[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".