Creating Trigger Email to Collect Taxes

ISSUE:
*** I need to collect 3% from each AirBnB guest to pay my local county lodging tax. The 3% is assessed against the total of: the total rent, plus the cleaning fee plus the admin fee (all of which ABB collects, and each of which are listed separately in my ABB listing).
*** I live in Tennessee, where ABB automatically collects/pays our state and local sales taxes (9.75%). Those taxes are calculated based on the three charges mentioned above.
*** I am trying to see if there is a way to create a Custom Email Template that will pull the three amounts against which my local lodging tax needs to be assessed. I am not active on ABB yet so I don't know what fields OR pulls. I also don't know the specific definitions of many of the "field inserts" OR offers.
*** When writing a custom email it would be great if I could use a field insert like {BTGUESTFEE}. But that specific field won't work if it includes the 9.75% sales tax ABB is assessing. (Because I obviously don't want to charge 3% against ABB taxes.)
*** So, need to know if pulling those three fees is possible and which field insert it would be.

THEN, IF ABLE TO DO THE ABOVE:
*** Is there a way to calculate a 3% against those three fees using something like {BFPPOA}? (I know that's not what that was intended for, but trying to think outside the box here.)

Hahahaaa! Hope I explained that properly. Trying to work smarter, not harder, so setting up something like this thru a trigger email would be amazing. Thanks for any/all ideas!

Hi Lydia,

Not possible to do that based on the current fields and what our Airbnb/Channel Bridge process would create. You could use a custom field (at the booking level) to manually define this on every booking. So you would open the booking, crunch the numbers and write "$485" (for instance) in that field for the booking. Then when sending the email for what you need to collect, the email template could reference the custom field code so that it shows the manually entered amount correctly.

Ahhhh - good idea! I will try that. THANK YOU!

Lydia, I am in TN also. I collect 3% tax via Airbnb resolution center. By the way that way they do not apply CC fee or service fee to it but it is a manual process. it is against ABB terms to collect amounts outside of ABB, so some guest may complain.

"it is against ABB terms to collect amounts outside of ABB"

A lot of people (on the forums I follow) say they collect various things outside of ABB. Some claim they never do the crippled ABB security deposit thing, but request for damaged items directly from What if you upsell when ABB doesn't do that kind of thing?

Curious where you saw this?

BDC (at least used to) do a lot of having you collect from the guest at the door.?

It is a message right in your dashboard. You have to remember, Airbnb users are a separate "breed". They worship Airbnb. maybe 4 out of 5 will be oK if you request amount outside of airbnb, but the 5th will report you or raise a fuss.

The suggestions and rules seem to depend on which Airbnb rep you talk to -- different ones have different solutions.

Their API team says they are working on taxes and resolutions and hopefully will have a bit more control and automation around them by earlier next year.

Chris - hope you guys can find a way to help us with this. A big topic of discussion for a lot of our Tennessee owners (as Victoria says - some ABB guests will go along with anything and others will go along with nothing outside the site). There's just got to be a better way to do it, particularly with an eye to accurate financial reporting. Many folks don't have the time to do what Victoria does. But if owners just randomly go in and raise their nightly ABB rates by 3% that really doesn't make things accurate. Really appreciate your looking into a solution for all of us.

Right, just allow you to specify the tax. VRBO needs to do the same. It's ironic that the platforms make it so hard to do the right thing.

Airbnb has said they're working on that (direct tax remittance) as well as resolutions via API, so hopefully in 6 months or so these things will be a lot easier :-)

TOTALLY AGREE! Would be great if they would get out of our business altogether and allow us to collect all of it.