Now the price shown will include all extras!

Well, they’ve finally done it. Now when a guest searches for a property, the price that comes up will include all taxes, fees, and extras. This has been a long time in coming, but, in my opinion, it’s great news for guests and hosts alike.

Guests have long complained of searching and finding the perfect property at the perfect price, only to be hit with a staggering total once they get to the booking page. Who can blame them? That sticker shock can be astounding. State tax, occupancy tax, Airbnb surcharge, cleaning fee, pet fee… A two-night stay that’s listed at $99 a night could easily run you $500. It can be infuriating.

On the other side we have the hosts. I’ve wanted to roll our cleaning fee into the nightly price for quite a while now, but I couldn’t. Why couldn’t you? you may ask. Well, because not everyone does. So if my townhouse is $500 a night and I rolled in the $175 cleaning fee my price for a weekend would have shown up as $1175 while a property with the same fee structure would only show up as $1000 a night. The two properties would in reality be the same price, but the potential guest might never know that. Even worse, the Airbnb algorithm weighs the nightly price heavily when ranking the listings in the search results. Even their own algorithm won’t recognize these two properties are the same price.

So, having it standardized makes it easier and fairer for the hosts and easier and more transparent for the guests. One wonders why it took Airbnb so long to make the change…

Those are my thoughts, but I want to hear what you think. Let me know in the comments. Is this a good change or a bad one?