[spfzero]

>>The entire point is to make the customer do enough work before you show them the actual price, that they just give up and deal with it.

I think a big part of the point is to compete on search (aggregate search like travel sites especially) with the company's competitors. The first company to start, say, charging for a carry-on realizes that they are forcing everyone to copy that, but for a while they'll have an advantage and make more profit. Any business leader doing this first is trying to dishonestly game the system. The others are just doing what they now have to do to keep the playing field level.

On aggregating vacation rental sites, the owners that choose not to do this (at least on sites like VRBO) can add "no service or management costs" to their listings, or maybe "no hidden costs", but it is not very effective because if you are charging $225 and the customer is searching in the range $100 - $200, you loose and the person advertising a $199.00/night charge (with management fee added later) wins.

[ncallaway]

Yep, I understand why people commit this fraud.

And, again, as far as fraud goes I think this is on the fairly low end of frauds.

But, “hey, lots of other people are committing this fraud” goes into the bucket of “helps the person committing fraud sleep at night”.

I do tend to hold the platforms themselves (AirBnB, VRBO) more responsible than the individual hosts that list on these platforms.

It just shouldn’t be possible to even present listings with hidden fees on the platforms. So, in general I look at this as 90% AirBNBs fault, and 10% the individual hosts fault.

[spfzero]

I agree with you directionally, it's a problem that VRBO et. al. should solve, perhaps in their search algorithm and UI. For instance, the fee-range search should include the hidden flat fees averaged over the number of nights, in the nightly rate.

I notice VRBO has a search by nightly rate and a search by total cost, so at least you can choose "deceive me" or "don't deceive me".