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Sorry for the delay. I haven’t been active on here lately.
I’m not sure how the math equations fit in here exactly, as this is not a strictly financial decision we’ve made, but this is what it looks like if I put in dates as if I’m about to rent our cabin.
As a guest I’d enjoy seeing that I’ll pay zero service fees. As a guest I also have no idea if the nightly rate is higher than it would have been had the fee been non-zero. My point is that the perception of the potential guest would be such that they may me more likely to book. In the end the total cost to the guest, and our payout, is roughly the same. But this looks better to the guest, hence, greater likelihood of getting the booking.
Now, you could go one more step to get rid of that pesky cleaning fee. Let’s suppose that most of your stays are three nights, with some at two nights, some at four or more.
In that situation, you could increase your nightly fee by $25 a night and most likely recover your cleaning fee. If you wanted to do more math you could look at your breakdown for the last 12 months and calculate what addition to your nightly fee would result in recovering all or most of your cleaning fee.
Then you eliminate your cleaning fee so the guest sees no additional fees.
In the end the client sees your nightly rate BUT ALSO the total cost. See below:
So the guest’s total cost is going to be the same whether you build in the cleaning fee or not. BUT, to your good point, the guest – when it clicks on your listing – will see no additional fees. Nada, Zip, Nothing.
What’s more, as several Hosts here have commented – and this makes sense – that when a guest sees that there is no cleaning fee they tend to take better care of the property.
Because it is intuitive that a guest might think, especially when a cleaning fee is large, ‘Why should I clean up?? I’m paying a $XXX cleaning fee!’
So I CAN’T have zero default cleaning fee (minimum of $5). But I CAN have my 2-night stays free of cleaning fees (and 1-night stays, if we allowed those). [On a separate note, I was thinking of allowing 1-night stays, but I would set special pricing to approximately 80% of what a 2-night stay would be. ]
NOPE! Can’t set $0 for short stay cleaning fee. When I do it deletes the differentiation and ALL stays have a $5 cleaning fee. But I can set the short-stay fee to $1, which seems silly.
Of course you can have a zero cleaning fee. You just don’t list a cleaning fee. I’ve never charged a cleaning fee, nor do lots of hosts. Am I misunderstanding you?
20202020 is just a space filler because a post here has to have at least 20 characters. When I first started on this forum, and saw 4 20s in a row, I thought they were indicating that they were pot-friendly.
Okay, I figured it out! When the red text warns you to please use a value of 5 to xxx dollars, just leave the zero there and hit save. No more cleaning fee. They’re tricky with that red, invalid field entry text.
Ah. Sorry, I don’t know. I would assume you delete a cleaning fee elsewhere, not by clicking on the cleaning fee, in true completely unintuitive Airbnb fashion.
I just hold down the period button on my keyboard as I’m usually on my computer.
Then it registers as the number of characters needed but typically truncates the display so it shows as 2 or 3 ellipses. Someone commented that they thought I didn’t know the proper use of ellipses at the end of a sentence…
