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What is the Airbnb pet fee policy
The pet fee is an additional charge an Airbnb host can collect in exchange for allowing pets in their listing. It’s meant to cover the additional costs associated with hosting pets such as additional cleaning. It is set by the host as flat rate. The guest sees the pet fee included in the total price and not charged as a separate fee.
Airbnb pet fees for services animals
Airbnb explicitly does not allow hosts to collect pet fees on service animals. Guests are also not required to inform hosts that they are bringing a service animal. However, if a guest is claiming their pet is a service animal certain rules still apply.
Service animals cannot be left alone in a listing without a host’s approval. Therefore, one way for hosts to ensure the service animal policy is not being used as a loophole is to monitor if this is happening.
Service animals versus emotional support animals
Airbnb makes a distinction between service animals and emotional support animals. Hosts may collect a pet fee for an emotional support animal if the law permits it in the jurisdiction of the listing. Hosts can also decline a guest’s stay if they have an emotional support animal, again if the law permits.
How to collect Airbnb pet fees
Airbnb now allows hosts to collect a pet fee through their pricing tool by setting a flat rate per stay. While this is an improvement, this functionality is not very flexible. As we’ll see below, there are number of ways hosts choose to charge pet fees some of which are not solved by this new functionality. Hosts seeking more flexibility in charging pet fees will need to use the trip change request feature or the resolution center.
Methodology of the analysis
To uncover what hosts were charging for the pet fee, I analyzed 12k US listings I scraped in 2022. I first filtered on listings that allowed pets. This reduced the dataset from 12k listings to 2,858 listings. I then searched those listings for mentions of both pets and fees in either the listing description or additional house rules. This reduced the dataset to 613 listings. Finally, I deduplicated listings from hosts with multiple listings. I did this to create a dataset of unique samples. Hosts with multiple listings will charge the same pet fee across all their listings which would skew the data.
The final dataset contained 377 listings for which I did some manual classification. Fees were categorized as either flat rate or per day. I also identified whether it was specified that the fee was per pet or not.
Does Airbnb charge a pet fee
23% of hosts who allow pets charge some kind of pet fee. This was calculated as the 613 listings with mentions of both pets and fees divided by the 2,858 total listings that allowed pets.
How to charge a pet fee per night
22% of hosts charge a pet fee per night rather than a flat rate. Airbnb currently only allows hosts to charge a flat rate rather than a fee per night. Therefore, hosts looking to charge a fee per night must do so through a trip change request or the resolution center.
How to charge a pet fee per pet
41% of hosts specify that their pet fee is per pet. Again, Airbnb does not give hosts the flexibility to charge a fee per pet. Hosts would need to make any alterations to the flat rate pet fee through a trip change request or the resolution center.
What is the average Airbnb pet fee
The average pet fee is $20 per day or a $100 flat rate. We can see this in the following graphs which show the distribution of fees by the type of fee charged (flat rate or per night).
For both types of fees, there is some right-skew to the data which is bringing the average up. 85% of hosts charging a flat rate charge $150 or less. 89% of hosts charge a per night fee charge $25 or less per night. A reasonable pet fee would therefore be less than $25 per night or less than $150 flat rate.
Excluded from the distribution is 21% of listings in the dataset that did not disclose the pet fee indicating it would be applied on a case-by-case basis. The implication being that the pet fee could depend on several factors including the length of stay or the type of dog.
Key Takeaways
- 23% of Airbnb listings that allow pets charge a pet fee
- 21% of hosts charging a pet fee do not disclose it in their listing. Rather the pet fee is determined on a case-by-case basis
- 22% of hosts state their pet fee is per night. Hosts seeking to charge a pet fee per night will need to do so through a trip change request or the resolution center.
- 41% of hosts state their pet fee is per pet. Hosts seeking to charge a pet fee per pet will need to do so through a trip change request or the resolution center.
- The average pet fee is $20 per night or $100 flat rate.
