I feel bad for those who were misled. Some of them ended up paying up to 25% more than they expected.<p><pre><code> >>> “Despite thousands of consumers complaining to Airbnb about the way prices were displayed, Airbnb didn’t amend its booking platform until after the ACCC raised the issue.”
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This quote seems to indicate that Airbnb only started to care after threats from the ACCC.
Of course, AirBnB misleads everyone by hiding key costs from sorted comparison views of the 'average nightly rate'.<p>It is also clearly a company-wide value to mislead, as their subsidiary HotelTonight does the same thing with regard to hiding extra fees in the small print.
Airbnb used to be my go-to, but I've since mostly returned to more conventional hotel booking sites.<p>Have had numerous experiences where hosts have had to 'sneak' me in because their building banned short term rentals. None of this was disclosed in advance, and no doubt it's in Airbnb's best interests to look the other way.<p>As others have mentioned, there's often not much of a price differential anymore, and hotels typically have their shit together way more than the average Airbnb host.
The first time I tried to use Airbnb, they confirmed my reservation and charged my credit card. They then texted me a few hours later insisting I upload a profile picture or they would cancel my reservation. I didn't, and so they cancelled the reservation. I was just trying to book a cottage in my local area, so I tried to exchange contact info with the host through the messaging system, but they filtered out our phone numbers then presumably shadow-blocked us from further correspondence.<p>I have no sympathy for Airbnb.
Completely insane given how most websites default to the local currency based on IP, Airbnb included.<p>I just visited the site logged-out, from a non-US IP address, and although the home page claimed to be in the local currency, it actually displayed USD prices. I can't imagine how confusing it would be for countries that actually use the dollar symbol.
I wonder if we need an entire CS work-over for this, like everything else we engineers do: instead of using text to display any given dollar sign, we should emit <money currency="USD">15.23</money> and allow only the browser to display from there - if the user is seeing their own currency, then it would just show a normal $ (or the one they typically see). But if it is not their currency, the browser should emit: $15.23 USD. Basically treat it like times - always pass the Z time, but let the browser render the local time.
Related: Airbnb and apparently Booking.com are billing Australian customers from overseas, causing customers to incur a bank service charge. This isn't revealed to the customer in any way.<p>Don't know how this is legal, but the ACCC needs to jump all over it either way.<p>This happened to me a while back and I went ape on Twitter and got the charges refunded by Airbnb. But that's not how it should work.
Stopped using them years ago. As a European I expect to pay the price that is advertised in the beginning, nothing more. No taxes and fees added later, that's just illegal. Of course there are also shady European businesses that break the rules, but Airbnb was a clear, systematic offender.<p>Additionally I remember when travelling to non-Euro countries they insisted that I have to pay in Euro "for my convenience", of course the conversion rate was significantly worse than what my bank would have offered. (I checked by visiting the site in local currency of the host.)<p>I don't need the convenience of being cheated. If I couldn't handle different currencies, I would stop travelling there.<p>Edit: Obviously for the Australian customers mentioned in the article they were less concerned about convenience. But the pattern of doing business unfavorable for the customer is the same.