Airbnb to Remove Hidden Cleaning and Service Fees

Travelers often require different needs depending on how they plan their days of vacation. This is one of the reasons why some prefer staying at hotels while others would rather go with Airbnb vacation rentals. There was a time when Airbnb became the go-to service for accommodations worldwide, though, mainly due to its services being more cost-friendly.

However, Airbnb’s hidden cleaning and service fees, among other reasons concerning safety and privacy, as well as the rentals’ impact on locals, have turned customers away. Said hidden fees make initial prices and nightly rates jump quite significantly higher as Airbnb app’s users prepare to book their preferred places, leaving a sense of frustration. This has also made users prefer renting places from hosts that do not charge extra fees.

To ease the frustration felt by both renters and hosts, Airbnb has attempted to display more upfront pricing for transparency, followed by regulations that may lead to the potential removal of extra cleaning and service fees altogether soon.

Transparency in Pricing

Aware of the app’s displeasing pricing design choice, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky decided to overhaul the service’s pricing and booking system. Instead of having fees only visible during checkout and booking, total nightly prices can be made present upon searches.

Through this regulation, the plan isn’t to completely eliminate extra fees but to provide transparency for customers instead. Airbnb implements this by creating a toggle button placed on top of the app’s homepage named “Display total before taxes” that allows users to see prices, including what was previously hidden as extra fees.

To ensure transparency, Airbnb made the toggle even bigger than the search box, pushing the importance and convenience of the feature. What the toggle essentially does, in Chesky’s eyes, is to eliminate the term “cleaning fee,” integrating it completely into the nightly rates, similar to how customers would only see the price total when booking a hotel room.

In addition to hidden cleaning and service fees, guests are also often required by hosts to do cleaning tasks such as vacuuming, doing laundry, or stripping the bed right before check out. Upon realization that charging fees whilst unreasonably demanding guests to clean their vacation rentals is far from accommodating, Chesky has also cracked down on these tasks, making the inordinate requests no longer allowed.

As of 2023, Airbnb stated that the company could only go as far as making costs more transparent and that the possibility of cutting costs had not seemed plausible. With cleaning services often outsourced, there is a reason why Airbnb hosts charge cleaning fees: to pay cleaners a fair living wage in addition to commute fees.

However, things may change soon as Airbnb works on regulations that can get rid of extra fees entirely, gradually phasing them out.

Fee Removal

While it is unlikely that Airbnb can remove extra fees in an instant, the company has started pricing properties in a more inclusive manner. Almost 300K Airbnb hosts worldwide have removed, or at the very least, lowered their property’s cleaning and service fees by last year, as revealed through Airbnb’s earnings report. Chesky announced the change in Airbnb regulations through X, previously Twitter, by the end of 2022 and gradually applied them as time goes.

According to the Airbnb team, almost 40% of worldwide active listings no longer charge cleaning fees now. While it is unknown whether Airbnb will stop paying for cleaners or will simply find a way to integrate costs in a more efficient way, it seems the company does plan to slowly weed out all pesky fees and charges. The company states that its average nightly price for a listing has decreased from $149 in 2023 to $114 as of February 2024.

Despite this decrease, Airbnb has managed to meet a 17% rise in quarterly revenue every year, earning up to $2.2B. The pandemic hit the company hard, however, when it had to go through a tax cost of $1B that cost them $349M.

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