Leaving Hostaway because of the 2% booking fee?

Resort & Parking Fee Set Up

Salty Snow Prope
Feb 17, 2020 3:07 PM
Joined Feb, 2020 3 posts

Hello

We have been running our listings exclusively on VRBO that past 7 years and have recently decided to make some major changes to increase exposure and direct bookings hopefully; which have lead us to signing up for OR and getting our listings set up on Airbnb & Booking.com.

My question revolves around how you as owners are setting up fees in OR to be pushed to Airbnb beings their set up for fees is different than that of VRBO & Booking in the sense that you can not set up a per night fee.

For two of our listings we have a nightly parking & nightly resort fee that you can charge in someway through VRBO and Booking but not through Airbnb. I'm hoping to be able to set rates in OR and push to all platforms (VRBO, Airbnb, Booking) but can't wrap my head around how to best incorporate the parking and resort fees being the escalators can not be used since the percentage would need to change as the seasonal rate changes?

The only thing I can think of is to eliminate all fees on VRBO & Booking as lump them into the nightly rental price; but I am not reallly fond of that idea because it raises the rate and the parking is really an optional fee that I would like guests to know about if they choose to shuttle to the unit?

So open to thoughts and suggestions as to how you all are doing it as maybe I am over complicating and thinking this. Thanks in advance I do appreciate it!

Chris Hynes
Feb 20, 2020 7:04 PM
OR Team Member Joined Oct, 2012 1401 posts

You can do this because there's some magic for nightly surcharges that goes on in the background depending on the channel:

- For VRBO it will be sent as a separate fee because they do support nightly fees
- For booking.com, you configure fees on the booking.com (we send nightly rate and are not able to send fees other than guest fee)... then whatever charges booking.com sends back based on that we will use
- For Airbnb, any nightly surcharges will be added to the nightly rate pushed

So if you create the nightly surcharge, it should work -- of course, make sure to test on each site and review that you get the expected result.