How to See Actual Prices for Airbnb Listings
Airbnb , your interface sucks. I am not talking about photographs and presentations of beautiful houses and apartments that I can take for the coming vacation; I’m talking about prices. When I go through the ads, I want to see the actual daily prices – with commissions and everything included in the daily average, since I use Airbnb precisely because I try to stay within a certain budget.
In other words, it’s frustrating to find a great place on Airbnb that’s just below my price range just to watch it skyrocket above what I want to spend every night due to all the different fees that are charged right before you are booking a place.
This must be David’s case, because David Sawyer obviously had the same complaint – only instead of just smiling and dealing with it , he decided to create a browser extension that will show you the true daily Airbnb price with averaged fees for the location. in the daily price before booking. You can download the extension for Chrome and Firefox right now, but there are a few important caveats.
First, this extension only works when you are on the booking page of a regular listing. You will see the old price until you enter your check-in and check-out dates. When you do, the price above the star rating of the rental will be updated to indicate that it now “includes fees” with a large checkmark – you cannot skip it.
Second, the extension doesn’t seem to work for Airbnb’s more trendy “Airbnb Plus” ads just yet. If you’re looking for a royal treatment, you just need to calculate the daily price yourself until Sawyer releases an update for the expansion (cough-cough).
Finally, the extension only works when you are on the ad booking page. It would be perfectly fine if fees for all places were factored into their prices when you browse potential places to stay, but this seems to have some technical limitations, as Sawyer explained on Reddit :
“Pretty much the main reason is that I would have to rely on Airbnb’s internal API to calculate the total cost of the trip, and I feel like Airbnb might cap my rating because I’ll probably be making a bunch of requests at a time. when the property list has changed. Also, using their internal API can easily break the extension if they change what they need to request or what they respond with.
I’m also not 100% sure that I can only achieve this with API calls. They can send other values needed to calculate prices with the HTML payload of the listing page, so this can add a lot of complexity as well.
Also, I suppose my mind is less focused on “can this be done?” and a lot more about “how bad will it be to maintain / update when Airbnb changes something?” When creating an extension that modifies the content of a web page, your main enemy is the page / code structure you change from under you, so building reliability is a huge goal of mine. “
While Sawyer’s expansion is small and slightly limited in usefulness, it’s still a great way to avoid having to wreck a calculator to figure out a potential listing’s true daily rate. And if Airbnb reads this – you guys could do this pricing magic on your side, right?