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I did all this for my listings effective 11/1 - wish I would have been caught up on this thread. Guess they haven’t rolled it out in the US? Back to the old pricing… 
I saw somewhere else that cleaning fees will also be rolled into the nightly rate, rather than a separate charge? Is this correct? Bummer if it is.
Where did you see that?
JF
I doubt cleaning fees will get wrapped in by air. I think it is smart for hosts to wrap them in though.
Never charged cleaning fee - isn’t cleaning our job ? and never like paying it either
when I’m travelling , seems like a cheap scam to add-on while the nightly rate
stayed artificially low. Just stayed 2 days in Vancouver Airbnb - nightly price was $70
and cleaning fee was $70, and it wasn’t even that clean…
B.com includes the cleaning fee in the commission charged
Caveat emptor…
202020
JF
Below are screen shots of how pricing displays in my area. This condo is $104/night. Occupancy taxes are not included until the final reservation step
If you only clean once per reservation (as most hosts do), then having a cleaning/preparation fee is the most fair method of optimizing your cost structure. If you include the cleaning fee in your nightly rate, then you will almost always be cheating either yourself or your guests, depending on the length of the reservation. What a cleaning fee should ultimately do is to encourage longer stays by making the overall nightly rate lower for longer stays.
I agree that guests don’t like it, but that’s not actually problem with the fee, it’s a problem with Airbnb’s interface. All of the fees are known when a guest searches with check-in/out dates and they could roll all of their fees into the nightly rate shown before booking, but they chose the slimy marketing way of waiting until you’ve invested more time in before showing the final price. Some regions have already made them stop that practice and given that they are moving to the host-only fee model, I would expect they will do it everywhere soon.
My price is fair and I have no interest in encouraging longer stays. Hotels wrap it in, I want the price you see to be the price you pay.
RR
Well , it was a Super Host…
I think that the price we usually get for our accommodation is whatever the market would bear , and that’s where the cleaning fee and 15% host commission meet - since we canot change the price level much , we might have to absorb all or part of the commission , and no cheap tricks like added fees to give ourselves a tip.
I wonder if the level of pricing will move after these changes will take place,
I’m afraid prices will not go anywhere, definitely not up and we’ll effectively
be cheaper by 10-15%.
You know your market, and I certainly don’t. But I would automatically increase prices to offset the additional fee. I assume most hosts will do the same; those who don’t might well fail.
I have never found that price was the main criterion on which guests decided. My Airbnb location has always been more expensive than others in the area, and (until we closed because of the pandemic) we had great occupancy for all three years that we were open.
I saw it in another thread…
I saw it somewhere else, in a Community Center thread, but can’t find it.
I don’t like to include them, because it encourages longer stays, IMO. I have a small cleaning fee that is negligible if you are staying more than 1-2 days.
We received an email from AirBnB about a month ago telling us that we will be moved to host-centric pricing because we either use third party software to access AirBnB, were in a ‘selected’ country (the meaning of which AirBnB were unable to explain), or were running a serviced appartment. All of which was untrue. When challenged they changed their story and said it was being rolled out to everyone. This disingenuous approach got my blood boiling. I have little issue with the principle of moving to this pricing model but when asked to point me to listings which already use this model in Cornwall UK, they claimed they were unable to. I have searched through over 100 properties in Cornwall and have been unable to find any property without a guest service fee. I only asked because I want to see how such a change in the model would present my property when compared to those on the guest service fee model. I have simply been told to leave feedback. Pathetic. This may signal the parting of the ways for me. I simply do not trust these people anymore.
That was someone posting an article from some Greek newspaper, and was full of inaccuracies.
Both BDC and VRBO allow cleaning charges to be added, and neither of those have indicated any changes to that in the immediate future. In many markets a cleaning fee is pretty much the norm, so can’t see Airbnb removing the option. That said, it is Airbnb we’re talking about here so anything is possible!
More fool you for “trusting” them in the first place.
On a fairly generic search for “Cornwall” with Dec dates, I found three on the first page.
JF
Thanks JohnF. Not sure why my search didn’t return anything. I’ll give it another go.
JohnF. Still can’t located those guest service fee-less properties you found. Would you like to give me a clue with a link or a name? Many thanks!
Search parameter:
Number 2:
Number 16:
Number 18:
I’m in Spain, so your search results page may differ from mine, although if you use a different browser from the one you access Airbnb with, it shouldn’t vastly different right now.
JF
Many thanks JF. Most helpful and gone some way to allaying my fears!
