PSA: Airbnb Gift Card Caveats

I provide a lot of discounted Airbnb gift cards for my friends to save money on their Airbnb trips. Over the years I’ve learned a lot of nuances about these cards that I thought I’d share here. If you have anything to add, I’d love to make this a comprehensive post so please let me know and I’ll add it in!

Velocity Limit

There is a seemingly random velocity limit to adding cards to your account, and it seems that everyone’s account is different. Some that I’ve noticed are:

• $50 x 10 per day (seems to reset after midnight PST)
• $100 x 7 per day
• Some people say 6 total cards per day
• Some people have no velocity limit at all

You know you’ve hit the limit if the next card you try to add gets this error message: Unable to perform action. Please try again later or contact support if you need immediate assistance.

If you get this error, I’ve been told that you can call or chat (calling is more effective from what I’ve heard) to get someone to apply them for you manually. You can also try adding them using the other link (see the last paragraph of this post). Or wait a few hours (or until after midnight) to try adding more.

Update: Apparently if you call after you already got the velocity limit error, the representative won’t be able to help you either and will tell you just to wait. So if you are adding a lot of cards, I would advise you to call to add all the cards rather than trying to add them online. Here are the phone numbers:

United States
+1-415-800-5959 (San Francisco)
+1-855-424-7262 (toll-free)

Can’t use GC on second installment (update: now you can)

UPDATE 2021: Airbnb now allows to apply Gift Cards to the subsequent payments for a booking. Just click “Update payment details” once you get the payment reminder email.

On the Airbnb Gift Cards page, there are a few caveats on when you can’t use GC:

• Reservation of 28 nights or more
• Changes to existing reservations
• The second payment, if you choose to pay with the pay less upfront option
• (this is not on the page, but my friend Tonei says in the comments below that they cannot be used on reservations marked as “Business” either)

Airbnb gives users the option to pay a portion of the booking up front and the rest later in a feature called “Pay Less Upfront”. In the fine print of the terms for this feature, it states:

The Pay Less Upfront Feature allows Guests to pay a portion of a booking’s Total Fees at the time of booking and pay the remainder of the Total Fees at a later time prior to check-in. The Pay Less Upfront Feature is available to Guests for eligible bookings when they pay with certain Payment Methods. If your booking is eligible for the Pay Less Upfront Feature, the Airbnb Site, Application or Services (collectively, the “Airbnb Platform”) will notify you during checkout.

If you choose to book with the Pay Less Upfront Feature, the Airbnb Platform will notify you of the amount and schedule of each payment due. On the second payment due date, Airbnb Payments will automatically charge the original Payment Method you used to make the booking. Gift Cards and credits cannot be used for the second payment. Therefore, to the extent a gift card or credit is used for the initial booking using Pay Less Upfront, Airbnb will only charge the gift card or credit up to the first scheduled amount due.

Airbnb “Pay Less Upfront” Terms

The GC terms page also says: “Gift Cards may only be applied to new bookings and at the time of the initial booking request. Gift Cards cannot be used to purchase other gift cards or applied to a reservation of 28 nights or more.”

I’ve had a number of friends take Airbnb up on this offer to pay less upfront and get burned. Some of them thought they could secure their reservation first and then get discounted GCs from me to finish the payment. Or they just want to pay in two installments so they don’t have to float for so long (many people’s reservations are thousands of dollars!). They apply the GCs to their account and when it comes time to make the final payment, they can’t figure out how to force the GC balance to apply, until they find this line in the fine print: “Gift Cards and credits cannot be used for the second payment.”

I don’t see why Airbnb disallows GCs to be used on the second payment, and I do hope they change this policy soon, since I know at least a dozen people who’ve been burned by it. I now try to check with everybody who is getting GCs from me to make sure they’re not getting them for a second payment, or they don’t plan to split payment. Not everyone combs through and remembers all the restrictions of a gift card, especially since most other retailers that issue gift cards don’t really have restrictions like this.

Always Pay in Full

After reading the previous section, you will definitely want to pay for your Airbnb booking in full if you want to use GCs to cover all of it. However, it may not be immediately obvious how to do that, since it usually defaults to paying 50% now and 50% later, until the last page of the checkout flow where you “confirm and pay.” Thanks to my friend Jay for these screenshots:

Where to Apply the GCs

This should be pretty obvious to most people, but posting it anyways in case anyone is too embarrassed to admit they don’t know how to apply the GCs. It’s very similar to Amazon — once you apply a GC to your account, it goes into your gift card balance and it is stuck to your account forever.

Another thing to note is that you can load many gift cards into your balance, but if you didn’t use the entire balance at once, you cannot give the remainder to someone else to redeem on their account. This is in the terms: “Unused Gift Card balances in an Airbnb.com account may not be transferred to another Airbnb.com account.”

Once you’ve loaded the gift card to your account, they can be redeemed on eligible bookings (back to the caveats above) and they don’t expire. As Calwatch mentioned in the comments, note that you have to select the balance to be used when you’re making your reservation, because it’s not applied by default.

To load the GCs to your account:

1. Go to Payment Methods in your account
2. Under Airbnb Giftcard, copy and paste the 19 digit card number (all numbers).
3. After this, a new field should pop up which is where you copy and paste the alphanumeric pin (string of letters and numbers).

There’s a second place you can load GCs to your account, and some reports indicate that you may be able to bypass the velocity limit by using both methods to load GCs. So if you hit the limit, try the other method and let us know if it worked for you! https://www.airbnb.com/gift/redeem

Hope this helps those of you who are not frequent Airbnb users!