News and notes from around the interweb:
- Get Etihad elite status after only one flight (HT: Loyalty Lobby)
- Archaeologists have found more than 40 shipwrecks in the Black Sea
- Chase and Deutsche Bank declined to sell Uber shares through their private wealth divisions. Bank of America and Morgan Stanley picked up the slack. (HT: Skift)
- Is Airbnb hitting everyone with a 3% currency conversion fee you cannot opt out of when renting abroad?
- Room service with a 1% charge to take your order on top of the customary service charge, delivery charge, and tax.
- India’s cancellation of 500 and 1000 rupee notes doesn’t just hurt the black market, it hurts the poor
Airbnb used to have a way to avoid the 3% forex fee through various ways of displaying prices in local currency. That option is gone. I recently complained to them about this on my recent stay, and they insisted that I’m dumb and don’t remember things correctly…that all my previous stays had a 3% fee. Sure enough, they actually went back and converted the invoices for all my past stays where I distinctly remember not paying the fee, to show that I have. They’ve sunk to a new low. Unfortunately in most cities they’re a necessary evil since the hotels are an even bigger racket and grossly overpriced, so I’ll just factor that 3% into my price and offer the hosts less.
Ritz-Carlton Boston? That prop has been the Taj Boston since January 2007.
Gary your link is for the Ritz-Carlton Boston Common across the Common in the area formerly known as the combat zone, and has been there since 2001. Do you proofread anything before posting or linking them?
@Josh G wtf are you complaining about now?
The NYTimes article of the shipwrecks was really fascinating, thanks for posting!
Yes, I got stung by the Airbnb conversion almost 2 years ago. I had a conversation with them and they explained it off as a technical issue, that the website is set up to automatically bill you in the currency of your address (not the bank’s address, mind you; when I lived overseas I had my foreign address on my U.S. accounts). They made it sound like choice of billing currency is something they intend to resolve, “we always look for ways to make our customer experience better” blah blah blah. Nada. I learned to just accept this as part of the cost of doing business with them.