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Comment by boberoni | Hacker News Reader

I feel bad for those who were misled. Some of them ended up paying up to 25% more than they expected.

    >>> “Despite thousands of consumers complaining to Airbnb about the way prices were displayed, Airbnb didn’t amend its booking platform until after the ACCC raised the issue.”

This quote seems to indicate that Airbnb only started to care after threats from the ACCC.

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The ACCC wouldn't allege "Airbnb engaged in further misleading or deceptive conduct by telling many of them that it had displayed prices in US dollars because the user had selected this currency, when this was often not the case" without good evidence.

I also never encountered this during all of my bookings over the timeframe mentioned (2018-2021) making me think that I had a selection of AUD in the Preferred Currency settings https://www.airbnb.com.au/account-settings/preferences

So I must assume that a default selection of USD or (no default) setting was the one affecting these customers. Strange that Airbnb, with their widely regarded bleeding user experience, still chose to render $ amounts without the default? "USD" qualifier.

Was this really deliberate? Seems likely given their attention to details like this.

> Strange that Airbnb, with their widely regarded bleeding user experience, still chose to render $ amounts without the default? "USD" qualifier.

> Was this really deliberate? Seems likely given their attention to details like this.

Random guess: maybe some US customers are confused by (or even just dislike) seeing "US$" or "USD" as opposed to just "$"? If enough US customers are like this (or even just if Airbnb believes that they are), that might influence a decision to just display "$" when they think (however wrongly) the customer is from the US.

I've never used Airbnb, so can't comment on their UX specifically, but I've seen before web sites run by US companies which offer their services to non-US customers, but have a UX which starts out by assuming you are in the US, and you sometimes have to go out of your way to tell them that you are not, and it is easy to miss doing so.

as a Canadian, i mostly assume everything is in USD. surprised when it isnt. i like seeing the C$ then i know I'm getting a discount!

The ACCC's complaint [0] says that consumers in Australia were going to airbnb.com.au, to book accomodation in Australia, and were being displayed US dollar prices, marked simply as $ rather than USD or US$.

If you went to a .ca website, to book accomodation in Canada, you'd expect unadorned $ to mean C$ not US$.

[0] paragraph 10 of https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/ACCC%20v%20Airbnb%20Ire...

The issue happened a number of times to my partner. We have only ever used AirBnB in Australia, registered in Australia, and booked Australian properties. Why they would, in those cases, think defaulting to USD is acceptable is beyond me. It's not like it's a predominantly-US company; it has localized presence.

It definitely used to be the case that if one navigated to the .com domain then currency was in USD (even if within AU)

The .com.au domain was in AUD by default. I don’t believe there was a modal to redirect Australian visitors to the appropriate domain either.

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