The Federal Court of Australia has directed Airbnb to pay a fine and to provide compensation to users in Australia who were charged in US Dollars, instead of Australian currency, when they made bookings on the site.

An Australian court has ordered Airbnb, an online marketplace for short-term rentals, to pay a fine of AUD 15 million or USD 10 million for misleading customers by not clearly showing that prices for its property rentals were listed in USD, instead of AUD, which are worth less.

According to reports, Airbnb has also provided the court with an undertaking that it would pay as much as another AUD 15 million in compensation to the affected customers, who had made more than 70,000 bookings paid in US Dollars.

About 2,088 customers complained to Airbnb customer support about being charged in USD, according to the court ruling. Some were told by Airbnb customer support that they had chosen to see prices in US currency even though they had not, the ruling said.

Some of the customers had also been charged fees by their banks for paying in USD, the ruling said.

Gina Cass-Gottlieb, the Chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, said in a statement that customers had reasonably assumed that the prices were in Australian dollars. “They were on Airbnb’s Australian website, searching for accommodation in Australia and seeing a dollar sign. By paying in USD, these consumers were charged more than they expected to pay, and were deprived of a chance to make an informed decision about whether to make the booking because of this misleading conduct regarding the price,” Cass-Gottlieb said.

According to the ruling, Airbnb will contact customers who are eligible for compensation by February 5, 2024. The agency initiated proceedings against Airbnb in June 2022.

“The company fixed how it showed currencies after the problem in Australia was raised. While only a very small percentage of Australian guests are believed to have been impacted, we are disappointed that this happened. Airbnb would like to apologise to those guests,” says Susan Wheeldon, Airbnb’s country manager for Australia and New Zealand.

Justice Brendan McElwaine of the Federal Court of Australia said in the ruling that the lack of clarity about the currency was “not the result of deliberate conduct, designed to intentionally mislead.”

The Airbnb platform should have defaulted to Australian currency for people using it in Australia, the ruling said, but there were “bugs and/or edge cases” that caused the system to inaccurately identify some users as being located in the United States. The court ruling said that Airbnb changed the platform in August 2021 to use the “USD” abbreviation when US Dollars are the applicable currency.