Being able to break out variable and fixed costs is such a huge advantage to hosting businesses, and provides transparency to guests as well.
I set my cleaning fee’s to cover all of the variable costs that happen when a guest check’s out. Basically cleaning and linens/laundry. I know exactly what this will cost every time (minus the variances for dirty vs. clean guests). I recently started a worker owned collective cleaning company as well and to price Airbnb turnovers we do an assessment of the property and go over a checklist with the owner. It really varies property to property but we always charge by the job and not the hour as that keeps the worker owners accountable to timelines without feeling the need to rush through jobs at the expense of quality as we deduct from the fee if there are valid cleaning complaints.
It’s always way more expensive to hire a company to do cleaning because of the taxes and benefits we provide on top of the actual labor, not to mention insurance, transportation, supplies, and a full-time manager to schedule and communicate everything that’s going on ever day. If you’re working with an individual who is happy to be paid in cash you won’t be able to deduct from your business expenses legally (in the US anyway) but it may be worth it because of the savings vs. a professional company.
I don’t let competition affect my variable costs strategy (cleaning fee’s). It’s very important for me to pay fair wages and to compensate the companies that do great work for me, and that has a real cost that doesn’t change from check-out to check-out. For a bigger house, sometimes the cleaning fee will be higher than the nightly rate on a mid-week day in the winter.
There are tons of differing opinions on cleaning fee’s, but this is what has worked very well for me and is now working well for my clients as well.
