sharing economy

My husband and I are short-term rental hosts with two properties, one of which we began renting out in 2016 and the other in 2019. We love being hosts and have had very successful with over 1,000 5-star reviews, repeated Airbnb Superhost status, and many repeat guests.

Over the years, we've learned a lot about what guests love and what they loathe, and one thing is universal: Everyone is annoyed with exorbitant cleaning fees, and everyone thinks checkout chores are ridiculous. As both guests and hosts, we 100% agree.

Part of what makes us good hosts is that we've been Airbnb guests ourselves for years. As a family of five that travels a lot, we've found far more value in short-term rentals than in hotels over the years. We love having a kitchen, living room, and bedrooms and feeling like we have a "home" while traveling. We even spent a nomadic year staying at short-term rentals for a month at a time.

When you've experienced dozens of Airbnbs as a guest, you see what's annoying and unnecessary and what's to be expected in comparison to a hotel. We started taking mental notes long before we started our own rental about what we would want to do and not do if we ever had one and have implemented those learnings into our hosting habits.

Chasing Tom And Jerry GIF by HBO Max Giphy

As guests, we hate cleaning fees, so we don't charge one.

It helps that my husband has a flexible schedule and grew up in a family that owned a janitorial service, so most of the time he cleans the apartments himself. We could charge a cleaning fee for his time and labor, but even if we were paying for outside cleaners, we still wouldn't put a separate fee on guest bookings. To us, it makes far more sense to just wrap the cleaning fee into the price.

From a host's perspective, the one-night stay is where the cleaning fee question hits the hardest. Whether someone stays one night or 10 nights, the cleaning cost is the same. But spreading the cost over 10 nights is a very different beast than adding it to one night, especially from a guest's perspective. On the host side, if we had to pay cleaners without passing that fee onto guests, we'd barely make anything on one-night stays. But on the guest side, a $100 a night stay suddenly jumping to $150 or more (sometimes a lot more) because a cleaning fee was added is painful, and often a dealbreaker. You can see the conundrum.

The way we see it, and as other Airbnb hosts have found, wrapping cleaning costs into the base price comes out in the wash over time, as long as you have some longer-term stays mixed in with the one-nighters. And it's a much better experience for the guest not to get hit with sticker shock on the "final cost" screen, which is already eye-popping when the platform's service fees and local taxes are added on.

(I will say, this may only ring true for smaller units. If you're renting a huge home, cleaning costs are going to be higher just because it takes longer to clean. But I still don't think the full cost should be passed onto guests as a separate fee.)

There's almost no reason to ask guests to do check-out chores, ever.

As for check-out chores—asking guests to do things like start laundry, sweep the floor, take out the trash, etc.—those have never made sense to us. Hosts should have enough switch-out linens that laundry doesn't have to be started prior to checking out, and none of those chores save enough time for the cleaning people to make it worth asking guests to do it. I can see taking out trash if there wasn't going to be another guest for a while, but usually you'd want to clean right away after a stay anyway, just in case it does get booked last-minute.

Asking guests to stip the sheets saves almost no time and costs a lot in goodwill.Photo credit: Canva

The only thing we ask guests to do is to start the dishwasher if they have dirty dishes (as a guest, that seems like a logical and reasonable request), lock the door, and have a safe trip home. Don't need to pull the sheets. (In fact, we prefer they don't because it's easier to check for stains when sheets are still on the bed.) No need to take out any garbage or recycling. Those things don't take that long, but that's just as much a reason not to ask guests to do it. Annoying your guests by asking them to do something extra—especially if they're already paying a cleaning fee—isn't worth the tiny bit of time it might save the cleaning people.

Surprisingly, the vast majority of guests leave the space neat and tidy anyway.

In almost 10 years, I can count on one hand how many problems we've had with guests leaving a significant mess. That's been a pleasant surprise, but I think part of the reason is that guests are simply reciprocating the respect and consideration we show them by not making them pay extra fees or do chores on their way out. We're going to have to clean it anyway, so putting work on them is unnecessarily burdensome, even if it's something that doesn't take long. People recognize that.

Being regular guests has helped make us good Airbnb hosts.Photo credit: Canva

To be fair, it probably helps that we aren't some big real estate tycoon buying up a bunch of apartments and turning them into short-term rentals run by impersonal management companies. People's complaints about how short-term rentals impact local housing economies are legitimate, but our situation is more aligned with the original "sharing economy" model, renting out our home to guests who come through town. Because our rentals are in a small college town with a large university, there often aren't enough hotel rooms during busy weekends anyway, so it's been a win-win all around.

I think having personal communication with our guests (but also leaving them their privacy) and not charging or asking anything extra of them makes them want to be respectful. From our perspective, both as guests and hosts, cleaning fees and check-out chores simply aren't worth their cost, financially or energetically.

This article originally appeared two years ago. It has been updated.