4 ms·

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 sh

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.

paxys 4y ago
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.
NegativeK 4y ago
A company can throw whatever fees they want at me as long as it's in the up front cost.
eganist 4y ago
> 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.
- yanderekko 4y ago
  >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.
  - fumeux_fume 4y ago
    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.
    - wpietri 4y ago
      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.
    - yanderekko 4y ago
      Multiple people have explained how it's useful to them. Do you think these people are all jointly deluded in the exact same fashion?
      - qotgalaxy 4y ago
        [dead]
- wpietri 4y ago
  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.
zamadatix 4y ago
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.
- wpietri 4y ago
  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.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    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.
    - tomschlick 4y ago
      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.
      - yamtaddle 4y ago
        Are local sales taxes just a US thing? How do so very many other developed countries manage this just fine?
yamtaddle 4y ago
> 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.
- matsemann 4y ago
  It is factored in here in Europe. So the issue isn't the fee itself, but that in other jurisdictions it's hidden.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    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).
- wpietri 4y ago
  > > 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-rentals/ 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.
rqtwteye 4y ago
The cleaning fee is part of doing business. I don’t pay my taxi driver for car registration or oil changes either.
- jrs235 4y ago
  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.
  - lazyasciiart 4y ago
    Actually taxis handle this in their fee structure already: a fixed initial cost and a marginal rate for additional mileage/time.
- tcmart14 4y ago
  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.
antihero 4y ago
These people are making money hand over fist, cleaning should be on the hosts, it is their duty to provide clean accommodation.
- wpietri 4y ago
  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.
  - acdha 4y ago
    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.
    - wpietri 4y ago
      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.
  - antihero 4y ago
    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.
bagels 4y ago
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...
- wpietri 4y ago
  Probably not, in that those are either too small to be worth the cost of metering or not representative of actual direct costs.

paxys 4y ago

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.

NegativeK 4y ago

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

eganist 4y ago

> 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.

yanderekko 4y ago
>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.
- fumeux_fume 4y ago
  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.
  - wpietri 4y ago
    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.
  - yanderekko 4y ago
    Multiple people have explained how it's useful to them. Do you think these people are all jointly deluded in the exact same fashion?
    - qotgalaxy 4y ago
      [dead]
wpietri 4y ago
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.

zamadatix 4y ago

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.

wpietri 4y ago
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.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  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.
  - tomschlick 4y ago
    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.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      Are local sales taxes just a US thing? How do so very many other developed countries manage this just fine?

yamtaddle 4y ago

> 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.

matsemann 4y ago
It is factored in here in Europe. So the issue isn't the fee itself, but that in other jurisdictions it's hidden.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  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).
wpietri 4y ago
> > 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-rentals/ 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.

rqtwteye 4y ago

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

jrs235 4y ago
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.
- lazyasciiart 4y ago
  Actually taxis handle this in their fee structure already: a fixed initial cost and a marginal rate for additional mileage/time.
tcmart14 4y ago
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.

antihero 4y ago

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

wpietri 4y ago
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.
- acdha 4y ago
  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.
  - wpietri 4y ago
    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.
- antihero 4y ago
  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.

bagels 4y ago

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...

wpietri 4y ago
Probably not, in that those are either too small to be worth the cost of metering or not representative of actual direct costs.