised this?

Our AirBnB for a family wedding overseas was cancelled the night before our flight (having been booked 3 months earlier). They booked an alternative for us but by the time we landed, this was also cancelled. We had to sit in the airport for 2 hours with young DC, waiting to get new accommodation- and it was AWFUL - dirty, unsafe, overpriced. Complaining got us nowhere. That’s when I discovered how little consumer protection we had. Never used them again.

Airbnb host, we don't ask guests to do anything when they leave except make sure the windows are shut and locked. We do charge a cleaning fee - it makes more sense. When hosts set their per night rates they also set any weekly or monthly discounts. Short bookings have the same set up costs as long ones for a host i.e place needs cleaning and bedding washing. If you build that cost (c.£80 in our case for a 2 bed house) into the nightly rate you would realistically split across your minimum booking period. That could mean upping the nightly cost hugely which then makes stays beyond the minimum booking period more expensive. If you charge a cleaning fee separately longer bookings are not disadvantaged by a higher nightly rate.

So simply adjust your week long booking rate accordingly 🤷‍♀️

Yes, isn't that the whole point of a discount for staying the whole week - that you only need to clean the place and change the bedding and towels once rather than up to 7 times?

Nobody is disputing that the costs to you are disproportionately higher for shorter stays, but you can still work out what those costs will be and charge accordingly.

It seems much fairer (and I would have thought more enticing to customers) to state the highest price per night but then immediately add in discounts that people can benefit from if they qualify, rather than state the alluring baseline price and then come in with all the add-ons.

Same here.

We're having a stay cation this year

We live in a fabulous place so what's the point in paying for a sodding holiday cottage?

We've had some good vacations with Airbnb abroad, but several poor experiences in the UK. I'm not taking the chance again - holidays are too important to have them messed up.

We're done with Airbnb in the UK completely now - back with the old skool alternatives - but still happy to use for holidays abroad.

At last! Someone who understands the word "staycation". You stay at home, not "somewhere in the UK, where I already live."

We had mostly staycations when my dc were small, we lived in a holiday destination.

There is a thread up now about trying to find hotels where two rooms interconnect, and I swear to God, if the hotel industry could sort this bloody issue out they could… not wipe out AirBnB, but greatly reduce AirBnB’s share of the market. The biggest reason I have seen for AirBnB is when parents want to be able to put their kids to bed in an adjourning room.

For the most part, I prefer hotels although I have had some nice AirBnB stays as well. I like simplicity and I don’t want to feel forced into personal interaction with a strange or have my cleaning etc. judged and evaluated by them.

AirBnB has ethical issues as well, although in Japan where I live, AirBnB is only legal if you set yourself up properly with a hostellier’s license, so it ends up being an occasional business option run by a small number of people, rather than it hollowing out whole neighborhoods, so I am more comfortable using it here than in the UK.

I used to like airbnb but they've just gotten ridiculously expensive.

I always use super hosts . I’ve booked for the summer as the hotel prices were out of my reach, it worked out much cheaper (and nicer ). I tend to look into hotels first and then end up at Airbnb!

It‘a just me and dd so not much to clear up. I’ve never been asked to do more than empty the bins, which is fair enough .

I've found a Facebook page for booking direct with cottage owners - the only problem is they are asking for payment by bank transfer in order to knock off their fees and I'm a bit wary of doing that. I will suggest PayPal as there's a bit more protection but I guess they'll have fees to pay then.