Skift Take
TripAdvisor's decision to expand travelers' fees for vacation rentals will please Wall Street and could put pressure on Booking.com, which adamantly eschews such fees, to do likewise.
With HomeAway slated to follow Airbnb and begin charging travelers' a fee for vacation rentals in the first quarter of 2016, TripAdvisor has expanded its booking fees for travelers when they rent a vacation rental on TripAdvisor through a property manager.
At the same time, beginning December 9, TripAdvisor will lower property managers' commissions to 3 percent, from the current 12 percent to 15 percent. Individual owners will continue to pay a 3 percent commission on bookings -- the same as the reduced commission for property managers.
Under the change, TripAdvisor will begin to charge travelers a variable fee of 5 percent to 15 percent of the rental under its property manager business model.
When TripAdvisor introduced two years ago a business model that had property managers listing their vacation rentals for free and paying a commission on bookings, there was no booking fee for travelers.
There previously had been a traveler booking fee in TripAdvisor's business model for individual homeowners.
Lowering the fees that property managers pay was a demand that property managers made to TripAdvisor when they got into a dispute with TripAdvisor/Flipkey over a technology migration.
The 3 percent fee that vacation rental property managers will pay to Trip
