Good news Airbnb bookers! For the longest time there’s been a potential downside when booking stays and paying with Airbnb gift cards.
When choosing how to pay for your stay, you get a couple of choices; one is to pay in full up front and the other is to pay 50% now and 50% later. The downside came in when choosing the latter option and paying with gift cards. You could pay for the first half of the cost with gift cards, but when coming to pay the balance later on, Airbnb didn’t allow you to use your gift card balance to do that – you had to pay by credit or debit card.
That feature was particularly troublesome for infrequent Airbnb bookers who had preloaded a gift card to their account, only to find out they were stuck with its balance and having to fork out more money for the second half of the stay. For more expensive stays, that could be a pretty significant sum of money. If they weren’t planning on using Airbnb again any time soon, having hundreds – or even thousands – of dollars sitting with Airbnb was frustrating.
Thankfully Airbnb has, at some point in the recent past, updated their system. You can now book a stay, pay for half of it up front and then redeem Airbnb gift cards for the second half of the charge later on. That’s a simple thing that you would’ve thought would be possible up until now, but at least it’s now an option for those who like to split when they pay for the cost of their stays.
Demflyers posted about it in 2021 so it’s been possible since at least last year but good reminder