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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you on almost all of this, but I think the cleaning fee is different. It represents an actual cost for an actual activity. I think AirBnb should show initial totals with it included, so you're never surprised by it. But it shouldn't be rolled up into the nightly rate because it really is a one-off.

As an example, right now I'm looking at doing an extended trip, on the order of 2-4 weeks. I just need one cleaning at the end. If they inflate the daily rate to cover cleaning, I'll end up paying a lot more than the average weekender trip. Or if they hide it in a variable price, then I'll have a hard time comparing different lengths of stays across different places.

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> I think AirBnb should show initial totals with it included, so you're never surprised by it. But it shouldn't be rolled up into the nightly rate because it really is a one-off.

I disagree with this, and it's easily handled on the backend too. If the cleaning fee is e.g once per trip or once every few days, smear that cost across the cost of the stay for your effective nightly rate.

Frankly, how much it costs to clean a unit shouldn't be a separate calculus when comparing rooms. What ultimately matters is how much I'm out of pocket by the end of the trip, and that's most easily compared by showing the customer the effective nightly rate for the date range being searched. Do the breakdown later, sure, but the effective nightly rate is what should be shown first. Or even just the total for the stay, but no weirdness with fees where those fees can be smeared.

Last tidbit: cleaning fees are another profit vehicle for Airbnb sellers; rarely is the fee the same as what the seller is paying the cleaning service.

Isn't this:

> shouldn't be a separate calculus when comparing rooms

Solved by this:

> AirBnb should show initial totals with it included, so you're never surprised by it.

The reason I put it that way is that the "smear that cost across the cost of the stay for your effective nightly rate" is hiding a number that I then have to reverse engineer if I'm looking at stays of different lengths. Since I work remotely, I could easily stay an extra week or two, but I won't do it in a place that is going to gouge me for cleaning I don't need.

>If the cleaning fee is e.g once per trip or once every few days, smear that cost across the cost of the stay for your effective nightly rate.

This misses the point that it's useful to have the one-time costs separated from the nightly costs so that consumers can better understand if they can get a better nightly cost by extending their stay (or even ideally from having options over those fixed costs.) It's the same logic as separating shipping costs from unit costs in online sales, because you can often save on shipping by spreading the cost across multiple units and it benefits the consumer to know this.

This misses the point that it's not useful to have the one-time costs separated from the nightly costs when trying to compare options.

I think we all agree that the totals should include everything, as that makes comparison better. But I am precisely saying that there should be someplace where the legitimate one-time costs should be separated out because it is useful to me.

Multiple people have explained how it's useful to them. Do you think these people are all jointly deluded in the exact same fashion?

Even better, show total price not nightly rate. They'd never do that though because showing the nightly rate holds off the total sticker shock until the user has their credit card in hand.

>how much it costs to clean a unit shouldn't be a separate calculus when comparing rooms

The cost to clean shouldn't. The fact that there's a large fixed charge that's going to be amortized across the number of nights you're staying is relevant though.

Yes, by all means give me the total amount for the stay length. But show me any fixed charges so that I can maybe decide it makes sense to stay longer given part of the cost is fixed.

I definitely wouldn't mind it broken out in the details section but the main displayed price should always reflect all costs (including taxes!) IMO. If I'm going to need to do math on the pricing it should be for the corner cases like comparing the daily price of stays at different places for different lengths of time not for finding out how much something costs on its own.

Totally agreed. I lived for a time in Australia, where all the prices included tax. The price you saw was the price you paid. When I got back to the US, I wondered what the hell was wrong with me that I spent my life seeing our much more confusing system as reasonable.

That and the way our income taxes work are two of the most annoying things that the anti-tax right have "won" in the US. Everyone's life is made a little worse all the time, in the name of some I-suspect-imaginary "awareness campaign" to increase resistance to taxes. In fact I doubt there'd be any less awareness if they'd just mandate that tax be itemized and given sufficient weight on receipts, and that the IRS mail out some tax-burden statement for the ~90% of people who shouldn't, in a well-functioning system, need to manually fill out and file anything.

It has way less to do with any "awareness campaign" and more to do with how tax rates are different in many municipalities that are very close to each other and how hard that makes advertising.

For instance, the famous "$5 footlong" from Subway couldn't be advertised that way nationally, or even within a single state or metro area due to different taxes on prepared food.

I'm pretty skeptical there. Do you have any evidence that was a big motivation?

I'll note that the costs of labor, space, and other inputs also can vary widely across a state, so tax differences don't strike me as unsolvable. And regardless, "prices and participation may vary" is an extremely common disclaimer for ads with prices.

Subway national ads & coupons (among other practices) in particular are notorious for immiserating or ruining their own franchisees. My nearest one keeps a sheet with the list of the ones they'll actually honor.

I wanna say Little Caesars had kind of a similar situation. I think they actually had a fight at one point with their franchisees over their too-static-to-be-realistic very-low prices.

In practice, these national campaigns seem to kinda be a bad thing, anyway—either abusing franchisees who can't evade them, or else not actually being offered universally (which is pretty damn close to false advertising, "participating locations" fine-print being more a bullshit dodge than something intended to truly communicate the truth of the offer).

Why is that an issue? Subway could easily find another campaign, such as “$5* footlong (*or less depending on local taxes)”, “affordable footlong”, or whatever. If your advertising campaign depends on being deceptive, I find no issue with it becoming impossible.

Are local sales taxes just a US thing? How do so very many other developed countries manage this just fine?

The US, thanks to being well, states that are united, has a history of devolved government. In a lot of places the power structures are much more unified, but here there's a tradition of independence within broad limits.

There's a short history of California sales taxes here on page 3 (which is ~30 by PDF page count): https://www.ppic.org/wp-content/uploads/content/pubs/report/...

But basically during the depression, state-level sales taxes arose in a lot of places. Some cities/counties/districts then got in on the action. This means that people got to decide their own levels of taxation (and spending) on a much more granular level. Which as somebody who lives in a high-tax/high-service area (relative to America, not to the civilized world) is great by me.

Careful what you wish for—it causes strong race-to-the-bottom effects and tragedies of the commons / free-rider problems—if tax districts are small enough, I can go enjoy the parks in a neighboring tax district while having chosen to live where taxes are insufficient to pay for such nice parks. Extend for everything, not just parks, and you've got the situation in tons of major US cities, where low-tax suburban and exurban towns attract people who pay taxes in their little town but strain the public resources of the city proper, which city is the only reason those towns are 1/10 the size they are in the first place. City forced to raise taxes by all the free-riding, effect intensifies. It's not great.

interestingly, sales tax in San Francisco (8.63%) is noticeably lower than in the Easy Bay (10.25%).

replacing big ticket items such as a macbook pro 16” ends up being about $40 cheaper, especially for someone commuting into the city for work anyway.

You can, you just do the math backward so it’s $5 everywhere (or $6 or whatever).

From a compliance perspective that would work. However, that means that franchisees in high-tax areas like Chicago make 10% less per sale than those in Oregon or Delaware. That doesn't seem tenable in the long run.

I mean franchises in high cost areas already deal with this and survive. Or, as written, “at participating locations.”

The cleaning fee is part of doing business. I don’t pay my taxi driver for car registration or oil changes either.

The cleaning is a one time fixed cost for a stay. It's the same for a one night stay or a week long stay. There is a one to one expense per "purchase". Not so with your taxi example.

Actually taxis handle this in their fee structure already: a fixed initial cost and a marginal rate for additional mileage/time.

You do, but it is apart of the charging model. They accounted for wear and tear on the car and baked that into their rate. if their rate is 10 cents a mile they transport you, maybe 0.01 cent of that that 0.10/mile is the cost of wear and tear. It isn't a separate charge. Which is how hotels should handle cleaning. Yea, your technically paying for it, but isn't a separate fee. It is just included with the price of the room just as project wear and tear costs are baked into the taxi service rate.

These people are making money hand over fist, cleaning should be on the hosts, it is their duty to provide clean accommodation.

I don't even understand this.

I show up at a clean place. After I leave, somebody needs to clean up after me to make it good for the next person. No matter who does the cleaning, the hosts or somebody they hire, this takes supplies and labor. The only person putting money in is me, so the cleaning obviously has to be on my dime. I just want the pricing to be transparent in the details and included in the headline numbers.

It should be factored into the up-front price. Do they include the cost of the inventory and snacks in the price?

The host wants to make money from a room, it is in their interest to keep it clean for their guest, because they are the ones making profit from it.

Making the room habitable and desirable is their cost in order for you to spend money on their service.

I read it as the person making the money being responsible for cleaning, which makes sense — it’s quite literally their job and they’re way more familiar with the local market for cleaning services.

Huh. I hadn't thought of that. Is there some circumstance in which the hosts aren't responsible for cleaning for the next guest? I was talking about cleaning fees charged by the host, which would seem to imply them responsible in that sense.

> It represents an actual cost for an actual activity.

It really doesn't. It's been a stealth way to increase your rates for a long time now.

> I think AirBnb should show initial totals with it included, so you're never surprised by it.

They do, but it makes comparing rentals (both within AirBnB and across services) a pain in the ass, because it's not factored into the initial rate-per-night that you see and that they sort by if you ask them to show cheapest-first. [EDIT] I glossed over the "should" when reading the parent for this part—whoops. I thought they meant it's included once you're into the actual listing, not on the list-of-listings page, which is already, but which isn't enough. I stand by the first part—cleaning fees rarely represent the "actual cost" of the activity, on US AirBnB.

> > It represents an actual cost for an actual activity.

> It really doesn't. It's been a stealth way to increase your rates for a long time now.

Two things can be true at once.

Cleaning is an actual activity they actually have to do after I leave. There are actual costs. E.g., they might use a service that specializes in vacation rental cleaning: https://cleaningglow.com/san-francisco-services/vacation-ren...

Do some people inflate the fee as a way of increasing your rates? Surely. But that's only a problem when the comparison price doesn't include it, a problem I agree we should solve. I'd just like the fee to also be listed somewhere, as it makes other comparisons easier for some people, me included.

It's so common on US airbnb that I expect it's practically necessary to shift some margin to the "cleaning fee" to stay competitive (you'll get out-"bid" by others who have).

I objected to "actual cost", not "actual activity". Yes, they clean (usually...). No, it doesn't cost anywhere near what they're charging, unless you left the place such a wreck that you're getting a 1-star guest rating.

Depends on the Airbnb, I guess. I've definitely looked at places where the cleaning fee struck me as about market price. And I'm much more likely to stay at a place like that as it increases my trust in the host, so maybe the margin-shifting doesn't work for everybody.

It is factored in here in Europe. So the issue isn't the fee itself, but that in other jurisdictions it's hidden.

Right, if it's factored in, that's fine. It'd also automatically remove the incentive to pad the cleaning fee, which is so common in the US that I expect it's hard to compete in listings without doing it (without hiding some of your margin in the cleaning fee, that is).

By that logic, they should also charge independently for: rolls of toilet paper used, water used, electricity, booking fee, advertising fee, email fee, listing fee...

Probably not, in that those are either too small to be worth the cost of metering or not representative of actual direct costs.

The point isn't that it isn't a real fee (it may or may not be), but that it isn't advertised up front.

A company can throw whatever fees they want at me as long as it's in the up front cost.

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