Our cleaning company estimates that Airbnb’s new enhanced cleaning protocols for COVID-19 will significantly increase the time to clean and require more extra linens, pillows, blankets, etc. than we previously had in order to clean our condos in a timely manner. They are estimating that it could take between 2-4 more hours per cleaning to comply with these cleaning protocols because of the extra time to clean every hard and soft surface; pillows, blankets, every dish, every pot/pan, etc. It is more like a deep cleaning than a normal cleaning turn. The costs will be $50 at a minimum and could approach $100. They want to switch from a fixed rate per cleaning to an hourly model because of this. Our cleaning costs could easily be $200 or more per cleaning – we are in Maui.
In addition, the requirement to leave PPE for each guest is expensive. We are leaving; masks, gloves, sanitizer, wipes, disinfectant, extra towels, extra soaps, etc. We are providing approximately $35 worth of PPE for each reservation.
These are costs that we never had before and I’m not sure that Airbnb considered this? We need a way to let guests know that these costs are incurred without just raising our prices. We simply can’t afford to eat these costs. What’s more, we have no way of adding this to existing reservations and it could easily be an extra $4-5K for those reservations that booked pre-covid.
What are others doing? Raising rates? Increasing cleaning fees? Nothing?
It would seem to make sense that Airbnb should add a pricing feature similar to the resort fee, linen fee, etc. and call it a PPE fee so that we could recover this cost. I can’t believe that they would expect us to eat these additional costs?
