Eventually Airbnb will do away with cleaning fees and all hosts will have to roll it into their nightly rate.
I have a guest coming this weekend that had all good reviews except for one. Host complained that he had dishes rinsed in sink but not washed, plus a couple of other what seems to me minor complaints. When I asked him about the review he said that he as annoyed that he had to pay a large cleaning fee and still had to do his dishes.
I explained that each host can set their now rules and that cleaners are hard to find and prices have going up. The good thing for my STR is that I provide paper and plastic wear because there’s no sink in the kitchenette area and I don’t want folks washing their dishes in the bathroom sink so no worries about unwashed dishes.
2 Likes
It would have been better to explain that there is hours of cleaning involved in preparing a listing for a guest and that a guest cleaning up their own personal messes, including washing their dishes, is expected in most Airbnbs and is not what the cleaning fee covers.
4 Likes
This guy sounds clueless. Obviously Airbnb doesn’t tell guests to clean the whole house and he’s probably one of those guests who thinks being asked to wash his dirty dishes and bag up the garbage means he’s doing all the host’s cleaning for them, i.e. “cleaning the entire house”.
5 Likes
I’d wager he’s one of those folks who think Airbnb is some kind of Hotel Chain and then complains about how inconsistent Airbnb is between locations.
5 Likes
That’s beside the point. Plenty of folks pointed it out to him in the thread.
But the post had 135,000 likes when I saw it a couple of hours ago. Now it has 166k. It has over 12k retweets and quote tweets. And I saw another thread recently with a similar theme.
A simple way for Airbnb to avoid this kind of negative advertising is to disallow a separate cleaning fee.
1 Like
Yes, I get that. And I don’t charge a cleaning fee myself, but it’s easy for me to incorporate it into the price, as I do my own cleaning, it takes me about an hour and a half, and I have a three day minimum. Also only host one guest, so it’s never a big mess nor piles of laundry.
But I don’t quite understand how hosts with entire homes that sleep more people and who hire cleaners can build it into their nightly rate, which I’ve always thought was the reason it’s listed separately. I can’t imagine any guest who would be okay with a $250 cleaning fee for a one night booking, but if the host incorporates it into the nightly rate at say, $75, that’s going to be hugely expensive for someone who books 10 days.
1 Like
Since I don’t host that kind of listing I can’t address that. But I’m sure if guests who object to “cleaning fees” quit booking listings that use that them and enough guests truly hate “cleaning fees,” then hosts who aren’t getting bookings will figure it out. Meanwhile it’s twitter clickbait and something for Airbnb to consider as a policy change.
Another possibility for Airbnb to consider is to develop its software (STOP LAUGHING!) so that the Host enters the cleaning fee and the software builds it into the nightly price based on the booking request.
5 Likes
That makes a lot of sense. (Except for Airbnb actually creating software that does this without thheir inevitable glitches)
2 Likes
I’ve had cleaning fees off and on but mostly off. I did put it back on during the pandemic because common sense and Airbnb were asking us to go above and beyond. I mostly did it for the one or two airing out days. That wasn’t cleaning but it was costly.
The premise of a “cleaning fee” seems odd given my experience in accommodations. I just can’t think of anywhere I’ve stayed over the last 40 years that had such a fee until Airbnb. Doing away with it seems the simplest.
I found it odd when I first signed up. It seemed to me that cleaning is part and parcel of hosting, the main part, even.
But then hosts who have entire place listings that take many hours to clean with multiple loads of laundry to do and cleaners to pay explained why it wasn’t really feasible to roll it into the nightly rate and it made sense.
Hosts like me and you can not charge a separate cleaning fee, and other hosts who have fairly standard length stays, like 2 nights, or a week. Seems like it would be a real headscratcher to do it though if it was an entire home that got sometimes 2 nighters, and sometimes 2 weekers, with sometimes 4 guests and sometimes 8.
In my experience having no cleaning fee works out better, the guests are more willing to do their dishes. My check out instructions start with, in order to continue to offer this cabin with no cleaning fee we ask that you help us out and … basically I ask them, if you use it clean it no need to strip the bed.
RR
2 Likes
My only objective in posting was to point out that apparently …checks twitter… hundreds of thousands (200k+ now) of people can think that having a cleaning fee together with rules about cleaning is a bad idea.
To make absolutely clear… I could give a 
but would like hosts who do charge cleaning fees to be aware.
1 Like
Yes, I would struggle to figure out what to charge for a nightly rate if the cleaning fee had to be rolled into it. At one point, I was hosting 12-14 in a house with 4-5 bedrooms (one bedroom was huge and comprised the entire third floor of the house and could fit 8 twin beds, plus chairs, night stands, etc.). It could take 3-4 people 6 hours to clean the house properly and set it up for the next guests. My cleaning fee for this house is $95 and I absolutely lose money on the cleaning. Even when I have only 1-2 guests and only me and one assistant doing the cleaning, that fee doesn’t cover the cost of the my assistant, much less cleaning supplies, consumables, etc.
Figuring out a cleaning fee when I’ve had from one to 18 guests, staying from 2 nights to 3-4 months, is a nightmare. I would welcome any ideas on how to do that.
Another issue, when no one else in your area rolls the cleaning fee into the nightly rate, your nightly rate looks way higher than the others, and people don’t bother sometimes to look at the full price vs the nightly rate.
3 Likes
I don’t see how you can incorporate a cleaning fee into a whole house listing when stays vary so widely. More than a struggle it seems impossible to do in a way that yields the Host the same cleaning fee. It is an important consideration because many of us already lose on the cleaning fee.
Yet it would be easy, or. seems so to me, for Airbnb to make the calculation and build into the nightly rate for the booking stay shown.
As to the comments that the cleaning fee struck many of us as odd when we first encountered it as guests, I felt the same as a guest. But I was not thinking it the whole way through. How can a Host possibly build in a fair cleaning fee into a DAILY rate when a stay could be just one night or seven nights or . . .more?
The only reason I don’t roll it in is exactly this. Every host in my area has one & i would price myself out of stays.
I don’t see the problem, 2 days or 10 days the nightly rate is the same. Longer stays I make more money. I am not trying to be the cheapest, or to be “fair”
I get mostly 2-3 night bookings, sometimes a week or 10 days. Works for me.
RR
So, what I’m saying is this:
We have a cleaning fee of $130 and usually a nightly rate of $170.
So if I wanted to eliminate a separate cleaning fee and combine it into the nightly rate, and still recoup my cleaning fee, the nightly rate would need to vary based on the length of stay.
I discovered in this forum that in Europe Airbnb’s software rolls the cleaning fee into the nightly rate, so that there is no separate cleaning fee. That seems to me to be a great idea. I wish they would do that here.
3 Likes
So $235 a night for a two night stay. Sounds reasonable, more reasonable than a $130 cleaning fee which guests do not like.
This works for me because I do not want people here more than a week, guests and fish…
RR
1 Like