Cleaning Fees

[Chris1587]

As a sometime Airbnb user I would like to make hosts aware of something. I will never ( never ever ) book a place with cleaning fees. I can’t imagine I’m the only so please consider carefully before adding this extra cost to your prices. 

1. I would leave the place clean and tidy when I left anyway. 

2. What am I paying you for anyway? I expect you to have to wash towels and vacuum, why would I pay extra for this 

3. Clean is not an ‘optional’ extra. 

I pay more perhaps than the advertised fee by this standard I have set but that’s OK, it’s my opinion you’re just adding the fees so your prices seem lower. 

For instance advertised at £40 pounds, cleaning fee £17 plus Airbnb fee £15 - total £72 !! Sharp practice. 

So please, please have a bit of consideration before adding these fees. 

And to to the person who seemed proud of ‘a free basket of logs for the woodburner’.... c’mon. 

Rant over. 

[Tara241]

This makes total sense. It’s one reason I won’t generally do low budget weddings, and why once I increased my prices to a certain point is topped getting super high maintenance, ungrateful, rude, clients with sh!t show, stressful weddings. That is not to say all low budget weddings are awful, they aren’t. That would be classist and rude and untrue. But those bad situations have dramatically decreased or disappeared with higher pricing. I get it.

For those hosts, maybe investing into making their space more enjoyable and raising their nightly rate would solve the problem. But I know people with super small budgets still need places to stay - but if the hosts are making up for all the trouble by increasing the cleaning fee anyway, maybe it just makes more sense to increase the quality of the rental and thereby the “quality” of the guests. 

[Christine615]

@Alice-and-Jeff0

If it's a 2 bedroom, why not limit to 4 or 5 people?  We have three bedrooms. The city will legally allow us to host 7 but we limit to 4 (in some cases of families we will increase to 5). It lowers wear and tear. (And one of my messiest guests was a superhost if you can believe it).

Also - unless the neighborhood is undesirable, raise the rent. OR -- drumroll -- set the rate for 2 people and charge $25/per person/night for every extra body walking in the door. Change the listing to say that only those guests who are registered may stay there. That will more than cover your extra cleaning fee.

We charge for every warm body over four people and so far, so good. Most people with more than four just find another place 🙂

[April96]

Raise the price. Definitely. Add a coat of paint and spruce it up super cheap (Homegoods, IKEA, whatever)...then jack it. quality over quantity...always. SANITY. 

[Casita-By-The-Texas-Bay0]

For us is an added expense as we pay a cleaning service to come and have the house ready before the guest arrives, and cleaned out when they leave. If I were the one doing the cleaning, I may or may not include the cost.

I believe it is a fair and necessary practice.

[Annelies24]

I won't charge a claning fee because I paid a $50 fee for a place which was not at all clean... I may not have checked behind the bed and all the crockery if I hadnt paid the fee. Charging a cleaning fee is licence for the guest to criticize cleanliness... I do believe that a host has a responsibility to have the place clean by default.... including rewashing all the dishes.

[Tara241]

Do you mind if I ask if ABB charged another fee to the host besides the service fee the guests pay? I know they charge you a fee for credit card processing (I pay all those fees too, for my business). I’m just curious if ABB is double dipping on the fees or not. 

[Sarah977]

@Tara241  Hosts are charged 3% service fee by Airbnb. Guest's fee % varies according to some formula no one but Airbnb actually knows. The listing price you see, before any security deposit, cleaning fees, etc, is actually not what the host ends up getting. Airbnb takes 3% out of that.

[Tara241]

@Sarah977 Wow! That’s really great, actually! 3% would basically cover the cost of credit card processing fees. I was expecting to hear they took s much larger amount. Glad to hear that for the hosts! 🙂

[Sarah977]

@Tara241  Well, there's no credit card processing fees involved in Airbnb's payments to hosts. We are paid into our bank accounts or paypal accounts (there may be other methods in various parts of the world) but they don't pay us onto our credit cards.

[Tara241]

@Sarah977 No, I meant the fees incurred when processing the guests’ credit card payments.

If you weren’t renting out your home through Airbnb, but rather doing it in your own, you would be charged a 2-3% credit card processing fee by whichever company you used to accept credit card payments. For example, as a photographer, if a client makes a $500 payment to me with a credit card, it is processed via Square or Stripe or PayPal and I will be charged about 3% of that fee, which would be $15, so $485 would be deposited into my bank account rather than $500.

Pretty much all businesses owners pay these fees if they accept credit cards. That’s why I said it’s a pretty good deal - it’s a fee you’d probably be paying regardless of whether it was Airbnb taking it or the credit card processing company taking it. 

[April96]

Airbnb makes their money investing the $ given to hold reservations before the payout is done. Those reservations done months in advance? They love those. 🙂

[Sarah977]

@Tara241   thanks for reply. Actually, hosts I know who use other booking platforms, or have their own websites, which allow a host to charge a guest directly, don't use credit card payment- they tend to accept payments either through paypal, or direct deposits to their bank accounts.

[Tara241]

Interesting. I’ve booked through other platforms and paid with my credit card. Also, PayPal still takes that fee, I promise. I’ve used PayPal for many years. Typically, any type of service that doesn’t charge a fee is specifically for personal use only and you can get into real problems using it for business (like Venmo). I can see where a direct deposit to s bank account may not have a fee, but I have never been asked to do that and would feel really weird about it if I was. 

[Lisa723]

@Tara241 @Sarah977 I accept payment only via credit card on all platforms, and yes Airbnb's host fee is pretty much equivalent to the cc processing fee I pay on my own site.

[Lisa723]

@Chris1587 @Ben551 @Tara241

Inspired by this and the other thread about pricing surprises I've added "Please enter your dates for accurate pricing" to my listing summaries and the following text to my listing descriptions:

A note on rates and cleaning fees: Our nightly base rates are set automatically and vary according to supply and demand in our area. Our cleaning fee is a fixed cost per stay, which goes directly to our cleaners for their labor and supplies. We think this is the fairest price structure for everyone, but it means that for low-demand dates, our variable nightly rate may drop below our fixed cleaning fee, leading to an unpleasant surprise when you see your final cost. We regret that Airbnb displays only the lowest available nightly base rate, excluding cleaning fees and their own service fees, until you enter your specific dates.