@Pat29 If Airbnb is collecting and paying taxes on your behalf, then you're ahead of the game. In our town, we're about to have occupancy tax payment imposed on short-term rentals, and the city's finance department has been trying to contact the various platforms, including Airbnb, to get them to collect and pay taxes. According to an update I heard last night, they're having "very little luck."
I think Airbnb responds only to threats from cities that they'll outlaw short-term rentals unless the booking platforms themselves handle tax collection and payment. That's really not how our city does things (they're not the best negotiators, from what I've seen), so I expect we'll be adding 9 percent to our rate, which sucks because Airbnb sees that as straight income and calculates its commission on that extra tax money as well.
I've asked several times that if Airbnb isn't going to collect and pay taxes on our behalf, the least it could do is simply add a line item to "Extra charges and currency" section of our pricing settings that allows hosts to cite a specific percentage for any occupancy taxes they are obliged to collect. (In my town it's 9 percent, or 15 if you throw in state of Texas occupancy tax.) That way, that amount could appear as a separate line item ("Local tax") in the Total Price guests see, and it would naturally separate the tax amount from the amount on which Airbnb charges a commission. I work with tech companies and this seems to me to be a fairly simple modification to make to the site, and it wouldn't even require a change to Airbnb's payout process.
