Is it just me, or does this article look like a textbook example of a press hit / submarine marketing (as described by pg [1]), for Hilton's recently-launched anti-AirBnB campaign [2]?

I don't know if I can trust this. It's almost ridiculously anecdotal, and in a big enough market it's unfairly easy to find anecdotes to support almost any claim. There are no metrics about typical cleanup expected or whether cleaning requirements are truly growing; running a dishwasher and cleaning your own messes seems patently reasonable as part of the "deal" of this kind of rental. And as a very infrequent AirBnB user, it's not clear to me how the $143 cleaning fee works. Is it only applied if you make a huge mess? Are the expectations on cleaning and possible fee made clear going in? Or is this always charged and part of the standard fee?

I wish this kind of PR nonsense didn't exist; if so, the organic decision to write about this might be signal about a real trend. But given that it does, this may just be an attempt to pipe lies into my brain. I am suspicious.

Edit: This line is extremely telling when carefully parsed: "[AirBnB] said around 55% of its active listings charge a cleaning fee, which on average makes up less than 10% of the total reservation cost."

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/AirBnB/comments/wwqibv/hilton_launc...