Outrageous Cleaning Fees

I just did a search in my area and I saw the nightly rate and the total rate for the stay without clicking further. So the price you see is the price you get, $500 is $500 no matter how you slice it up.

So more the reason to bundle it in for me. I do not want people paying a seperate fee and then not tidying up before leaving because in their mind they paid me to do it. Since I rolled in the fee I have had better experiences with guests cleaning up and they comment that they appreciate no cleaning fees.

Cleaning fees are taxable to the guest regardless in my area so no benefit to the guest.

In my welcome letter I remind them that they agreed in the house rules to leave the place as they found it, while assuring them we will do a thorough cleaning post stay and asking them to make it easy on us. In the letter I tell them what goes into preparing the place for them with an emphasis on the blankets and bedspreads being washed everytime and tell them that the housekeepers are working their asses off and I suggest a tip. 80% of the guests tip, rarely do the guests not do a good job cleaning up.

An argument I have heard it that by rolling the fee in it discourages longer stays. Yay, I do not encourage longer stays, my max is 14 days and my longest booking was 6 or 7 days and that suits me perfectly.

So I guess it just depends:)

I sure like my kettle, it heats the water right up.

RR

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Definitely many guests will take a separate cleaning fee as meaning they don’t need to clean up their personal messes. I’ve read lots of guest posts where they say that if the host wants them to wash all their dirty dishes and wipe down the counters and the greasy stovetop and make sure that all garbage is in the bin, why should they be charged a cleaning fee, since all the host now has to do is put out fresh towels and make the bed.

Lots of cluelessness out there about all the work that goes into cleaning an Airbnb.

On the other hand, I think there are some hosts who charge a cleaning fee and expect too much from guests, like stripping the bed and starting a load of wash, sweeping or vacuuming, or hoofing the garbage out to the street or the dumpster in the alley. If I were a guest, I would find that over the top.

So many anecdotes, so little data. I wonder if Airdna knows if listings with no listed cleaning fee get more bookings than those with it broken out separately?

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What guests really need to be made to understand is that they are paying for cleaning whether there is a separate cleaning fee listed or not. If they grasped that concept, it wouldn’t matter how it broke down on paper.

But it would be interesting to see some stats. There’s certainly plenty of listings that charge what appears to be a hefty cleaning fee that are fully booked.

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@muddy, your point is well made.

It’s the same in the retail world, where people think “free shipping” is free. Right. Like UPS or FedEx would deliver packages out of the goodness of their hearts.

“Free shipping,” just like “no cleaning fee,” means that the cost of the shipping has been accounted for in the retail price. Granted, a huge company like Amazon has gigantic volumes of shipping and can negotiate lower shipping prices. They can also distribute shipping costs unevenly from item to item. Even so, customers pay for shipping although the company says it’s free.

I know from the retail business I run that people are snagged by “free shipping” every time. They don’t realize that a $60 item with free shipping is actually a $50 retail item with about $10 of shipping.

Based on that logic, I recommend rolling the cleaning fee into the overall fee.

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My cleaning fee is minimal and designed to cover what my team gets paid, I do not include my own time as I am the owner and get paid anyway. My tiny homes it is $25, my 3 bed 2 bath is $75 and the huge victorian is $100.

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What? LOL! Most guests totally get it - they can not leave a sink full of dirty dishes, regardless of a cleaning fee or not.
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We had one guest ever who left some extra cleaning for us. No big deal and it is part of the deal.

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I didn’t say that most guests don’t get it, did I? I said that many don’t. Because I must have read at least 30 guest posts over time that say exactly that. And obviously those 30 are representative of many more who don’t post.

Sometimes when hosts reply explaining what the cleaning fee covers, the guest will say they get it now, they just hadn’t thought it through or realized all that goes into cleaning an Airbnb. And because they’ve never paid a cleaner in their lives, or done that level of cleaning on a regular basis, if at all, they had no idea how much time it takes to clean a 3 bedroom house to hosting standards.

Others dig their heels in and maintain that if they paid a cleaning fee they shouldn’t have to clean up after themselves at all.

Had a month tenancy, 2 guests 1 large INSIDE dog.Weekly service, Normally 3 hours, this time seven hours to get it back to standard. Carpet cleaner pulled a Yorkshire terrier size ball of fur out of the machine and both door screens had to be replaced as they were scratched to pieces.

“Many” indicates a big amount. That is not the case. I have never explained what a cleaning fee covers. No guest has ever asked.
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Obviously, only a tiny # of guests don’t understand that they can’t leave the place a mess.

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I was referring to guests who post these comments online, not ones who ask a host in a message or when they are in residence.

There always seem to be a bunch of them that jump into a thread in the Airbnb CC where hosts are discussing cleaning fees, to say stupid things like they shouldn’t have to wash their dishes, or if they do the few things the host asks them to do, that they are doing all the cleaning for the host.

Or that hotels don’t charge a cleaning fee and hosts are just greedy.

Luckily I don’t get these sorts of guests and neither do you. But other hosts do.

Uh huh. Would be easier to just change many to some or a few. Regardless of the forum “many” guests are not remotely confused about needing to leave it reasonably clean.

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It’s obviously really important to you to you to nitpick over the use of the word many, a few, some or several, so knock yourself out.

You’ve been harrassing me like this since I started posting in this forum.

You wrote this: Definitely many guests will take a separate cleaning fee as meaning they don’t need to clean up their personal messes.
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Sorry but NO. And you wanna stick to ur guns about it blah blah - go right ahead.

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@Jefferson I was going to send you a private message but apparently I can’t because I can’t see your profile, so I’ll say it publicly:

Your harassment of others here, especially women, is getting very very very tiring.

If you can’t resist trying to “win” every damned discussion, maybe it’s time for you to take a break.

That’s what I was going to tell you, and also the admins.

The other alternative is for most of us to block and ignore you.

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Yeah so sorry that I can’t disagree with a statement from another member :rofl:
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That’s not it. It’s that you pick on certain people, particularly women, when they disagree, and then you hound them.

It needs to stop.

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Oh do go away. This is about the least friendly forum there is. People speak their mind regularly. Forum regulars generally chew out anyone new who asks a question that is somewhere in the thousands of previous posts and abuse them for “not using the search feature before asking”. People disagree ALL THE TIME. It doesn’t have to be any more than just that. If I said exactly what she did multiple people would have jumped down my throat about it.

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Well then maybe you could just stop replying to @Muddy because it seems you are picking on her. And being the upstanding virtual citizen you are I am sure you do not want the rest of us to think you are picking on her. So just stop.

RR

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Doesn’t understand the difference between disagreement and harrassment, obviously.

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