Is it possible to make the price more, if the guest only wants one night?
The only way of achieving this is to add a cleaning fee (if you haven’t already). This is a one off payment that the guest makes regardless of whether they are booking 1 night or more. So let’s say your nightly rate is £50 and your cleaning fee is £10 the guest would actually pay £60 per night if they book 1 night but only £52.50 per night if they book 4 nights. Obviously there’s ABNB’s cut to factor in too but you get the idea.
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Thanks for the feedback! That’s a very good suggestion, although we worry it might be rather discouraging to applicants, when the competition don’t have cleaning fee’s.
At the moment, we have simply set the charge to ÂŁ80 per night and then will offer discounts when asked.
Seems to be a feature missing from ABNB to be able to charge more for short term stays.
Yes, you’re quite right. There has been much discussion on this forum about this deficiency in the Airbnb system.
I added a cleaning fee recently. It’s not that common around here. But it was the only way to increase the price for one night stays, short of disallowing them completely. It doesn’t seem to have made any difference to bookings.
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Add the cleaning fee. When guests search for a room with specific dates, they see the cleaning fee factored into the price. If it’s on par with other listings in your area, I doubt prospective guests will flinch.
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Add the cleaning fee. It hasn’t hurt us at all. As long as it’s not exorbitant, it’s not going to shock guests. Ours is only $20. That makes it worth it to add to the profit we would make for our time.
And it rolls into the nightly price quoted.
Hey, it can’t hurt to try it, right?!
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I used to think that adding it would affect bookings, but it hasn’t in my case.
Figure out your “fixed costs” for each booking and put them into the cleaning fee, then reduce your nightly rate slightly. Your fixed costs are things that cost the same whether the guest is there for one night or five. For example, the cost of washing the linens, paying yourself for your actual cleaning time, a welcome basket of snacks you might supply, etc.
I settled on 30€ and reduced my prices by 10€. That means for a guest staying 3 nights (my average guest), I get the same amount and they pay the same price. It means I no longer feel like single-night guests get ripped off - they are paying extra because it still takes me just as long to clean after they leave.
Week-long guests get a slight discount with this system. But I’m ok with that as they give me a good, solid, hassle-free income without as much effort.
As for the entire PROBLEM of single-night stays (yes, they annoy me slightly, since they’ll book a single night in the middle of a 5 day space and I end up being stuck with gaps that don’t get filled), I was forced to solve this by having a separate listing. My main one has a minimum stay of 3 days. I only offer the gap days on my second listing and I discount them to sell them.
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