@Sue1907 "But cleaning fees should be based on what the unit looks like once the client leaves and possibly refunded or partially refunded at best. IMHO"
I understand why a guest who never leaves a mess behind them would resent paying the same cleaning fee as guests who walk away leaving a pile of dirty dishes, a stovetop swimming in grease, garbage strewn all over.
But from a business point of view, in all businesses, whether it's a private business or the way a municipality runs its budget, the administrators have to look at the big picture and average things out. When people pay property taxes, they pay for everything that property taxes are used for. Things like sewers, maintaining the water system, garbage collection, schools, roads, etc. Just because I might be a really diligent recycler and composter and therefore produce one small bag of actual garbage each week, while my neighbor puts out 2 big bins, doesn't mean I get my taxes reduced. Just because my neighbor has no kids doesn't mean they get to deduct the portion of their taxes that go towards schools. Just because my other neighbor has no car, and goes out very seldom, while I use the public roads to drive on every day doesn't mean my neighbor doesn't have to contribute equally to the road system.
A host has to schedule their cleaners on a regular basis. A host has no way of knowing if the guests who stay for one night are the type who can manage to create a huge disaster zone in a few hours, or whether the guests who stay for a week are going to leave it nice and tidy. Whether a guest left the place clean or not doesn't mean that the place doesn't need to be vacuumed, floors washed, everything dusted, bathrooms thoroughly cleaned and sterilized, bedding and towels washed, beds remade, windows washed, fridge cleaned, fingerprints wiped off surfaces, check to make sure the dishes and pots and pans put back in the cupboard are actually clean, etc, etc, etc. Depending on the size of the place, no matter how respectfully guests leave a place, there is still plenty of cleaning time involved.
Then, what you haven't considered when proposing that guests get the cleaning fee back, or a portion thereof, is that this would lead to endless arguments, because everyone has different definitions of clean. So say the host doesn't consider that the guests left it clean enough to warrant a discount on the cleaning fee, and the guests think they did. Or they washed the dishes but left bits of food and grease on them that they didn't notice. Or they washed the dishes, but didn't take out the garbage as asked. Do you see how this would be an untenable sitution that would just create strife, as hosts and guests battled over how clean is considered clean?
When a guest leaves a place clean and tidy, they do so because they are mature, respectful people, because it's just the right thing to do, and they will be sure to get a good review for doing so, and be welcome back anytime.
Those who leave a mess will get a review that warns other hosts about them and they will have a hard time getting accepted in the future.
I do agree with you that some hosts leave what I consider to be an unreasonable check-out list, expecting guests to strip beds, start a load of wash, stuff like that. IMO, if hosts expect that sort of thing, they need to make that quite clear in their listing info so guests can decide whether they want to book that place, or cross it off their list of possible rentals. It isn't fair to guests to spring a long list of cleaning expectations on them in the house manual that were never mentioned beforehand.
