Cleaning fee not paid on Cancellation

Not really worth a post but an excuse to wish everybody on the forum Merry Christmas.

We have flexible cancellation conditions. A couple who were supposed to check in tonight for 10 nights cancelled this morning and it seems that we will get our 1 night cancellation fee but not our Cleaning Fee.

I’d always thought that the Cleaning Fee attached to getting the room ready for the guests who are paying the fee. Seems that it relates to cleaning the room after they depart.

As I say for $17 hardly worth a post … so I’ll add Happy New Year as well.

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Yeah, if they guest doesn’t show up, the cleaning fee is supposed to be refunded.

Then it would be called a “preparation fee”, which honestly is what a lot of hosts actually want, so you’re not alone.

Normally, you can treat a cleaning fee and a preparation the same way since your preparation should apply to the guests that check-in after the cancellation. However, with the very late cancellation, it’s certainly possible lose money if you provide perishable items like fresh flowers or food.

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Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and all that.

Brian covered it. It makes sense to not get the cleaning fee.

It does suck to have a 10 day booking canceled same day. Was it related to the pandemic?

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Delta and Southwest just cancelled 200 Christmas Eve day flights due to Omicron. Over 2000 flights globally have been cancelled. Don’t know where all those flights were headed, but bound to affect some hosts.

Happy Holidays all.

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It’s not just a matter of perishables. Where I live, between the dust, the gecko poop and the bugs, a cleaning wouldn’t last until the next guests unless they came within a day. Some cleaning would have to be done again. So it is definitely not a matter of cleaning after a guest, but before.

I don’t charge a separate cleaning fee myself, but guests who cancel within 24 hrs of check-in should forfeit the cleaning fee, IMO.

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They say it was. Visitors from outside our State of Queensland are required to present a negative test, no older than 72 hours (I think), before boarding their aircraft. They say they didn’t get their result back in time to fly that day and the next day was outside the 72 hours. They probably chose to go to counselling instead.

Yes flexible hurts when a booking is longer than 5 days. Be good to be able to configure cancellation conditions as flexible for the first 5 and moderate above 5.

Happy Christmas and thank you for your mod work and wisdom along the way KKC.

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You need a PCR test within 72 hrs of boarding a flight to fly into Canada too. Almost everyplace that does PCR tests are aware of the 72 hr. requirement and get you the results back long before that. I got mine back within 24 hrs from the lab I used for my test here in Mexico when I flew to Canada this last summer.

I would guess your guests either left it too late or were bsing.

lol, you shouldn’t underestimate how some states can’t get their testing in order. i had a test done in Queensland, and never got my results back at all, cos the nurse wrote my phone number down incorrectly (blame this on drive thru testing and they don’t even swipe your medicare card or anything). My daughter did the test with me, and she got her result back in 8 hrs, and as she was the one with the sore throat i figured we were both fine (this was months ago now, and when Qld had basically zero cases).

also, maybe this will help others understand, a comedy sketch but he kinda nails all our premiers, and the general feeling, exactly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYHsNraVto8

Also, the way NSW and Vic are going, the testing centres might have been overwhelmed. I personally am very forgiving for anyone with a covid-related cancellation, and i refuse to penalise anyone due to govt BS. We’ve all suffered too much as it is to start penalising each other, but not everyone feels this way. (those people are actually no better than Nazis, or racists who practiced apartheid, they just don’t know it because they think following the govt rules makes them right, despite what history has taught us).

And yes, I feel your pain over the cleaning fee, we are on a farm, i’ve had people complain about dust and cockatoo poo… like i can control for that! ugh. still, we usually do a 10min sweep on the day of guest arrival looking for last minute vermin and other things, and in summer I spray insecticide constantly on the OUTDOOR guest furniture. [edited so people don’t jump to conclusions and then feel ok to have a go at me about their incorrect assumptions]

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I hope you put that in the listing so I would never stay in such poisonous place.

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If I walked into a place that smelled of insecticide, I would turn right around and leave.

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relax, it’s the outdoor furniture, and you’d be more likely to complain about redbacks… how else should i kill them? by hand??? people seem to love to jump to wrong conclusions in these forums.

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it’s the outdoor furniture, sheesh. relax, did you seriously think i meant all the indoor furniture? you think you’d be ok with a redback instead? I’m pretty sure all my non-Aussie guests would have a heart attack on the spot.

Well, it’s hardly jumping to conclusions when you said you spray all guest furniture with insecticide. I see you’ve now amended it to say outdoor furniture, but we were responding to what was originally written.

And no, I wouldn’t have a heart attack on the spot. I live in the tropics, total bugville. Insects and spiders don’t freak me out at all, I find them fascinating. Of course, I would appreciate info on what was poisonous in an unfamilar area, so I could steer clear.

I spray nothing with toxic insecticide, although I do have a natural insecticide spray I occasionally use that is cinnamon oil based. But I only use that if there’s some out of control ant invasion or something. Otherwise Iive and let live, and the balance of nature seems to keep anything from over-proliferating.
The only things I squash if seen in the house or outdoor terrace are scorpions and cockroaches.

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Yes. And people love to argue. It’s just like the internet in 2021. If you can, just ignoring people or scrolling on to the next post can be a useful strategy.

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In the US, we don’t have redbacks. We have greenbacks. And we do not spray for them, we pray for them.

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I’m with @muddy and don’t use toxic insecticides. I vacuum up spiders in the house or on the windows. Outside, they catch mosquitoes and flies, so they’re my friends, since we rarely find toxic spiders here.

My veg and ornamentals are all organic. I have wild berries in the back yard.

I also haven’t put outdoor furniture in my back garden because it’s full of mosquitoes and no-see-ums when the breeze dies in the evening.

When my parents were in Jamaica in the Peace Corps, my mother had a lizard living in the house as organic pest control.

I have a friend who lives in an area of El Paso where their land is irrigated seasonally. It’s by the river and the irrigation canals where mosquito concentrations are highest. After she almost died of West Nile the property is now sprayed regularly by a commercial operation and the mosquitoes are no longer a problem.

I read an article 20 years ago in the Science section of the newspaper, that I saved, about a study they had done somewhere in Africa where the mosquitos were bad, and malaria and dengue were a big problem.

Mosquitos’ primary food source is fermented fruit and flower juice (I hadn’t known that). So they put out feeding stations with this juice, with a chemical added that would kill mosquitoes. They found that it reduced the mosquito population by 90% within a week!

Then, because this chemical they were using was expensive, and locals wouldn’t be able to afford it, they tried using simple boric acid in the juice, and found it worked just as well.

This method probably hasn’t been instituted everywhere because there’s little money to be made from it. So toxic chemicals are still being sprayed.

But on an individual basis, it’s something we could try if we live where there are lots of mosquitoes.

I bought mosquito curtains for my patio this summer. Flies were terrible and I’ve become more wary of mosquitos since my friend’s illness. I don’t want to spray poison because it’s poison and because of the dog boarding. This friend was a very anti insecticide person prior to her illness. Now she’s probably not interested in experimenting with various methods. If I were her I’d be looking to move but I haven’t been in her shoes.