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Airbnb new user tax question (setup in OR?)

Rich S
Dec 12, 2019 10:36 AM
Joined Dec, 2018 301 posts

Still working on getting set up with Airbnb for a ski condo in Colorado (town of winter park, Grand county)

Q1 - I can't get Airbnb support to help me enable Professional hosting tools. I'm on my third support person, I keep just getting boilerplate answers. Any suggestions?

Q2 - I see that if you have business verification it can help to enable professional hosting tools, but I'm running my condos in my personal name, not in an LLC. So I don't have an EIN

Q3 - Maybe I can do what I need within OR and their API, I see that in the Airbnb Channel Bridge I can adjust Rates & Surcharges by a percentage which is what I want, do I then choose the "Included in Airbnb amount" option?

hoping someone can guide me here !

Chris Hynes
Dec 13, 2019 8:34 AM
OR Team Member Joined Oct, 2012 1400 posts

Sure thing, some answers:

1, 2) You should be able to enable professional hosting tools yourself in the account menu -- see screenshot. I don't think it requires a business verification --I just tried this with an account that's not set for a company and it was able to enable the pro tools.

3) If you go to the Local taxes and laws section in Airbnb for your listing, do you see the Custom option? Look at the screenshot here: https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/channel-management-api-integrations-airbnb-common-issues-questions#taxes

If you do have Custom available to you, you can configure taxes that way.

If not, you can have OwnerRez factor taxes into rates. To do this, go to the channel bridge or Airbnb API settings and set tax calculation to "included in Airbnb amount". This will cause OwnerRez to add any tax applicable to the Airbnb listing site to rates during pushed and back it out when bookings are imported. So go over to the Tax area and set the listing site criteria on the ones that Airbnb already remits to "Everything but Airbnb". And the ones you want to add rates, set those to All so that they do apply to Airbnb.

You could also do this yourself manually by setting the rate adjuster like you mentioned, but if you do that we won't know to back out the taxes again on the booking import.