Vacation rental guests booking this fall are running into a new hurdle at checkout: a refundable damage hold charged on top of the cleaning fee they already budgeted for. The hold typically shows up as a separate temporary charge or card authorization, distinct from the nonrefundable cleaning fee, and travelers say it can land alongside service fees and taxes, appearing only after a reservation is confirmed rather than when they first searched for the listing.
On Airbnb, the practice runs up against the platform’s own stated rules. According to Airbnb’s help center policy on security deposits, most hosts are not allowed to charge security deposits, either through the company’s Resolution Center or outside the platform entirely. The policy carves out one exception: “select software-connected hosts may collect a security deposit off of the Airbnb platform,” provided the charge is disclosed in the listing’s fee field. That carve-out is where guests appear to be running into stacked charges, since many professional property managers now use third-party booking software that applies a refundable hold as a separate step from the cleaning fee collected at reservation.
Federal regulators have taken notice of fee stacking broadly, if not damage holds by name. The Federal Trade Commission’s Trade Regulation Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees, which took effect May 12, 2025, requires businesses offering what it calls “short-term lodging” — a category the rule defines to include vacation rentals — to display a total price covering all mandatory charges up front, instead of revealing fees only at checkout. The rule also bars companies from “misrepresenting the nature, purpose, amount, and refundability of fees or charges.” Whether a temporary damage-hold authorization counts as “mandatory” under that rule, since it is typically released rather than kept, is a question the FTC has not yet addressed in public guidance.
Airbnb has separately moved toward showing guests a fuller total before they book. The company says its total price display now shows guests “the total cost of their reservation, including all fees before taxes, when they browse listings,” per its own announcement. That change was built around folding cleaning and service fees into the advertised nightly rate. It does not appear to capture a damage hold that a host’s outside booking software applies only after a reservation is already locked in, which is exactly the gap guests are describing.
Travelers hoping to avoid a surprise hold are largely left checking a listing’s full fee breakdown and messaging the host before booking, since charges authorized outside a platform’s standard checkout flow don’t always surface until after payment. Disputing an undisclosed hold typically means going through Airbnb’s Resolution Center or a Vrbo customer service case, and neither process guarantees a quick release once funds are already tied up on a card.
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