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Comment by ohnoitsahuman | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to gauge cleaning effort: if a guest uses every dish in the kitchen without doing a wash up, they cleaning crew could be there for hours.

But if a guest is tidy, then the cleaning fee should be nothing.

The hard part is that you need to reserve and pay for a cleaning crew as if it was always a disaster.

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you need to reserve and pay for a cleaning crew as if it was always a disaster.

Yet hotels manage this fine - it's just baked into the price.

I don't have a problem paying a cleaning fee. I just don't want to pay the fee AND be required to do 90% of the cleaning myself.

I'm happy to put the dishes in and then start the dishwasher. I'm not going to wait around for it to finish and then put them away. I'm happy to pile the used towels and bedding in a single spot, but I'm not going to do the laundry. I'll pick up any trash and wipe down the kitchen, but I'm not going to take out the trash or do a deep clean of the kitchen. Etc.

This is the fundamental problem with AirBnb as a business instead of a side gig. The hotel has massive economies of scale in cleaning and other things, because they have dozens of rooms on site. If one room gets totally trashed, they just won’t use that one until they get around to cleaning it. If a guest checks out late or wants to extend their stay, they just put the next guest in a different room.

Also the cleaning crew is already on site. People are always checking out and checking in. The crew just pushes their cart to the next room instead of driving across town, packing and unpacking all of their stuff, and making sure to hit a precise time window between checkout and checkin.

This may be true for hosts with one property but it's becoming more and more common for management companies to own a lot of properties on airbnb. The whole economies of scale have been figured out.

It's really kind of wild. We rented a house on the Chesapeake Bay last summer. Newly remodeled (was very run down the year before - we've visited this town several times) with decent finishes. The manager runs a little real estate empire, either owning or managing rentals all along the I-64 corridor in VA (VA Beach through the Blue Ridge). She also runs a consulting business for people looking to get into the vacation home ownership game.

I used to dream about owning a vacation home, but my parents bought a beach house about 15 years ago. They'd rent it peak season, but keep it for family use on the shoulders through winter. It was fun for a few years, but eventually the constant upkeep and expense wore them down and they sold it. Renters can be real animals - constant stream of broken furniture, stolen kitchenware and decorations, and just plain weird stuff like broken bathroom mirrors. Really opened my eyes, at least to a money-making rental property.

Absolutely, there's a lot more risk in renting a single unit vs a hotel. The fees should be higher. The check-in/check-out timing should be stricter and with more time in between. Etc.

My wife and I have an airbnb and this is exactly how we structure our check-out. It still costs $250 per turnover for a reliable cleaning crew to come and clean the 3br, 3ba two level house.

$250 sounds like a lot of cleaning, multiple hours of cleaning by one person for sure, of course depending on your location. But that really gotta be some mansion or your customers are really the absolute worst if that's always required. Meanwhile my friend who does this stuff changes the sheets and towels and wipes the tables together with some light vacuuming and that's basically it, only a few times per year he does a more thorough cleaning. And he does it by himself since he has reasoned that he wants to check the apartment personally every time it's used anyway and he can carry those operations at the same time since it takes something like half an hour to do so.

that number is almost useless without context .. a dozen things factor into that, and the incentives, local labor market etc

Sure, and so is the $200 number in the first-level parent comment.

I think that's all pretty fair.

Put dishes in the dishwasher and start. Strip the beds. Pick up trash, quick counter wipe down.

Only difference is the trash which could just be an issue if the host isn't coming for a little while.

These should all be common sense. I don't think I've ever been asked for much more than that. Cleaning fee is for deep clean and general turnover. Maybe it should just be called the "flat-fee" though.

Hotels are literally factories for this. The fixed effort per stay is much different in a home.

Any service that's so pedantic about cleaning isn't a service that most customers would want to use. Airbnb is trying to have it's cake and eat it too putting the responsibility on "hosts" to be the bad guys. It's just lazy and callous to not have strict bounds of responsibilities customers are expected to engage with.

And that’s reason #13563 I would never do an AirBnb and we just stayed in hotels during our year of “nomadding”.

Good for you. We never used it in 10 years of nomadding. However, we did abuse it constantly by contacting hosts and then cancelling the request and paying them cash rent at a negotiated price for a month or two. Idk how well that would work anymore.

It depends on the host. If the host is a "real person" (for a lack of a better word) then it works. If they have a bunch of properties and outsourced it to an agency or something, it won't work.

Unfortunately the latter is becoming increasingly popular and harder and harder to avoid. I usually try to book places where it's a large house and they rent out the top floor or something.

That way if there are any problems, the owner is right there to help and it's easier to negotiate the cash deals.

I pay a housecleaning company come every two weeks. Two people, sometimes three, between 2 and 3 hours. $150. Or $200 if it's been longer.

I regularly see $300 cleaning fees.

And when I've had limited options and paid those cleaning fees, I think "I'd have fired my housecleaners if this was what I was getting for my money, every week, sometimes twice a week".

Let's be brutally honest - the hosts using professional cleaners are only paying for an hour or two. And oftentimes, I expect that their "cleaners" are the host's kids being handed a tub of sanitizing wipes.

> if a guest uses every dish in the kitchen without doing a wash up, they cleaning crew could be there for hours

If it is $200 then that should cover 10 man hours of cleaning in a developed country.

I had similar issues as a guest on Airbnb, paid a cleaning fee $100+ and then had complaints that I left food in the fridge (like normal a pack of milk or something not growing new lifeforms) and couch pillow on the floor. They sent photos to shove my nose into it. And it was a tiny studio not a big mansion with much area to cover

I quit Airbnb 2-3 years ago and am happy without

Which developed country? The rates in a US city are generally higher than $200 for 10 hours.

Ha, $20/hr for house cleaners is so 2020. They're much more than that in reality.

And meanwhile the actual cleaners are rarely paid even $15/hr in many places. I always hire one or two person companies if I just can find them since then it's at least honest business and not yet another hustle to get rich by using slave labour. Not just for cleaning which I only rarely outsource but for everything.

What do you think hotels pay their cleaners?

In my area cleaning rates are around double that.

Have you tried to hire a cleaning person recently? $200 will get a small apartment cleaned, maybe. For a thorough cleaning of a modest house prepare to pay 2-3x that at least.

For my small house (~1200 sq ft) the woman who cleans my house charges me $150, and she's usually here for around 2-2.5 hours. She hasn't increased her rate for me for over 10 years, so I imagine she'd charge more if I started out new.

So in other words, even 10 years ago she was charging roughly $75/hr, which is much more than the $20/hr that grandparent was citing.

If that's too expensive then the host should do the cleaning themselves. Or do like hotels and real B&Bs do and hire people as cleaners and pay them a salary.

The entitlement is through the roof, when people pretend to run a business refusing to do any work themselves and refusing to hire people. As long as there are clients willing to use AirBnB and pay cleaning fees, sure. But it is a scam and not much more, as another poster pointed out.

$600 for a house is far beyond typical prices

If it just needs a sweep, or if some party animal trashed it?

$250 for a 2bed 2bathroom house in 2022.

Two people spent roughly 2 hrs cleaning, so 4 hours of labor total + supplies. I think that's reasonable, but I wouldn't hire them for after every single short stay if I ran an Airbnb.

I'm just outside Seattle. My 2,500 sq ft 4br 3.5ba home gets cleaned every two weeks by two, sometimes three, people, for a minimum of 2 hours, usually 2.5, up to 3.

$165.

When they deep clean? $250.

We have a cleaner come in for a 1900 SQ ft place in SF and it costs $250.

It sounds like your two options are to either charge the max to all guests and the expense of less bookings or to take the loss on the extremely dirty outliers and expect it to be made up by the extremely tidy outliers.

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