268 replies
2d2h
I'm worried this ban will only affect honest hosts.
Anyway, what Airbnb should really ban is hosts charging a mandatory cleaning fee when also requiring their guests to do the cleaning.
We just stayed at one this weekend, and like almost all our previous bookings, the host asked us to:
- Take off all bedding and towels and start a load of laundry
- Do all the dishes and start the dishwasher (but required to hand-wash some items)
- Collect and take out all the trash to the curb
- Clean the grill/stove/oven
And we still had to pay a $200 cleaning fee when booking the place. A hotel would never require this of us or charge us extra.
At this point the cleaning fees are just a scam to make the listing fee seem artificially lower.
People did the same thing on eBay by making the items almost free but the shipping expensive, until they fixed the eBay interface, e.g. by letting you sort by price + shipping and showing shipping fees before you click.
Cleaning fees aren't a "scam" - most property owners really do need to pay someone to clean the property at the end of a stay.
But, as another commenter said, they can be used as a way to encourage longer stays, as with most places you only pay a single cleaning fee regardless of the length of your stay. But, again, it's just a fact that these rentals are usually just cleaned between guests (as opposed to a hotel when cleaning is done daily so it can be rolled into the nightly rate).
No, scam is the right word. It could pretty easily be rolled into the advertised nightly rate.
No it can't because the hosts are trying to charge a fixed fee per reservation.
If they need a fixed fee they should set bounds on the duration of stay. They keep shifting the burden to users when it should be on hosts.
AirBnb hosts have had their hands on the scale for too long now because the company is terrified of a mass exodus of hosts (many of whom act just as entitled as your average landlord, who will beat every penny out of you). It used to be a much better service for the users.
But there aren't bounds on the duration of the stay. Many places will take you for 1 day or 4 weeks, and there is still just a single cleaning fee.
FWIW I think pretty much every vacation rental I booked pre-AirBnB (or, for that matter, pre-Internet) charged a cleaning fee in a similar manner.
Right, I'm suggesting duration bounds as a host-focused solution to a problem that's been frustratingly shifted to users. Better for the user experience to limit the stay to 3 nights (and thus removing it from results for single nights) instead of trying to put a $200 cleaning fee on an overnighter, IMO.
They can still take that fixed fee and do what some hotels do and average the total cost of the stay across the number of nights booked to get a "nightly rate".
I don't think hosts have the ability to set variable nightly fees like that.
You can't do that on airbnb. You can only set a flat fee and a nightly fee.
However, in my market customers only see the total, calculated to an avg nightly price. So it all works out and is fair for everyone.
I get an itemized bill from the grocery store, but that doesn't make it a scam.
It's like putting a bunch of bananas in your basket, thinking the display price ($10 of course) is the real price, only to find out at the checkout, that it's $10 per banana...
Fees are stated up front, and completely to be expected.
I think getting shocked by cleaning fees is like getting shocked that there is a sales tax.. Every time you go to the store.
Showing the total with cleaning fees at the end is inconvenient and user hostile, but in no way a "scam".
The US is an anomaly in drip-pricing sales tax at the register. It's normal for sales tax to be part of the list price. It's one of the things travelers to the US are frequently outraged by, as well as our "pint" glasses (16 oz) that are smaller than an imperial pint (20 oz) or metric equivalent.
As someone else in the thread pointed out, some locales do require that AirBNB and similar list prices with the fees included, and they comply in those regions. And not including tax is kind of a con when the rate can vary between states, cities and even parts of cities. Nobody can be expected to know the particulars everywhere they go, while businesses are legally required to know in order to collect.
Sure, I agree with everything you said,and that is why I think it is annoying, but not a scam.
Which is why they tell customers exactly what the total is and fee/tax breakdown before purchase.
What if they charged you a fee because they now have to restock the bananas that you removed from their display?
it would be annoying and stupid, but if it was a regular and expected part of the bill every time I went shopping, I dont think it would be a "scam".
I think scam implies that something is deceptive, but not everything that annoys me is a scam. If users are completely aware of something and expect it, it is hard to claim they are being duped, in my opinion.
Lets say their cost for cleaning is 100 usd. Without cleaning they the price per night is 150 usd.
How much should the price increase per night to cover the cost of cleaning?
So either too low for people staying one night or too high for people staying multiple nights. Why is it better?
They should estimate the average stay length of their guests and amortize the cleaning fee appropriately, the same way that many other businesses (including real B&Bs, in my experience) handle fixed costs. In theory, AirBnb should be very good at automating the process (they have large amounts of very granular, market specific, historical rental data), but honestly, if that amount of planning and bookkeeping is too much for the rental operator, maybe running a B&B is not the best career fit for them.
It's fairly routine for B&Bs to have a 2-night minimum on weekends but, yes, they typically also just have a nightly charge (which may vary depending on day of week) and don't have a fixed per-stay adder.
AirBnBs have definitely normalized a significant per-stay charge that isn't the norm in the hotel/inn business.
Somehow hotels that don't clean every night figured this out like a million years ago.
Averaging
A hotel with 100 rooms can average. Me with my single room can not.
If you don't like it, fine, just don't use it. But pricing it to what people actually use, is fairest for everyone.
No, because math. As others have stated it can't be rolled into the nightly rate because it is only charged once per reservation.
At least last time I booked on AirBnB it was clearly displayed as part of the total reservation price if you entered dates.
I stay at hotels all the time that don't do a cleaning on the first night. How could they possibly figure out the complex calculus of what to charge?
Oh right, averaging.
As another user replied, hotels have a cleaning staff that they just pay a salary to - it is, for the most part, a fixed cost. The owner of a single rental/room really is usually paying a flat fee every time they need their placed cleaned, and thus can have widely different costs based on whether someone stays 1 night or 28. They simply don't have the luxury of averaging their costs over a wide base, no matter how many times you put that word in italics.
OP is right that it's not necessarily a _scam_ but is more so deceptive advertising. You're also right that they should just show total cost of your stay rather than the nightly rate pre-fees. It's wild to me that Airbnb hasn't done this because it's one of the worst parts of their service that has pushed me (and others I've talked to) back to hotels.
If you switch to the Australian AirBnB site, you can see an all-inclusive price because they are required by law to do so there.
Isn’t it? When I search on airbnb the rates shown on the map include everything. It’s only once you open the page for a specific listing that the price gets broken down
I've rented out a couple rooms in my house in the past for airbnb during special events in Austin to make some hobby money, shared my kitchen, they have a private bathroom. It doesn't cost $200 to clean. I can clean up after them typically in less than an hour.
It cost you nothing but time and some supplies. If you asked a random person to clean it, they would refuse. So you have to pay them. Minimums for cleaning would be 3 hours. At 50 an hour plus taxes and travel $200 doesn't sound unreasonable.
The people cleaning your hotel room who can barely speak english and get skiddish if you are wearing a law enforcement uniform definitely don't make $50 an hour.
If you can't efficiently get cleaning services for your rented out room, maybe you should get out of the hotel business!
Wait, your point is that those paying their cleaners well, above the board and with a contract should go out of business?
But those paying cash, no taxes, low salary abusing people, should remain in business?
What an insane take.
Unless you have a pipeline of the undocumented then you have to go through a company.
I think nearly all the house cleaners will be extremely surprised to hear that they earn $50 an hour. Even more, they get all their travel-related costs reimbursed! Oddly enough, that's not what they see on their payslip. And that's assuming they get a payslip at all.
FWIW I've never seen $200 cleaning fees on AirBnB for a room-in-a-house accommodation, but if I saw that then yes, I'd call BS. I've only ever seen fees that high for whole-home rentals.
I'm willing to pay a cleaning fee (though really it should be rolled into the cost of the stay) but not also be required to do the cleaning myself.
If you rent an apartment in my neck of the woods, then this is exactly what the law is. If your landlord charges a cleaning fee you can feel free to let them clean it up at the end of the rental period.
The only reason anyone does the cleaning is because the host can then leave a poor review. Does the law cover this angle?
Well, if I'm a landlord I'll often call two or three of the tenant's last landlords and ask them if they left the place in decent condition, if they were a good tenant, etc.. So there is a review system for tenants as well. I'll also use someone's credit rating and derogatory notes on credit reports as a proxy for how diligent they are at following a contract. And finally nobody here rents anything long-term without a very high-quality contract either purchased boilerplate or custom-written by a lawyer.
So yeah, the law and custom both cover this angle.
The law allows you to make multiple accounts. Creating additional cards could help here.
I think it's the time constraints on the dishwasher. Basically there's two levels of cleaning service. Everything else can be cleaned in two hours, but then there is waiting on the dishwasher. The cleaning crew bills to wait for the dishwasher to run and dry (2-4 extra hours). Just look for higher priced rentals, they will roll that cost in. For me, I'd usually rather pay a smaller cleaning fee because I don't usually use the dishes.
The fee is obviously much more than they're paying the person who actually does the cleaning.
How is that obvious? Paying $200 for turnover service seems perfectly reasonable; when my wife and I ran an AirBnB, we paid our cleaners $250 per visit.
It's a scam when the cleaning fee is as much as the advertised nightly rate, and they require me to clean everything still.
I suspect you’re not vacuuming, cleaning toilets, cleaning shower, washing bedding, folding and stocking bath towels, putting bedding on and making beds, tiding sofas and kitchens, restocking TP, paper towels, and other consumables.
It's not always a scam but requiring guests to clean while they are also paying a cleaning fee is what makes it a scam.
When the cleaning fee frequently exceeds the per-night rate, AND the guest is expected to do a significant amount of cleaning(!) ... that's a scam.
It's a scam if a cleaning fee is charged and the renters are ALSO expected to do a truckload of cleaning themselves, for which the fee is presumably charged.
And a less charitable interpretation is that it's a scam because it's deceptive advertising to show a lower nightly rate.
Cleaning fees exist to charge a fixed fee for a reservation, regardless of the number of days. There's more overhead for a reservation beyond just "cleaning".
The most consumer friendly thing would be for AirBnB to just explicitly have a fixed "stay" fee and a per-day fee.
That said, AirBnB's site shows the total cost for a stay when browsing, so I don't really see this as particularly deceptive. I don't care how the host itemizes the bill as long as I know what I'm paying when selecting a place.
It only shows total price in markets where it is legally required to. Meaning they took the time to implement the feature and actively decided to be shitty to their customers when they are given the choice.
> they took the time to implement the feature and actively decided to be shitty to their customers when they are given the choice
Ah, but companies have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to be as shitty to their customers as they can get away with.
No they don't.
Many companies act as though they believe that they have a fiduciary duty to not think further than the next quarter's results.
Are you happy now?
Such companies would fire all employees directly unless they are required to complete the current quarter. I haven't seen many sustainable businesses completely giving up all revenue for all future quarters just to improve the current quarter. It would be a very poor business decision. It sounds like a meme and I'll name it Enterprise Kamikaze.
Companies obviously do care (a lot) about their current quarterly results. But if they literally did not care about what happens in the future, they could cut a ton of costs. They probably have a ton of engineering and marketing that isn't essential to the next quarterly earnings.
Dang what does your flamewar indicator say about these?
To help put an end to this meme...
Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. - https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/13-354
It would be nice for me as customer to see what sorts of objectives any given company values: a sort of barcode scanner / brand scanner that travels up the tree of parent companies and returns the objectives for each one.
B Corporations have a certification process: https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/find-a-b-corp/
Are you sure? I'm in the US and it displays the entire price (including cleaning fees) for me.
Airbnb sellers can charge a fixed fee directly by setting minimum stay lengths or by charging different nightly rates based on the length of stay (e.g., weekly and monthly stay discounts).
What if I just want to stay 3 days and I’m willing to pay the fixed fee anyway?
What I do see is some booking automation that will dynamically set minimum stay lengths to avoid filling, say, a 3 day gap with a 1 or 2 day booking if it’s far enough out and set minimum stays to the duration of the gap.
Simple they just have a minimum fee, book whatever days you want.
Former isn't the same thing and is in fact less efficient. Is latter actually possible on the platform?
Edit: At most latter is possible with complex rule sets. But I'm really not sure: https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/2061
This depends on which site you’re browsing on. I don’t think US does this, but you can browse the AU or Canada version and set your price in $USD because those geographic “editions” have to post the all-in cost up-front.
I'm in California and see it
Yes, and I think the only exception might be California where it is now required that prices include previously hidden fees such as "resort fees" (and "landing fees", etc for airlines).
So put it in the price rather than "fees". That always feels highly dishonest to me.
How would you make that work?
I rent out our cabin. If you stay 1 day or 7 days, it's the same amount of work for me and same costs in cleaning. That's impossible to price fairly without having a flat fee.
In my market the customer sees the total price up front. I think this is the best solution for all parties.
I haven't checked the platform lately but from what I remember the first search view did not show the total (plus cleaning) fee and only when you advance to book you would see the final cost.
While not a scam, it definitely feels like a dark pattern.
Agreed. That said, not that I stay at AirBnbs more than rarely but there's definitely been an ooching in both the per-stay fees and the expectations for cleaning. I suspect some of this is that housekeeping services have probably gone up in cost a lot. I thought my housekeeper was sort of an expensive luxury. It is but after talking to some people, the rates I pay are actually pretty modest.
But to many other comments, there's probably at least some element of advertising a relatively low nightly price and tacking on a stay fee that may not be as immediately obvious.
Airbnb is a marketplace with a much wider range of "products" than standard hotels. I have found stays that fit my needs far better than any hotel ever could. I am both a host on Airbnb and frequent guest.
Airbnb's UI needs to guide prospective guests toward specifying what they are looking for so that prices (and price sorting) actually meets their expectations. If you search for a specific date range with # of guests, pets, etc., the sort order needs to be on all-in costs, not daily cost. Maybe they could offer pre-baked "personas" - e.g., I am looking for a hotel alternative vs I am looking for a unique experience.
I've used Airbnb 25 times. 12 of those times had issues. Issues like
"parking space included" - show up, no parking
"wifi included" - show up, wifi is sitting next to window and stealing from neighbor
listed on quiet road - after booking address is changed to unit on busy road
heater is so loud it sounds like a vacuum cleaner making getting any sleep hard
I no longer use AirBnB period. Hotels have extra rooms, reception, cleaning, etc. I'm not saying hotels are perfect but at least for me, the positive experience rate is 90% vs AirBnB which is 50%
AirBnb also lost the price wars, at least as the places I've looked.
For what it’s worth, I’ve used Airbnb around 60 times and found it a much better experience than a hotel 9/10 times. Even putting aside amenities such as kitchen and washer/dryer access, hotels always feel like unnerving liminal spaces to me. Very few hotels I’ve stayed at have felt “homey,” which puts a significant psychological damper on my trip.
I guess I don't expect a short-term rental in an urban locale (especially) to be "homey." I'm looking for well-located, clean, and comfortable (enough). There are some brands that I find more welcoming than others but, in general, I'm not really looking for the hotel to be an important part of my experience with some exceptions.
In contrast, some of my favorite travel memories involve unique Airbnbs. People around the world have created some incredible living spaces, and hotels don't let you experience that aspect of travel.
It’s good for consumers this way I think. The hotels were forced to compete and I think overall are better than they were 20 years ago.
For normal people, they are not aware of this different form of rented lodging and if you’re hosting a big family vacation or a retreat, Airbnb is not a bad option.
It’s the bottom of the Airbnb market that is completely screwed up.
Your persona feature is interesting but I feel that every Airbnb owner would also game it so they end up in the category with the highest prices, just like they're gaming the reviews.
Hotels have a star rating so that I never go to a two-star hotel expecting a four-star experience. These star ratings are done independently, and I don't trust Airbnb to provide objectivity when the owners are going to strongly push back against an "unfair" rating, and Airbnb will capitulate especially for superhosts and others who have influence.
No, they've worked around that too -- now sellers typically include a [completely unrelated] 0.99p item as an option in the listing, which then moves them to the top of the price-sorted view.
Or on aliexpress, on items you’d usually buy multiples of, set the shipping to $cents for the first item, then it jumps to $$$ once you add a second to your cart.
Sometimes I’ve just bought individual items from several sellers as a workaround.
Usually when that happens, the shipping date jumps too, because it's chosen a faster shipping method. I'm not sure why but I'm not 100% convinced it's deliberate deception. However they also don't show shipping prices in the search view, and display the lowest-price configuration instead of the range.
Some of these would be tiny items. But yeah, on larger items, sometimes the shipping price changed dramatically once you add the 8th item to your cart.
I wish users could order stuff by sea for a discount. Sometimes I’m buying camping or sports stuff for another season and don’t need it coming airmail. Arriving months later can actually be beneficial. But I understand, too many people will lose their minds.
I usually go through the checkout process multiple times, if it works out cheaper, since I don't pay credit card fees per transaction. The buy it now button and multiple browser tabs are very useful for this.
I'm more annoyed by 90% of the search results disappearing when I sort by anything other than "best match".
There’s a longer story to this: eBay used to exempt shipping fees from its commissions.
So sellers would be screwing eBay and, being an efficient market, as it often is on eBay, the savings would be passed onto the buyer.
I’d sell games for 1 cent with $10 shipping (cost to me: ~$2) and put the shipping cost in the title for clarity. If you didn’t like it, fine, pay more to buy from someone else.
Now they charge it on the whole purchase, which sucks when they take a ~15% commission on sales taxes and shipping and sellers can’t easily tack on a premium to these. So they get lower net proceeds when selling to someone that has high sales taxes or shipping fees.
This really discourages sellers from shipping internationally where those costs are higher.
Now that eBay charges percentage fees for “promoting” your item and getting visibility, bulk sellers will often post the exact same item, unpromoted, for less if you can be bothered to go through their “other items for sale”.
Have seen some wild examples where a seller sold one item at very different prices. They must have had items with 50% promotion fees, 25%, 5% and 0% (evidently passed onto the customer through different pricing) to capture the whole market.
As a user I always avoided those low cost, high postage listings as it just seemed a good way for a seller to avoid refunding the full amount.
Refund would always be minus postage costs, so you'd get 1 cent back for your $10.01 purchase when returning (i.e. no point)
I think it’s up to seller’s policy if it’s a buyer’s remorse return situation. I find it hard to believe eBay wouldn’t make the buyer whole in a damaged/not as described case.
Been a while since it came up for me (always sold stuff as “final sale” and if I avoid buying fragile stuff). Once had a hard time repaying a buyer that returned an item where I didn’t describe it correctly (screw you apple for having nearly identical LCDs but with slightly different camera cable lengths)
Thanks for the history. I was wondering why I was seeing less crazy rates on shipping. I had no idea it wasn't on the whole purchase price as that seemed obvious to me. I figured it was sellers hoping people wouldn't notice the s&h until the got to checkout
There was a lot of that too. I’m sure it’s sometimes emotional: sellers wouldn’t want to “subsidize” shipping, so they’d fix the shipping fee to what the max could be for anywhere in the country.
What grinds me as an international buyer is when sellers offer “free” shipping domestically, but don’t subsidize int’l shipping by the same dollar amount. Though there can be other time costs for int’l shipping. It depends.
eBay could have fixed this a long time ago. Most marketplaces (at least in my country) manage the shipping transparently (by taking the shipping fee and providing a pre paid label to the seller).
Idk in the US but I know nobody who still use eBay for anything, I don’t know how they are still alive.
I fix old electronics things like phonos, radios, and other sound related things as a hobby and resell(mostly 60s through 90s). Ebay is still great (well "good") for old parts and selling my warez. Although I do sell more locally as I've gotten some word of mouth, and it's more business than I can do with my day job. Anyway ebay still works for older products/parts for electronics and I reckon other fixable things.
They're still sometimes useful for old parts and the like. But there was a period when I used them all the time--admittedly as something of a novelty. Now, it's maybe a once a year sort of thing. Global supply chains have made a lot of the used market pretty tough for things you can just buy new. (I admittedly work a lot harder to get rid of stuff than acquire it these days.)
eBay can now show the shipping cost tailored to your zip/postal code, and shows it up-front.
eBay is an undertold story in failure (to innovate).
For sure, still a going concern, but odd of such a large company taking the Craigslist approach of “let’s stay small and just do enough to keep it working comfortably for all of us”
eBay practically invented online shopping at scale and had a huge head start but failed to maintain marketshare.
It’s still the catch-all for products that don’t fit in other marketplaces. For me, it’s a place to buy a lot of Amazon items but at a lower price (at some convenience cost). Or niche/used items. Amazon has overly regionalized (sometimes I can get items in Canada from Amazon.com cheaper than amazon.ca for example), while eBay is still a generally global interface.
I'm not a fan of how AirBnB has displayed pricing in the past, but don't lose sight of how bad hotel pricing is: taxes and fees not displayed until the checkout page, "resort" fees added at any time, etc.
There are no good guys here.
Maybe that's the US hotel booking experience, I live in Europe and haven't encountered those dumb fees.
There are occasionally local tax rates that differ depending on the type of traveller, e.g. no tax for business travellers, €2/night for tourists. I've mostly seen it in Germany.
It's generally written somewhere, but on aggregation sites like hotels.com and booking.com it seems the hotel can't alter the advertised price directly.
Example: https://www.hotels.com/ho119759/maritim-hotel-koln-cologne-g...
And those were a twist on the old infomercial trick: Get a second one absolutely free! (just pay a "small" shipping and handling fee that is as much as a second one)
The "But wait, there's more!" device predates infomercials. It goes at least as far back as the "Atlantic city boardwalk pitch" from the early 20th century:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-tel
This is also how airlines work these days. Separate airfare from fees and baggage, then trick travelers with low sticker prices.
Most of the many taxes and fees associated with air tickets are built in. Not checked luggage in particular in many cases although I don't pay that on my usual airline and rarely have it anyway. Otherwise, unless I want to upgrade, the price it gives me is what I pay.
This is why I can't use AliExpress. Ordering by price+shipping is truly an awful experience. The people in charge of that feature take incompetence to a new level.
I remember a wave of $1 iPhone charging cables on Amazon! (with expensive delivery cost :)
I'm a host. I charge a $200 cleaning fee and my cleaners charge me $250, so I lose money on cleaning.
I ask guests to:
* Strip the beds (otherwise, I find that people re-make beds and it's hard to tell if they have been slept in), * Load and start the dishwasher (the dishwasher takes 4 hrs, and the cleaners travel to my remote house, and I want to make sure they can finish in about that time) * Take the trash down to the garage (to avoid ants)
I pay a neighborhood kid to take the trash bins from the garage to the street on trash day.
I successfully manage my place remotely (3hrs away) via a good cleaner and home automation (detailed here: https://www.linquist.com/airbnb/automation). 4.99 stars, superhost.
Tbh, those are problems that you have to solve, somehow.
Given my airbnb rating and constant positive feedback, I'd say that my existing solution is sufficient.
Give it time.
I'd not be surprised to read that Air BnB are going to curtail this behavior next.
The only reason you're doing this is to game the system. Be honest and charge more.
How am I not honest? The listing shows my cleaning fee and checkout list. Everything is transparent.
Be honest and build the fee into your rates.
Why do you not do that?
What is your rationale for charging it separately?
First, note that Airbnb shows it "built into the rates" when you put in the number of days you are staying when making a reservation. See this article from 2022: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/7/23444561/airbnb-total-pri...
But to answer your question - because it is a fixed cost per stay.
If you stay two nights @ $250/night, you'll pay an additional $200 cleaning fee (so that would be $350 night if I were to "build cleaning in") If you stay 6 nights @ $250/night, you'll still only pay an additional $200 cleaning fee (so it would be $283/night if were to "build cleaning in").
Airbnb doesn't allow me to charge a different $ based on the number of nights stayed. But they are showing an all-inclusive cost to the user when the user is browsing with their # of days, so there is nothing hidden...
and to your "give it time" statement, it's been over 5 years...
First off: https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/travel/airbnb-has-a-plan-...
And secondly if you reread my post you’ll see that I think it’s morally wrong to charge a cleaning fee AND expect guests to clean as well.
That’s double dipping.
My cleaning fee is for washing the bedding, mopping the floors, wash inside the oven, was inside the refrigerator, vacuum all floors, wash all floors, clean every surface, scrub the shower, scrub the toilets, clean the sink and mirror, etc etc.
None of which I expect guests to do. So it's not double dipping.
You've been explained why you're wrong ten times now, and still drone on about it. Maybe airbnb just isn't for you? Book a more expensive hotel instead, and then those thinking my cabin is a good deal can do so and be happy.
This is a public forum.
If I have a strong feeling on something, why do you feel I should not talk about it?
It is your opinion that I am wrong. It is not a fact that I am wrong.
You say you have a cabin - I’ve booked Cabins in the Hocking Hills area of Ohio (not via Airbnb). They’ve never had cleaning fees.
If they can handle this, why can’t you?
Ohh my god, come on, you've been explained this a hundred times by now. It's not that I can't handle it. It's that it's fairer for everyone if the price is set based on the actual cost.
My cabin costs $200 a night to rent, and $100 to clean. If you stay 2 nights that's $500 total, or $250 a night. Do you suggest I just should set the price to $250?
But what then for those renting for 7 nights? Normally they pay $1500. But with your scheme it will be $1750. Or I would have to eat the cleaning cost for those staying 2 days, making no money and instead just pulling it from the market and everyone loses.
The customer doesn't even see the cleaning fee. They see a total price. Then it's up to them to decide if they think it's worth booking or not.
Perhaps this is because I live in Europe, where all costs must be up front. Hence there is no scamming going on here. And I don't care what a cabin on the other side of the world does. I do what makes sense in my local market (people here even bring their own bedding!!). Get it into your head that people want freedom to choose a stay that fits them. If you don't want to care about this, then just don't book.
“And I don't care what a cabin on the other side of the world does”
And there’s the rub. You’re getting very emotive about the subject whereas I am approaching it simply as a customer experience issue.
When I book the cabins I get a cheaper price the longer I stay.
The issue would therefore seem to be that the Airbnb doesn’t provide you the flexibility you desire. The cabin’s I’ve stayed at are owned by different people but rented out by a company that handles such properties in a reasonable manner.
And besides, you continue to ignore my initial first statement: That I feel it’s immoral to charge a cleaning fee AND expect customers to do cleaning.
The original post I replied to stated that they expect the customers to strip the bed plus more cleaning tasks, AND they charge a $200 Cleaning fee.
Even the Airbnb CEO stated he felt that it was wrong to expect customers to strip the bed.
The Cabins I stay are request that when you leave the property you have gathered plateware etc. into the kitchen, and towels etc are left in the shower, and all furniture is left in the basic state you found it.
That takes all of about 10 minutes - which is fine by me. All costs in cleaning and maintenance is taken out of the rental fees.
So no, in my “scheme” costs are not higher because the company I rent through handles rates accordingly.
Lol, this is a severe lack of self-awareness on your part. You're the one bitching all over this thread because someone dares to not include cleaning fee in the nightly cost, but instead charges it transparently as a separate line. I can't imagine why this rubs you so much. Why? Why does it matter to you? Why do you take this as a transgression against you? I'm perplexed at your continued insistence on this being sooo important, when you're just not getting even the basics here.
You do get a cheaper price the longer you stay with this setup we have, by having the fixed costs divided over multiple days, hence making the price per day lower when you stay longer. How are you still not getting this? It's incomprehensible to me..
No, I've already explained that there's a difference between what a guest is expected to do and the cleaning the cleaning fee pays for.
I'm a guest, not a host.
I do not think of airbnbs as identical to hotels in every way possible, and I don't want them to be. I am ok with doing some basic cleaning tasks despite being charged a cleaning fee. I naively still consider airbnbs to be a little bit like sharing a space, with an implied social contract. I expect to do a little stuff that is low cost to me, high value to the host. I also know they're still going to have to pay a cleaner. And I really would prefer them to not unconditionally wash and dry the bedding for every single unused bed in the place. That's how our planet got into this mess.
I tend to be way more distrustful of previous guests than I am of the host. There are a lot of nasty and entitled people out there.
You have your perspective. Others of us share mine.
Thank you for that perspective. I spend a week a month in my airbnb, so it is considered more of my second home than a business. There are photos of my wife and I in the house, and I think the house feels "warmer" for guests because it's not just a sterile hotel or full-time business.
I totally support your right to your view.
As I’ve stated before these are my personal beliefs - and they may have been influenced by my age. I come from a time long before Airbnb was even the merest glimmer of a thought in anyone’s mind, and base my expectations and experiences on that.
Whilst Airbnb started off as folks sharing their properties. It’s now a fully fledged business for many where “hosts” are now corporations who buy properties to let out (in 2021 the figure stood at 28%).
So that also makes me very jaded.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/biggest-airbnb-hosts-canada...
No the logistics and economics don’t work to run an Airbnb the same as a hotel. Why would Airbnb add regulations that make their customers less profitable or financially viable?
Er, because they can.
And do.
As evidenced by the recent changes.
The point is, you should either charge cleaning costs and not require the customer to do anything other than leave it in a “used” state - or - not charge cleaning costs but require the customer at least does some basic cleaning.
Charging and also requiring customers to clean is unethical in my book.
Pardon what recent changes?
You don’t think the subject of this story isn’t a change of their rules and regulations?
I don’t see how security cameras impacts the economics of running an Airbnb.
Some owners were using them to record damage or vandalism to a property.
Without them that could make some properties more expensive to maintain and repair.
Meanwhile: https://www.rentalscaleup.com/airbnb-adds-2-more-to-guest-fe...
This change, affecting international bookers, will make it more expensive to rent, thus potentially affecting a hosts bottom line.
This may not affect you, but it will affect others.
And remember, as a host, you’re not the customer.
The person booking is the customer.
You? You’re just a supplier.
And they've done it.
As long as these expectations are spelled out before booking, it's not a scam and completely fine. If a renter doesn't like it, just don't book.
Why wouldn’t you clean the sheets regardless after each stay?
But everything else seems reasonable. If a host left a note explaining the reasoning behind the dishwasher and the trash, I would understand completely.
6 beds (comprising of 4 different sizes of beds/sheets) make it quite wasteful if a bed is not used. It already takes ~5 hours to clean the home.
I would take the side of sanitation than taking a chance on having used sheets on the bed
My existing solution does, by asking guests to remove the sheets.
Obviously, if no sheets are removed, they would all be cleaned.
And if your guest don’t remove the sheets after they sleep on them?
I pay my cleaners to make sure the home is clean. Simple as that.
Ewww…hosts like you are the reason Airbnb gets a bad rap. I don’t think any reputable hotel would find it ok to not clean the sheets on both queen beds in a room if only one “looked” used. Logistics of cleaning should be built into your pricing and scheduling and not be a chore or something the guests have to think about.
You've never seen hotel staff clean a room, lol. You'd be surprised.
I have a 4.99 rating with almost 100 stays, which seems to be telling me I don’t have a bad rap. In the end, it is my cleaners’ responsibility to leave my house ready for the next guest.
I find that abhorrent myself.
What YOU pay for your cleaners is up to you.
Stop nickel and dimming your customers - if you charge a cleaning fee then there's zero moral rights in my mind that you have to ask customers to also clean.
Just up the nightly rates and build it in.
When's the last time you stayed at a Hotel and found you got hit with a 'Room Cleaning" fee?
What's next - a fee for allowing Heating to be used? A fee to allow water? Heavens above.
My cleaners travel 25 mins each way to my remote home and spend 5 hours cleaning. In a hotel, with identical setups in each room, they can do a lot more work in that time.
My checkout list is clearly defined in my listing, which is doing great based on my ratings and bookings. The cleaning fee is not hidden.
I would re-evaluate if I were not successful.
I'm confused, if the dishwasher takes 4 hours and the cleaners clean for 5 hours, why do the guests have to start the dishwasher?
Are we arguing over the difficulty of loading soap and pressing a button? Yes, it would be possible for the cleaner to do it, and I don't negatively review a guest who doesn't. But it makes things much easier if the cleaner can simply unload upon arrival... and once again, helps keep pests at bay. My property is in the woods and it can be a challenge.
Doesn’t sound like it’s your home, sounds like it’s your business.
I spend at least a week a month there. It's more my second home than a full-time business. It is not profitable.
That’s entirely your problem.
And sure, your listing may be doing “great” now, but what if Airbnb change the rules as they may start looking at doing?
Sounds to me that your model may not be sustainable in the medium to long term. Life’s full of “we did like gangbusters last year until…”
If it stops being sustainable, I'll change my policy. I'm willing to change. I'm always revisiting my policies / listing / amenities / etc.
That is why any half decent hotel has protocol to always change all the linens anytime someone rents a room.
I have 6 beds. Change 6 beds when one is used? Talk about energy use and wear/tear on the linens themselves.
Hotels have cleaning "scale" on their side. I'm also operating a large home with a full kitchen, balcony, garage, etc. 8 people can comfortably stay. It ends up being a LOT cheaper AND more comfortable than a hotel for 6-8 people.
Depends how much you want to risk a guest sleeping in dirty linens. Maybe you have very trustworthy people you can rely on to accurately gauge if a bed has been used or not, maybe your guests do not mind the risk either in exchange for cost/environmental savings.
I prefer the most foolproof option when it comes to sleeping in between linens or using towels on my body.
My existing solution of asking guests to pull the linens off their beds seems to be working great :).
We just have a card with a couple of chocolates (bribe) on each bed asking that if it is used, the card is removed, and if it isn’t used, it’s left in place. If there’s any doubt, the linens get changed. Means the guests don’t have to do anything by default, the environment takes one less insult, and we save on linen hire costs.
I’m a host, two properties in the U.K. I charge no cleaning fee. I don’t ask guests to do anything other than lock the door behind them when they leave.
It’s really simple to manage - price it in.
Our nightly rate is our nightly rate is our nightly rate. We have a two night minimum on our city property, so it doesn’t end up astronomical - and when we have single nights spare we open them up at a higher price point. On the other property, we have a one week minimum, as it’s in the countryside, larger, and cleaning costs more.
We also price in stuff like welcome champagne, tea, coffee, cooking supplies, firewood, you name it - we give our guests everything they would have at home, and enough to throw together a meal on their first evening if they get in late.
Our margin is >50% on both.
Price it in.
This approach makes sense. Not everyone will take it, both because they're trying to compete on (apparent) price and because they don't want to 'force' guests to pay for things that they might have been willing to do themselves. But it's good that there are hosts out there who bundle all of these services together, like they would be in a hotel or resort. For many people, this is what they're looking for. They don't want to do chores when they're supposed to be on vacation. And because there are all kinds of hosts on the platform, the types of guests who don't want to have services bundled in can book a lower-priced listing that requires guests to do more work (but not pay as much).
“ I ask guests to: * Strip the beds”
“ But an unreasonable task is like strip the bed…”
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, 2022
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/airbnb-ceo-guests-shouldnt-ha...
Whatever the CEO said and, much as I tend to not be in the have to deep clean the rental camp, strip the beds and throw the used towels in a pile falls in the pretty reasonable category for me even if I don't do it in a hotel.
As you spelled out your reasons, it makes sense. But usually, you don't go over reasons with guests, and they feel like the host is treating them as his poor relatives doing chores. It's totally different at a hotel, where guests feel like they're being served.
I do go over the reasons in the automated message you receive the night before checkout.
It's hard to gauge cleaning effort: if a guest uses every dish in the kitchen without doing a wash up, they cleaning crew could be there for hours.
But if a guest is tidy, then the cleaning fee should be nothing.
The hard part is that you need to reserve and pay for a cleaning crew as if it was always a disaster.
If it is $200 then that should cover 10 man hours of cleaning in a developed country.
I had similar issues as a guest on Airbnb, paid a cleaning fee $100+ and then had complaints that I left food in the fridge (like normal a pack of milk or something not growing new lifeforms) and couch pillow on the floor. They sent photos to shove my nose into it. And it was a tiny studio not a big mansion with much area to cover
I quit Airbnb 2-3 years ago and am happy without
Have you tried to hire a cleaning person recently? $200 will get a small apartment cleaned, maybe. For a thorough cleaning of a modest house prepare to pay 2-3x that at least.
$600 for a house is far beyond typical prices
If it just needs a sweep, or if some party animal trashed it?
We have a cleaner come in for a 1900 SQ ft place in SF and it costs $250.
For my small house (~1200 sq ft) the woman who cleans my house charges me $150, and she's usually here for around 2-2.5 hours. She hasn't increased her rate for me for over 10 years, so I imagine she'd charge more if I started out new.
So in other words, even 10 years ago she was charging roughly $75/hr, which is much more than the $20/hr that grandparent was citing.
If that's too expensive then the host should do the cleaning themselves. Or do like hotels and real B&Bs do and hire people as cleaners and pay them a salary.
The entitlement is through the roof, when people pretend to run a business refusing to do any work themselves and refusing to hire people. As long as there are clients willing to use AirBnB and pay cleaning fees, sure. But it is a scam and not much more, as another poster pointed out.
$250 for a 2bed 2bathroom house in 2022.
Two people spent roughly 2 hrs cleaning, so 4 hours of labor total + supplies. I think that's reasonable, but I wouldn't hire them for after every single short stay if I ran an Airbnb.
I'm just outside Seattle. My 2,500 sq ft 4br 3.5ba home gets cleaned every two weeks by two, sometimes three, people, for a minimum of 2 hours, usually 2.5, up to 3.
$165.
When they deep clean? $250.
Ha, $20/hr for house cleaners is so 2020. They're much more than that in reality.
And meanwhile the actual cleaners are rarely paid even $15/hr in many places. I always hire one or two person companies if I just can find them since then it's at least honest business and not yet another hustle to get rich by using slave labour. Not just for cleaning which I only rarely outsource but for everything.
What do you think hotels pay their cleaners?
In my area cleaning rates are around double that.
Which developed country? The rates in a US city are generally higher than $200 for 10 hours.
you need to reserve and pay for a cleaning crew as if it was always a disaster.
Yet hotels manage this fine - it's just baked into the price.
I don't have a problem paying a cleaning fee. I just don't want to pay the fee AND be required to do 90% of the cleaning myself.
I'm happy to put the dishes in and then start the dishwasher. I'm not going to wait around for it to finish and then put them away. I'm happy to pile the used towels and bedding in a single spot, but I'm not going to do the laundry. I'll pick up any trash and wipe down the kitchen, but I'm not going to take out the trash or do a deep clean of the kitchen. Etc.
My wife and I have an airbnb and this is exactly how we structure our check-out. It still costs $250 per turnover for a reliable cleaning crew to come and clean the 3br, 3ba two level house.
that number is almost useless without context .. a dozen things factor into that, and the incentives, local labor market etc
Sure, and so is the $200 number in the first-level parent comment.
$250 sounds like a lot of cleaning, multiple hours of cleaning by one person for sure, of course depending on your location. But that really gotta be some mansion or your customers are really the absolute worst if that's always required. Meanwhile my friend who does this stuff changes the sheets and towels and wipes the tables together with some light vacuuming and that's basically it, only a few times per year he does a more thorough cleaning. And he does it by himself since he has reasoned that he wants to check the apartment personally every time it's used anyway and he can carry those operations at the same time since it takes something like half an hour to do so.
This is the fundamental problem with AirBnb as a business instead of a side gig. The hotel has massive economies of scale in cleaning and other things, because they have dozens of rooms on site. If one room gets totally trashed, they just won’t use that one until they get around to cleaning it. If a guest checks out late or wants to extend their stay, they just put the next guest in a different room.
Also the cleaning crew is already on site. People are always checking out and checking in. The crew just pushes their cart to the next room instead of driving across town, packing and unpacking all of their stuff, and making sure to hit a precise time window between checkout and checkin.
This may be true for hosts with one property but it's becoming more and more common for management companies to own a lot of properties on airbnb. The whole economies of scale have been figured out.
It's really kind of wild. We rented a house on the Chesapeake Bay last summer. Newly remodeled (was very run down the year before - we've visited this town several times) with decent finishes. The manager runs a little real estate empire, either owning or managing rentals all along the I-64 corridor in VA (VA Beach through the Blue Ridge). She also runs a consulting business for people looking to get into the vacation home ownership game.
I used to dream about owning a vacation home, but my parents bought a beach house about 15 years ago. They'd rent it peak season, but keep it for family use on the shoulders through winter. It was fun for a few years, but eventually the constant upkeep and expense wore them down and they sold it. Renters can be real animals - constant stream of broken furniture, stolen kitchenware and decorations, and just plain weird stuff like broken bathroom mirrors. Really opened my eyes, at least to a money-making rental property.
Absolutely, there's a lot more risk in renting a single unit vs a hotel. The fees should be higher. The check-in/check-out timing should be stricter and with more time in between. Etc.
I think that's all pretty fair.
Put dishes in the dishwasher and start. Strip the beds. Pick up trash, quick counter wipe down.
Only difference is the trash which could just be an issue if the host isn't coming for a little while.
These should all be common sense. I don't think I've ever been asked for much more than that. Cleaning fee is for deep clean and general turnover. Maybe it should just be called the "flat-fee" though.
Hotels are literally factories for this. The fixed effort per stay is much different in a home.
Any service that's so pedantic about cleaning isn't a service that most customers would want to use. Airbnb is trying to have it's cake and eat it too putting the responsibility on "hosts" to be the bad guys. It's just lazy and callous to not have strict bounds of responsibilities customers are expected to engage with.
And that’s reason #13563 I would never do an AirBnb and we just stayed in hotels during our year of “nomadding”.
Good for you. We never used it in 10 years of nomadding. However, we did abuse it constantly by contacting hosts and then cancelling the request and paying them cash rent at a negotiated price for a month or two. Idk how well that would work anymore.
It depends on the host. If the host is a "real person" (for a lack of a better word) then it works. If they have a bunch of properties and outsourced it to an agency or something, it won't work.
Unfortunately the latter is becoming increasingly popular and harder and harder to avoid. I usually try to book places where it's a large house and they rent out the top floor or something.
That way if there are any problems, the owner is right there to help and it's easier to negotiate the cash deals.
It sounds like your two options are to either charge the max to all guests and the expense of less bookings or to take the loss on the extremely dirty outliers and expect it to be made up by the extremely tidy outliers.
I pay a housecleaning company come every two weeks. Two people, sometimes three, between 2 and 3 hours. $150. Or $200 if it's been longer.
I regularly see $300 cleaning fees.
And when I've had limited options and paid those cleaning fees, I think "I'd have fired my housecleaners if this was what I was getting for my money, every week, sometimes twice a week".
Let's be brutally honest - the hosts using professional cleaners are only paying for an hour or two. And oftentimes, I expect that their "cleaners" are the host's kids being handed a tub of sanitizing wipes.
"I'm worried this ban will only affect honest hosts."
EMF meters(like in the airplane to spot mobiles) are quite cheap and if you find an active one, you can probably sue the host, but at least reporting should have some effect, even though no instaban.
"If a guest reports the presence of an indoor camera after that, Airbnb says it will investigate and that it could remove the host’s listing or account as a result."
I do think that many hosts are scared of loosing the income, so they will comply.
What are you referring to here?
Yeah I've often forgotten and left my ipad on cellular or my phone non-aircraft-moded. No one has ever said anything so it's unlikely they have automatic detection.
It also never happened to me, but I heard of stories, where the stewardess walked around with one.
But they might have gotten less paranoid about it(since nothing ever happened?). Chances of bad interference are probably very low.
I think (although not sure) that cell phone on planes ban was much less about interference with plane electronics and more about the poor handling of a rapidly moving phone on ground cell networks at the time.
Enough flying phones would cause a significant performance degradation. The issue of handling fast switching was solved, but any "because security" or "because safety" laws tend to stay for a long time.
I fly a lot and haven't head of this at all. Sounds like one of those stories that spread from someone thinking they saw something when in reality it was a crew with a phone checking seats for passengers.
I’ve flown over a thousand times and have rarely used “airplane mode”. I’ve never seen any cabin crew using anything to “detect” cellular activity or even mentioning phones.
People not turning on the airplane mode on their devices while in a plane. Sometimes they check (never happened to me though, but I avoid flying).
Modern mobiles are not using frequencies anywhere close to those used by the plane for nav / comms anymore so this is not an issue (though your battery will run to zero as it frantically tries to find a tower)
IMO phone battery is relatively fine. I've forgotten to enable airplane mode on a few flights.
I try to remember but I know I don't always and the battery has been relatively fine. And over the course of hundreds of flights I've never once seen or heard a flight attendant come around to tell a passenger to put their phone into airplane mode when I'm sure that maybe the majority of people just ignore the instruction to do so.
https://simpleflying.com/why-passengers-must-put-phones-into...
https://www.faa.gov/travelers/fly_safe/information
You'll note the FCC in there. While the aircraft instrumentation is the most immediate "reason for people to do this" that people can identify, disrupting ground communications is also there. Unfortunately, people are not that likely to do it based on "you'll inconvenience people using the cell phone towers that you fly over."
In a house with a bunch of smart meters/appliances, bluetooth devices, a router, indoor electrical wiring, nearby power lines, cell signals, AM/FM radio, etc wouldn't the house be constantly flooded with EMF radiation pretty much everywhere?
They all emmit on different frequencies. But I have not made a test yet, how well it works with a cheap one (I bought a simple one some weeks ago). The advanced ones can be tuned to find very specific bands.
I've stayed at dozens of AirBnBs and I've never had an onerous list of chores or a noticeably high cleaning fee, so these complaints always baffle me a little. Are people reading the listing thoroughly? Are they choosing a place with lots of ratings and reading all of the reviews? I've definitely had some bad AirBnbs over the years despite my careful selection process, but my complains are usually about noise or a lack of supplies (extra towels and blankets for example).
I literally lived in airbnbs for three years traveling across the whole of the contiguous United States and never once had this either. I did have them ask to put the trash can outside at some of them and most want you to remove your food from the fridge / freezer but that is about it.
Just checked my account, we stayed at 167 places in the last 5 years.
Maybe it's more common in larger group stays? The type you might not be visiting as much as an individual living in Airbnbs?
Wwe were a couple with two dogs renting whole houses as a rule but yeah that’s possible.
Same here. 16 stays so far (most long-term, 1+ months), so not much, but all with zero issues. Hosts usually ask to do the most basic stuff - check that everything is closed and turned off, sometimes take the trash out, and possibly collect the used towels and drop them in the bathroom. Stuff I'd do anyway without being asked.
I remember having a request to run a washing machine once - and sure thing I did. It's just a push of a button, not like I'm doing laundry by hand, and if a couple minutes of my time (that otherwise would be spent circling around the place and quadruple-checking if I packed everything I've brought with me) saves someone half an hour then I'm happy for a quick and meaningful distraction. As for the dishes and kitchen utensils - some hosts ask, some don't, but I wouldn't leave them dirty either way, that's just common sense and basic respect to the property.
Don't remember seeing any outrageous cleaning fees - although I haven't really bothered to check the fee structure, all I care about is the grand total and whenever it fits my budget - the rest is simply irrelevant to me. Airbnb used to suck about not showing the total amount right away (which led to this cleaning fee fiasco), but I believe it's long fixed.
Then, I typically spend about a week's worth of evenings carefully going over the listings, multiple times. Airbnb's search is mostly a joke, one can only find a decent place by setting only the most basic filters then methodically going through the listings checking if they're accurate, have a decent number of photos (listing descriptions are useless, have to actually see the kitchen, shower and "dedicated workspace"), favorable reviews, no obvious red flags, checking surroundings on the maps and so on.
Either way, for the long-term stays a good Airbnb house or apartment beats a hotel (YMMV). And ever for the shorter-term (1-2 week) stays I always checked the hotels and always ended up picking an Airbnb because it was a more attractive option.
This is the key. You're valuing your time at nothing. Which is fine, if it works for you.
It doesn't work for me. I want to do a quick search, using the basic parameters, and to be able to trust my search without going full CSI.
Increasingly, with Airbnb (also booking.com, also eBay, and now even Amazon), the results of a quick search cannot be trusted. In the case of Airbnb, hotels offer a "more reliable" alternative for the busy person.
If you know a service that has a working search over finer details (like a fridge size or having an ergonomic chair or path to a grocery store), and wide availability - please tell me. I’d probably ditch Aribnb instantly, I have no loyalty to it or anything.
It’s not good at all, but I’m not aware about any alternatives that can provide equally good results.
Having a good stay that I will enjoy is what I value of my time against. If I’m going to spend 2 months somewhere, I think spending a week isn’t worse than hating something every day for those two months.
I used to feel the same way, but over the past few months have started experiencing it quite a bit. I think it started in more touristy areas I didn't tend to go to, and now is spreading all over the platform.
It's a terrible experience. last 2 trips I've gone on I've ended up in hotels because all of the airbnb's had cleaning fees close to the nightly rate and an actual chore list for check out.
no thanks.
If you’re paying the cleaning fee anyway, why would you do any of that stuff?
The hosts could leave you a bad review which can make it harder to book in the future.
With instant booking isn't that pretty much pointless now? I'd rather have a low rating than be scammed.
I love how we went from "the customer is always right" to this.
/s
Have you watched Black Mirror's "Nosedive"?
There is a rating system for guests, and losing "social credit" will make using the platform harder.
This implied threat makes people "behave", with both benefits (the worst actors will be filtered out and can't repeatedly impose the cost of their actions on society) and drawbacks (feeling pressured to always give 120%, fear of bad ratings, getting excluded through no fault of your own if you just get unlucky).
Because hosts can leave bad reviews of guests. This happened to us once when we were new to Airbnb, we had that exact thought: "We paid a cleaning fee, we're pretty tidy anyway let's just let them do their job." But we got a bad review and now almost every place we book, I get a phone call asking about the bad review and I have to explain... "We paid a cleaning fee, we're already very tidy people, and we were stressed and rushed getting our family with young kids out the door on time. The mess they're complaining about was probably 5 minutes of sweeping, but now we are even more meticulous when checking out."
Most of those things are pretty common courtesy...
The cleaning fee is for deeper stuff like vacuuming, scrubbing the sink, toilets, etc... And yeah I think it also captures the one-time effort of the "turnover", where the host has to do the laundry, remake the beds, and a bunch of small things you might not notice.
I also hated it when the cleaning fee wasn't added until the end, which was very bait-and-switch-y. But as long as it's upfront it's ok.
It would be nice if more hosts just offered rooms though. If you don't think of it as a hotel, then it doesn't need that deep clean and doesn't need the cleaning fee. I just want a quick place to crash for a night sometimes...
Because they'll charge you for it and ding your rating.
Honestly I think those requirements are perfectly reasonable for the originally intended purpose of the site, which is people renting out their personal homes. I have stayed in several Airbnbs that had the owner's clothes in the closet and pictures of their kids on the wall, and in those situations, it just seems rude to leave dirty dishes in the sink. These places aren't hotels.
I agree that doing laundry is a bit onerous in clearly dedicated rentals, but in my experience those tend to have fewer requirements and tend to not care if you miss a couple steps unless you trash the place.
Those types of Airbnb's are long gone, now its entirely commercial.
They are not gone, I book them all the time. They're hard to find, but they exist.
How are they even hard to find? They’re one of the three top level filter options.
That's not really what I'm talking about. Yes, the "room in someone's home" is a subset of "people's personal homes", but some of my best Airbnb experiences were entire homes that were someone's personal home (or duplex style arrangements), that were being rented out on a temporary basis. There is no filter for this.
That's all fine. The $200 cleaning fee on top of that isn't. The $200 cleaning crew will do the dishes no problem.
Depends on the size of the property.
I’d say if it’s not mentioned in the ad up-front, you don’t have to do any of that.
I’ve found high cleaning fees to sometimes be an intentional discouragement to shorter bookings, but sometimes I’ve paid it because it was still the best option and I like that they maintained the option.
Sucks that the only way to push on fixed costs (it’s not just cleaning) is via the cleaning fee.
That’s how you get a bad review and charges for $800 to replace a napkin. Airbnb will side with the host, not you.
This doesn't actually happen even discounting the hyperbole. Airbnb sides with guests for little things. And hosts are much more affected by a bad review than a guest is.
Of course not a napkin, but it’s happened to me that they pushed made up charges on to me. So you can’t tell me it doesn’t happen. A friend of mine came to visit me and stayed at a place for one night. They hit him with smokers damage. Not only he doesn’t smoke but also he was there only to sleep. How Do you even fight that?
Charge back.
Reviews of buyers don’t matter much anymore since almost the entire platform is “instant booking”.
Dunno what kind of rules exist on the host side to block bookings under a certain rating. I know eBay’s are garbage because they’re not in the business of blocking sales.
This! If I show up after checking in and get a message asking me to do a bunch of things, I'm going to give them a hard no and point to the booking.
Your family was asked to do about 17 minutes of convenient, easy preparatory tidying that most considerate people would do even without being asked (as in a hotel or when visiting a friend).
Yet you benefited from coming into a home that, presumably, had all of its floors vaccuumed, its kitchen and bathroom surfaces sanititized, its linens folded and/or readied, etc. Whether it was the host or a service, somebody followed up behind you and likely spent at least several hours preparing the place for the next guest. And instead of it being bundled into your daily room rate like in a hotel, since it's only being done once per stay, it was applied as a per-stay cleaning fee. That's eminently fair.
There are about a thousand of things to complain loundly about with AirBnB and countless things in life more broadly -- being asked to tidy up a little bit or to pay a per-stay fee to cover cleaning? Not really a compelling one.
I think the point is it should be part of the upfront cost when searching, rather than something that shows up at the end.
Yes, that is one of the many valid complaints one might have with AirBnb and AirBnb browsing is much less frustrating in the markets that have forced them to do that.
But I don't read that as what the above commenter was complaining about.
You empty the trash from your hotel room? Really?
If there's an appropriate place for me to do so, yeah.
And if there's not (as often), I at least gather all the trash together and make that task as easy as possible for whoever's stuck with the thankless job of cleaning up after me.
It's wild and disheartening that people here feel justified in not doing basic tidying of whatever mess they made when traveling or that it's some big demand of a host to ask them to.
There is no situation where cameras are acceptable in another person's living space, so whether this only affects honest hosts is irrelevant; as long as it reduces usage, it is a good thing. Imagine hotels arguing for allowing cameras in their suites because they are "honest".
I believe the argument is that dishonest hotels will simply say "Yep, we got rid of cameras too!" without actually doing so.
I have never heard of hotels putting cameras inside rooms.
You could never trust a host to respond honestly about that anyways, so it's a moot point. AirBNB up until recently never acted on indoor cameras, and didn't care if a user reported it even if they felt the host hid/misled that information.
imagine a hotel charging you because when you obstruct the camera with some object, your video [profile data] couldnt be provided to a data broker
I've also noticed that now some hosts are able to use external services and require a security deposit not managed through airbnb. Supposedly these are only via "airbnb approved platforms," but I still don't like it as there is no real oversight.
For example, I found one that wanted almost $1000 as a deposit, and had a whole bunch of rules by which they would charge you extra. Not cleaning dishes, or not well enough would ding you $12 per item! Not putting the keys back in the lockbox on time would be $28/h. There was even a db meter that supposedly didn't record audio. The issue is where is the line? What do they consider clean a dish "well enough"? What is the db limit? Can I see the meter?
I just avoided it as it sounded too irritating to deal with and with the deposit outside of airbnb there is no room for argument.
That's even worse with Booking (half of their listings are now Airbnb-like rentals). After I paid the full non-refundable amount, I was requested to send an extra deposit, pass video-based verification, holding a passport next to my face, explain the purpose of my travel etc.
Issue a Chargeback.
You knew this when making the booking? Why didn’t you book a hotel instead? Airbnb or the host have no incentive to change if people like you keep going back. They will change only when it starts to hurt their bottom line.
You know about the cleaning fees at booking, but not necessarily the "rules" about cleaning.
Anything not disclosed in "house rules" section at the time of booking is not your responsibility.
A $200 cleaning fee is more expensive than a night at many Manhattan hotels. Actual hotels. With full service. Is airbnb even worth it?
Not for a night no. It's more of a replacement to renting a service apartment for longer periods of time (e.g. a week or more).
FWIW, the last hotel I stayed at in Manhattan was $300 a day and had no service. And this was a big name hotel too, not some budget option.
Re: will only affect honest hosts
It still probably helps reduce surveillance a fair bit:
- honest host who currently disclosed cameras will stop
- dishonest hosts who are worried about getting caught will stop (most aren’t tech savvy enough to hide cameras, catching them isn’t hard, and they don’t want to risk getting kicked off platform)
- really dishonest hosts who hide cameras will get kicked off platform if caught (and potential civil/criminal cases)
Not perfect but a good move and should help.
A host can’t complain about you breaking the camera if they didn’t say there’s one there.
cctv cameras in non public places and with no oversight (including video doorbells etc) are a cancer on society
Why would customers even put up with this type of abuse? I don't get it. Just stay somewhere else. If I'm staying with a friend or relative for free then I'm happy to pitch in with household chores, but if I'm paying then screw that. I honestly can't understand why anyone would use AirBnB when there are so many better options available.
AirBnB is the only decent affordable option for a large group of people who want to stay together. Other than that, I see no point.
They should ban any hosts that require guests to do cleaning to be honest.
Why? Lots of people would rather do a little themselves to get the price down. Why should your preference dictate how everyone does it?
And it varies from market to market what's the norm. For instance for cabins in Norway, the norm for a long time was that the renter brought their own bedding and cleaned everything, mopped the floor etc before leaving. Long before airbnb was a thing.
Should an American company decide that this Norwegian way of doing it is no longer ok..?
Yeah these days it is cheaper to rent a spot at apartment hotel.
Might pay $75/night for it but to need to do any cleaning
Vacuum, mop the floors, scrub the toiles and sinks, clean the dust / hairs. Of course there is a cleaning fee.
Next time book a hotel then.
The only way things will change is if all of use refuse to keep giving them our money.
You can avoid those listings if you want. You are only responsible for the tasks they specify up front in the listing under "rules". If they didn't list it up front, before you book, you don't have to do it. If they try to spring some tasks on you upon arrival, that's their problem.
Why do you have to do all that, though?
Don’t do the cleaning and leave a medium review that politely says you were not informed of cleaning policy beforehand. Host has no way to penalize you (outside of a bad review) and you can respond to their review (if they criticize you) saying you were not informed at booking. Keep your review and response cordial and any future host evaluating you will assume that the past host was weird. There’s no way anyone can verify the claim by the other host that they articulated the cleaning policies.
Is this partly about norms I'm different countries?
If I were renting a holiday cottage in the UK (airbnb or otherwise), I'd expect to do the washing up and take our rubbish, and possibly strip the beds. I wouldn't expect to clean ovens or put laundry on.
Staying in Finland recently we had to make our beds at the start - no idea if that is normal there but wouldn't expect that in the UK unless you were at a youth hostel.
I assuming the cleaning feel covers mopping, hoovering, cleaning bathrooms, making up beds with fresh laundry. Some places do feel like they overcharge nonetheless for the number of hours required and I presume that it is more an overhead person stay charged to discourage short stays.
I always refuse to do everything except load and start dishwashers, if I filled it, take the trash out. I have 15 reviews, ALL positive.
One hack you can do is tell the host you have a disability and will not be able to carry out those tasks.
AirBnB should tie the cleaning fee to your rating, perhaps a cleanliness dedicated rating.
I don’t understand why this is a worry. There’s no such thing as an in-room security camera in a hotel. Airbnb should have had a clear ban on indoor security cameras a long time ago.
You might as well say that “laws only apply to law-abiding people.” That’s not a reason to not have laws.
No come on, some of those are crazy, no one is expected to clean the oven after normal use.
I've seen this lots but I've never actually done any of the things they ask me to. Bringing out the garbage? Sure, but only if it's overflowing while I'm there. I will start the dishwasher. We've also never received a bad review so I think at least where we stayed, while those things are explained in their handbook or wherever there's no downside to just not doing them.
go to a hotel then, they have paid cleaning staff to take care of that stuff for you
What will they do if you refuse?
I just move on when I see requirements like that. Some of those I do as a matter of course (clean any food mess/dishes if I have a kitchen). I think my mom beat that one into me. I'm definitely not doing laundry with a house cleaning fee is tacked on. Probably why I stay at hotels 95% of the time.