Welcome to Your Airbnb, Cleaning Fees Is $143 and You Still Have to Wash Linens | Hacker News Reader

Welcome to Your Airbnb, Cleaning Fees Is $143 and You Still Have to Wash Linens

wsj.com

21 pointsSkipperCat16 comments

We had a good run with Airbnb, but it’s no longer the guy renting his apartment because he’s leaving over the weekend. It seems like all the offers available now are from people who bought lodgings specifically to rent them out hotel style.

We’ve stopped using Airbnb after a lady told us we should bring our own sheets and towels, otherwise there’s a surcharge of 25 euros per person. We discovered serviced apartments in the meanwhile. Same comfort, hotel-like regulations and, surprisingly cheaper

I've definitely noticed huge cleaning fees on Airbnb increasingly often over the years. I think the solution here is removing the "cleaning fee" entirely and just including that fee in the stated price that you end up seeing on maps or in lists when you're searching.

The fee makes using an Airbnb only worthwhile if you are staying there for many days. For a single night, the cleaning fees make them much more expensive than a hotel.

I imagine that's what a lot of hosts prefer.

If you're a professional Airbnb host, you probably have a deal worked out with a cleaning service or you do it yourself full-time. But if you're the day-job-having Airbnb host who just rents out a single room or nearby vacation home, you probably don't want to be managing multiple check-ins/outs and cleaning multiple times a week.

Which makes sense on the supply side too. Hotels have some overhead airbnb doesnt, but at least they have decicated cleaning staff that's working at some level of scale.

With Airbnb, there's a huge inefficiency, in that places have to be maintained, but to do so, help staff have to travel all over the place (very inefficient). Back when airbnb was people renting out some extra space or going on vacation for a bit, they'd swallow the cleaning costs as part of the profit. But now that airbnb & others are industrialized, are regular money making operations, the whole question of how these kind of special, spread out businesses compete versus the classic centealized meant-for-the-purpose hotel re-appears, & the economic inefficiency/insufficiency of the "disurptor" becomes clearly apparent.

We need a law that says, "List price must include all fees".

Welcome to Australia - its quite a shock when you travel to the US and suddenly the hotel price advertised increases with tax and resort fees and a bunch of other hidden charges.

One of the many problems with Airbnb is that a host can tack on crazy requirements and you're blackmailed into doing them for fear of getting ding'd your Airbnb rating.

In a perfect world, there's be some sort of "rights" as a guest where hosts couldn't demand the customer do so much cleaning or at least only make a guest clean if there's no cleaning fee.

Yep I've skipped giving feedback on a place that was very misrepresented because I know they would probably provide bad feedback in retaliation.

There should be escrow for the feedback - its not published until both parties provide feedback or the 7 day window is passed.

It should also be impossible to search for previous feedback a user has left, rather only see their overall score.

This used to be the case when we used Airbnb a few years ago. Is it no longer so?

I recall being able to view guest reviews around 3 years ago when I last used airbnb.

A quick google shows complaints of dodgy hosts who do a "snipe" nasty review just before the feedback window ends if the guest has not left a review.

there's no chance in hell I'd clean my airbnb if there's a fee attached

when I go to a hotel or airbnb etc (and yes, they are equivalent) the main reason for me doing so is that I have no intention of cleaning up after myself

I would have guessed the main reason is that you're going to sleep in a bed some distance from your house-- not having to clean is a perk. However, I'm always conscious to at least "tidy" up my room. The hotel staff definitely have a tough job. I don't need to ignore trash cans as well.

This is it, isn't it. Leave your hotel tidy. Trash in the bin, crumbs in the bin, stuff more or less where you found it so its easily made to look nice. Leave your used towels in a pile. Makes house cleaning easy and costs you basically no time or effort, and that keeps everyone's prices down.

And might make a cleaner sigh a bit of relief.

https://archive.ph/cYxFm

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