Airbnb API Surcharge Rules & Settings

Our Channel Management feature is extremely powerful and can greatly simplify your channel advertising. Learn how it works by reading our Channel Management overview article.  The most powerful part of our Channel Management is the API Integrations we have with certain channel partners like Airbnb.

This article provides a guide for how to set Surcharges for the Airbnb API integration. You should make sure to set up Surcharges before you do the API connection.

Surcharges

Airbnb supports surcharges configured in OwnerRez, which will be calculated per stay.

Consider displaying your Airbnb surcharges as part of the rent display. Follow the instructions in the Include Surcharges in the Rent Display support article.

These fees are handled specially by Airbnb, and operate with the following restrictions:

  • The surcharges below can only be per stay (not per night).
  • Everything but Cleaning and Linen can be either percent or amount. Linen can only be an amount.
  • Criteria will not be honored. For instance, you can't create a surcharge to be applied only to bookings longer than a certain number of days, or with more than a certain number of guests.
  • Pets: Must select Pet as the multiplier, even though no actual multiplication is performed - Pet Fee is only allowed as per-stay.

On the guest display when a guest is looking for the quote, Airbnb will roll together all of the following fees into the nightly rate -- they do not show in an itemized breakdown. So the rate as displayed to the guest will show the total of the following from OwnerRez:

  • Nightly rate
  • Channel rate adjuster
  • Per night surcharges
  • Matching per stay surcharges (except Linen), divided by number of nights and added to the nightly rate
  • Linen fee, added to the cleaning fee

Airbnb displays the fees as follows:

Fee name Guest display (where each fee is included)
Cleaning fee Cleaning fee
Resort fee Nightly price
Management fee   Nightly price
Community / Property Association Nightly price
Linen fee Cleaning fee
Pet fee Nightly price

OwnerRez surcharges can be set to apply to specific seasons - but, Airbnb doesn't honor that.  You also cannot have multiple surcharges with the same name, you only get one per property per fee name.

Per-additional-guest surcharges are supported by Airbnb with the following distinctions.

 

  • They only work for "guests", because Airbnb doesn't distinguish between Adults and Children.
  • They are valid only per-night, not per-stay.
  • Airbnb only accepts whole dollar amounts for this fee, so the surcharge will be rounded up to the nearest dollar.
  • Additional guest fee surcharges may be slightly off when displayed on Airbnb.
  • OwnerRez calculates the surcharge by multiplying the surcharge amount by the "for every number" criteria.
These are added directly to the nightly rate pushed and are not listed separately in the quote shown to the guest, although they are visible in OwnerRez.

Pet fees

You can configure a pet fee that apply to Airbnb just like any other channel, with one important caveat: Airbnb only supports per-stay pet fees! Per-night pet fees will be ignored and excluded from your Airbnb listing.  Also, Airbnb only charges one fee regardless of how many pets are coming -- so you may want to note any limitations or additional fees for additional pets in your house rules.  Last, Airbnb requires your pet fee to be no higher than your lowest nightly rate - so at most, you can charge the cost of one additional night as a pet fee.

The OwnerRez setting of "no pets" or "pets allowed" is also transmitted to Airbnb via the API.  Users set their pet rules by navigating to their specific Property > Rules > Change > Size Restrictions > Pets.

Please note that the pet fee is not enumerated separately like cleaning or service fees. The pet fee is added to the nightly rate like management, resort, and other types of fees. If you're looking to double-check that your pet fee is working, first select some nights without any pets and record what the nightly rate is. Then select a pet and compare the new nightly rate. You should see the price per night increase exactly by the amount of your pet fee.