[dominotw]

They use a 'dark pattern' where they don't really make clear how much you are actually paying for night till you are on the checkout page. Lots of hosts use this pattern and make their listing real cheap buck tack on a huge 'cleaning fee' and there are whole bunch of local taxes, service fees ect which you only know at the end.

They count on people to just go through with checkout since they spent a whole bunch of time to get through that point. Compare this with kayak which shows you final price right on the search screen.

And then there is a problem with reviews where a guest is not really motivated to write a bad review even if they have a bad experience because people are usually conflict avoidant. So almost all airbnbs have positive reviews 4.9 review average making the whole review section useless. Also, there is no way for user to sort reviews in ascending order of star rating.

[jitl]

Book on https://airbnb.com.au where law requires showing the total (inclusive of all fees) in search results. You can set the price to USD or whatever other currency you prefer.

(disclaimer: I was an Airbnb employee)

[lrae]

How do you change the currency without logging in? Because as soon as I log in on .com.au to do that, I'll get the not so transparent pricing again :(

Edit: It's just in the footer and I was blind. Thanks, that's actually awesome!

[btoro]

On the footer of the page.

[lrae]

Wow, how did I miss that earlier... and googling it tells you on two different 3rd party airbnb blogs that you'd do it in your profile settings.

Thanks!

[wintermutestwin]

OMG thanks so much for this! You should post this as its own submission.

I am amazed that ABNB has this dark pattern as I don't see how it benefits them and it clearly pisses off users and makes searching so much more work than necessary.

[owlninja]

The cleaning fee and service fee is under the rate off to the right, and it lists your total before taxes.

[lolinder]

The fees should be included in the list price. Instead you have to open each listing in order to compare real prices, which disadvantages hosts who don't play games with the fees. The last time I stayed at an Airbnb we found a host with reasonable fees, but they were buried under a bunch of "cheaper" listings that were all actually $100+ more expensive.

The way things are is bad for guests and bad for honest hosts.

[enos_feedler]

It makes sense for the user to have this feature. The ticketing app Gametime has a settings flag that says "all in pricing" and it's so much better when turned it. It keeps me off of other platforms like ticketmaster. I guess the problem here is: who are they competing against?

There are a few reasons to keep it the way it is: Airbnb is probably aspirational about its userbase: they don't want people to choose based on price comparison, it's more about the unique space. Or maybe this even speaks to actual measured user behavior. Airbnb invests a lot in data science so I would assume they have either tested this or have data to show the performance impact of such a change. They also might want to one day reduce or eliminate such fees using a membership program of some kind. So a perk of this membership would effectively be "all in pricing"

[alistairSH]

Currently, it's hidden in a collapsible widget, not in the main view.

Ideally, cleaning fees and similar shouldn't be allowed - they're a cost of doing business and should be rolled into the nightly. Heck, taxes too for that matter - no reason they need to be hidden from the main view.

[dominotw]

yea i know you can see it but it shouldn't be a subtext. You cannot also search within budget because it searches for listing rate not the final rate making price filter totally useless. I also don't understand why they can't add taxes ( which are significant these days) in the listing. I really think this is a dark pattern designed to trick users.

[wintermutestwin]

The point is that the total should be what is shown in search. As it is, search is meaningless.