The "Cleaning Fee" is Becoming AirBnB's "Resort Fee"

by Ryan Vagabundo

I think we pretty much all hate "resort fees", right? This sleazy invention can be laid at the feet of Las Vegas, where they first started appearing at the Strip's MGM hotels around 2011 or so. They took off like wildfire and spread like a virus, however. They were rampant in Vegas by 2014 and quickly spread to other casino cities like Reno. From there, they became common practice in any area that sees lots of tourists, like Miami and New York City.

The resort fee basically serves two purposes:

1) The main thing it was designed for was to game the booking aggregator sites - Hotwire, Hotels.com, Expedia and so on. Just about everyone who searches these sites lists their results from cheapest to most expensive. However, the sites only use base rates for this list - no fees, taxes or so on. So if you shift the bulk of your rate to a "resort fee", you can hide the true cost and jump up higher in those initial search results with a seemingly awesome base rate.

2) It also has a psychological sales component. Whether you use a booking site or just book direct through the hotel, you don't get the true cost until you're already partway down the "sales funnel." The farther you go along the sales funnel, the more statistically likely you are to end up buying. It also preys on people who aren't paying close attention, or who perhaps don't speak the language well and don't fully understand what they're being charged.

Now, the hotels will tell you that these are "to cover the amenities", like WiFi and the pool and the gym and all that. Nevermind that all those things were rolled into a more competitive base rate just a day before they started doing resort fees - down the memory hole with that tidbit, Winston! You also rarely get the option to simply decline the "resort fee" and not use the amenities it supposedly covers.

The true purposes of the resort fee are laid bare by the fact that all sorts of dumpy non-resorts are now ballsily charging them. Of course, Las Vegas is once again at the forefront of this. They have a crummy Days Inn and Super 8 that are charging $20 resort fees, along with a shabby weekly druggie motel conversion called The Downtowner charging the same. The champion, however, is a hostel - yes, a friggin hostel - that charges a $13 per night "resort fee."

OK, So Where Does AirBnb Come In?

Alright alright, I was just about to get to that.

AirBnb has its own form of hidden fee. It's called the "cleaning fee." You don't see it in the search results, or your estimated total for the stay until you click through to the actual property listing.

Most hosts are cool about the cleaning fee, from what I've personally seen. They either don't charge one or charge a small one (like a $20 or less one-time fee regardless of stay length). It does serve a useful purpose for them - most of them have their pricing set automatically by an AirBnb algorithm, so the fee actually ensures that their cleaning materials and turnover time are actually covered during periods where they are getting a low rate.

Of course, some slicky slicky boyz have found a way to abuse it. Manually set their base rate as low as possible, then hit you with an exorbitant "cleaning fee" when you click through.

For example I'm seeing a whole lot of this in - guess where - Las Vegas, where $50+ "cleaning fees" seem to be quite common among the "near Strip" listings (though they are popping up at an alarming rate elsewhere too).

I won't blow anybody in particular up, but the thing that prompted this post was seeing a listing right off the Vegas Strip, in a condo with a great view for only $20 a night on weeknights. Then you click through and ... $300 cleaning fee and the host doesn't accept bookings of more than three days. Ah so.

Now, I understand $100+ cleaning fees for an entire house rental, with multiple rooms where you either have to spend hours doing it yourself or hire a cleaning service. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about single-room listings and the sort of thing I expect to be "lived in clean", not perfectly sparkling. It don't cost anybody anywhere near $100 to turn those rooms over.

In those cases it's just pure emulation of the resort fee. But here's the thing about AirBnb: you generally have to put up with a lot of Extra as a guest, stuff that would not fly at even a basic motel. Having your travel info publicly listed and having hosts be able to blow you up with comments on a profile, having to arrange meetings with hosts who have 9-5 jobs and lives to check in and get the key, up to 24 hours for booking approval, all the stuff that goes along with shared spaces and bathrooms, hosts who think this is couchsurfing and get sniffy if you don't talk to them enough, and so on. That's why the prices need to be significantly lower than hotels and they need to not play the same sorts of predatory pricing games for the service to work.

I'm guessing this is only going to work in your super high-demand areas like Vegas, Miami, New York and so on. I really hope hosts don't get too oaty with this technique, though. I actually like AirBnb a lot, in spite of my list of complaints here. Nearly all of my experiences with it have been great and a very good value. But they absolutely have to stay away from playing The Resort Fee Game for it to keep working. AirBnb is already too much of a pain in the butt to search, dealing with sneaky fees behind every other listing is just too much.