All the online travel agents (OTAs), like Airbnb, charge a percentage of the booking as a fee for using their platform. When looking for properties on Airbnb, guests used to see a 10% - 20% service fee. Historically, Airbnb has had a split fee structure for all hosts, in which a service fee is charged to both the host (3%) and the guest (13-20%).
Airbnb launched a mandatory fee for software-connected hosts (which Hometime falls under) to remove the guest service fee and provide hosts with more control over their rates. This fee structure is known as the Host-Only Fee (HOF), or simplified pricing.
It is important to note that this fee structure doesn't impact your revenue. We’ve made sure this only changes the way the guest views pricing on Airbnb.
What does this mean?
This means Airbnb will deduct a flat 15% host service fee (this fee is an industry-standard across most OTAs) from the reservation value and the cleaning fee for each booking and won’t charge a guest service fee.
We have adjusted both nightly rates and cleaning fees so, after the change, the guests are still paying the same as they would under the old service model. Early Airbnb tests with hosts that have switched to the host-only fee model have also seen an overall increase in their bookings. These were the benefits and findings from the fee structure change:
- Guest transparency - no 'service fee' is added to booking totals which creates more transparency (no unexpected fees) for guests when they move through the booking process.
- Increased bookings - no booking fee displayed on the listing, guests feel like they are getting a better deal compared to a listing which shows a booking fee.
- Improved Airbnb search ranking - by adopting the new fee structure you endorse a simpler, more transparent and better guest experience which should improve your ranking on Airbnb as your listing offers more value to guests.
- Airbnb research - Airbnb ran a study with hosts that were subject to the Host-Only Fee model and found that by streamlining the fee structure for guests, properties saw an overall increase of +17% in bookings.