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I don’t charge a fair price, I charge whatever I can get away with. My rates during the pandemic were double of what I’m charging today.
Rather than fairness in cleaning fees, the bigger problem to worry about is whether the higher daily price that includes cleaning will make me uncompetitive for longer stays. One has to look into the most common length of stay for the listing and the come up with the price accordingly. Airbnb rulesets are helpful but the rulesets are imperfect if you host a lot of stays longer than 7 nights.
Overall, Airbnb has botched the whole cleaning fees, and service fees implementation. The pro OTAs like Expedia/Priceline know how to do it better.
No, I don’t think that’s what they mean. They don’t realize they are being charged for cleaning as part of the room rate. If they did, they wouldn’t complain about a separate cleaning fee for an Airbnb if they have more than a 1 or 2 night booking- they would realize that is better for them financially than the cleaning fee being added to the nightly rate as an average no matter how long they stay.
That they want to see a total price is true for a lot, or most guests, but not because they understand that they are being charged for cleaning at hotels, too.
I think things have changed in the past 2-3 years at hotels as the public dialog about STR v. hotels has become more prominent, and travel demand has surged.
Also I would distinguish between fees for services that are optional and not universal to all or even most guests (valet parking, dipping into the mini bar, early check in, which is really extending your rental and ought to incur a fee) and fees that are obligatory and totally unavoidable (resort fees). Most add on fees at hotels are taxes.
I just booked a 30 day trip using 7 hotels in Europe. A couple hotels charge for parking but I’m using only public transportation. Other than that, there were no fees such as you’ve describe at any of those hotels.
I’m sure hospitality businesses everywhere try to figure out how to be more profitable. That part is the same but they do it in different ways because of the regulatory environments they operate under.
The “resort fee” trend was to avoid being compared on price and avoid paying the commission to OTAs. Then Booking.com started charging commissions on the “second room rate” type fees that are mandatory as resort, destination fee, etc.
The Airline industry is a big fan of the unbundled approach (charge separately for each service). The claim is travelers can choose what they want to pay for. They say it is in the name of fairness, but the main goal is to confuse guests so they can’t compare your prices to other competitors.
As consumer awareness grows, and regulation grows, I’m sure hospitality businesses will try to figure out how to beat OTAs and extract more money from customers in different ways. The game will evolve.
As an Airbnb host, I am always interested in figuring out more ways to be appealing to guests, while charging as much as I can.
Timing the cleaning fee to the number of nights doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. You still need to change all the linen, clean the baths, kitchen, etc. We charge $160 which is what we pay the girl(s) who clean.
We charge a per person supplemental for guests over the usual amount and pay her 1/2 of it to cover the additional laundry. The other have goes to hot water and utilities etc.
In Brazil the cleaning fee is about 25% of what I see in the states but then people earn much less than in the US
I think it’s totally at the host’s discretion and is noted in the listing but am sorry that you are getting such a strong response here. It may be one way of discouraging short stays without having a high minimum. It is easier to look at total cost when booking than it used to be.
The hotels I’ve stayed at in the last five years certainly do have fees for parking, pets and incidentals like $2 for a plastic bottle of water they paid 8 cents for. Hotels in an area of the city with parking surrounding the hotel have free parking. Those same chains in a city with a parking garage charge for parking.
Possibly they didn’t used to have so many guests travelling with pets, but it seems like so many people thought getting a “pandemic puppy” was a great way to fend off boredom. If the hotels only used to have a couple of rooms to clean if pet hair and possibly worse, they may have considered it not such a big deal, but if half their rooms end up with pets, it’s a different story.
The “ESA” claim never used to be a thing, either, so pet owners used to board their pets more or leave them with a friend or relative when they went out of town. Now everyone seems to think that they need to bring Fido along.
As for the pandemic puppies, I just read a post today on a Mexico forum I follow by a woman who runs a dog rescue facility. She said they have far more dogs now than they can find homes for, because whereas they used to find lots of people in the US and Canada looking to adopt a rescue dog, there are so many people taking their pandemic puppies to shelters, now that they are no longer stuck at home, and find having a dog is negatively impacting their lifestyle, that the shelters in the US and Canada are also full.
I had a guest who used to take rescue dogs from Mexico to new owners in Portland, Oregon. When I said surely there must be dogs in Portland that need homes, she said no. Because people were hip to spaying and neutering, there was far more demand than supply. Apparently that’s no longer the case, as people no longer need the “boredom relief” of the living creature they thought they wanted.
