Some hosts are threatening to strike, while others are plotting ways around Airbnb’s new restrictions. Guests, meanwhile, are celebrating.
AIRBNB HOSTS ARE melting down over a new policy banning them from making guests complete tasks that “would typically be performed by a cleaner,” like “stripping the bed, taking trash offsite, or washing and putting away dishes.”
The change, which applies to all bookings made on or after November 20, quickly sparked outrage after it was announced in an email to Airbnb hosts on Wednesday. Many began fuming online about losing the right to make their guests clean up after themselves.
“As hosts, we have a responsibility to protect our investments, our homes, and, in many cases, our personal living spaces,” one person wrote in Airbnb’s official forum for hosts. “The problem is that Airbnb increasingly expects hosts to accept the risks while limiting our ability to protect ourselves.”
That’s not really the spirit of what the cleaning fee is supposed to be. I can see covering overhead of arranging for a cleaning service being legitimate. Using it as a profit center is wrong. Employing a mechanic as part of an auto service center is different because that is their primary profit center. A host is supposed to make money from the main lodging fee, not an inflated cleaning charge.
That’s much like adding a profit margin to a shipping charge.
If the cleaning fee is always charged, then there’s no good reason for it to be a separate line item. There may be bad reasons relating to platform fees or taxes.
I think a reasonable profit is okay, but 3x the basic cost is excessive.
Cleaning fees are something Uber has reasonably received much criticism for, and something I saw as a problem trying to use the platform myself. One thing is they for a long time did not include the cleaning fee in the pricing you’d see in a search… you had to read the description for each property to see what it was. That meant you might see one property for $200, and other for $100, which seemed like a relative bargain… but then turns out the $200 one had a $50 cleaning fee and the $100 one charged $175, for example. I think they finally changed that a few years back but it’s hard to see how AirBnB could not have understood why that would be a problem in the first place.