AirBnb and Pet Fees

It appears that Airbnb does not have a way to set a pet fee as part of the surcharges. While there are manual ways to get around this on a per booking basis, these seem highly undesirable. If I recall, the surcharges do not transfer over when you push OR rates to Airbnb. Does anyone know of a clean way to handle this?

Randy

Have not started AirBnB yet, but isn't there some not so obvious ways when it comes to requesting money? Things like pet or custom fees. I have heard this song before, unfortunately...

Unfortunately, Airbnb doesn't have a configuration for a pet fee, so you can't have it automatically collected on their side. If the guest flags the booking as having pets we'll pick that up on channel bridge imports, but they often don't do that either.

The best way to handle pets is to put the fee in your house rules and then submit a resolution request on Airbnb for the pet fee.

https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/767/what-is-the-resolution-center

A year and a half later, it appears we still need to submit to the Airbnb resolution center answer for pet fees.

How do I do as your Listing Analyzer says- what are the matching keywords you are referring to and where do I use them at?
Fee "Pet fee" is not recognized as an Airbnb fee. Airbnb only supports their own built in fees.
>>> Either use one of the matching keywords<< or set the listing site criteria to exclude Airbnb.

Unfortunately, Airbnb still does not support any way for a guest to indicate that they will be bringing pets, neither do they support a pet fee surcharge that can be set.

The only way to do this is as recommended above -- state the fee on your house rules and submit a resolution request after booking.

FWIW, this isn't going to change until Airbnb decides to change it.

I emailed Brian Chesky with the point that "when you make us collect pet fees via the Resolution Center, you pay CC transaction fees and lose the Guest Service Fee on that money. If you allowed them to be included in the listing price, you'd recover the 3% CC fee from the host plus the ~10-15% service fee from the guest and make a few extra bucks in the process." No reply, of course, and I know he has bigger fish to fry, but given the cash shortage Airbnb is experiencing, every dollar they can earn helps them. It's a bonus if it makes my life a little easier, even though I'd technically take a small hit on the pet revenue.

Yes, it's really dumb the way ABB does this. Many people travel with pets and many hosts accept them. ABB spends so much time and energy on all these social issues and sending emails to make us agree to "enhanced cleaning" etc, etc. Traveling with pets is a reality in today's STR market and will, most likely, increase as more travelers go to drive distance locations.

Taxes on that Pet Fee are another issue... The fee in our state is actually taxable just as any other rent for Lodging Taxes... so we have to request from the guest the total including state and local taxes. Since ABB remits these taxes on rent but not on the resolution requests, we then have to file with the state a return for the added pet fees basically doubling the efforts..

We've been doing the resolution request thing and it is just a bear to manage as the guests will not always pay it either so then it has to be escalated to ABB to resolve and many times the guest just refuses.

We've been actually toying with the idea of doing it direct via concierge services via a guest portal type app. We are currently researching those that have integrations to OR to see what options we might have there.