Airbnb host ditches cleaning fees – and says guests leave her properties cleaner than ever
Rachel Boice said it ‘doesn’t feel honest’ to add extra charges on top of the nightly cost
Tekef
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An Airbnb host in the US has claimed that guests leave her properties tidier than ever before after she removed separate cleaning fees from her listings.
Rachel Boice and her husband Parker first listed a property in the US state of Georgia in 2021 and now have two active listings, including a small glass-walled cabin near Atlanta – which featured in a video that went viral on TikTok in September.
A video showing the cabin and its features currently has 10 million views on the social media platform. In it, Ms Boice says that the retreat helps people “get away from the hustle and bustle” and reset their minds.
“We wanted to get into more of the experiential side of Airbnb, not just necessarily a house for someone to stay at if they’re traveling through,” Ms Boice told Insider.
Like many hosts, Ms Boice started off by listing her property with a separate cleaning fee alongside the nightly rate. At first, she was charging $89 (£72) per night with a $40 (£32) cleaning fee, but she then began charging flat night fee of $129 (£104), before eventually raising the nightly fee to $139 (£113) after a surge in bookings.
“I get why Airbnb hosts do it because typically you pay somebody to clean and it adds up,” she said on the topic of cleaning fees.
“Quite honestly, people have left it so much cleaner now that I don’t charge a cleaning fee. I guess they’re thinking, ‘I’m not paying someone to clean this, so I’ll leave it clean’,” she added.
Ms Boice said that she’s yet to see many Airbnb owners ditch the concept of cleaning fees, adding that as an Airbnb user herself she has previously been required to pay up to $200 (£162) in fees.
“We stay in Airbnbs a lot. I pretty much always pay a cleaning fee. You’re like: ‘Why am I paying all of this money? This should just be built in for the cost’. We can stay at hotels and we don’t have to pay cleaning fees. It doesn’t feel honest.”
At the end of 2022, Airbnb responded to years of customer complaints by putting an end to the hidden extra costs on its holiday rentals, and said it was cracking down on “unreasonable” chores demanded by hosts.
Last month, a pregnant Airbnb host was left devastated after damage caused by guests flooded her three-storey housing unit, leaving her family homeless and in debt.
In a thread shared on Twitter/X, “superhost” Erika said when guests clogged a toilet in her upstairs unit with baby wipes and human waste, an overnight leak flooded the building, landing her with $300,000 in costs and leaving her with nowhere to live.
