Cleaning fees are the most complained-about part of short-stay booking. We clean these properties for a living, so here’s an honest look at where the complaint is fair and where it isn’t.
Where guests are right
The fee punishes short stays disproportionately. A $120 fee on a two-night booking adds $60 a night. The same fee on a seven-night stay adds $17. The cost of the clean doesn’t change with length of stay, but the guest’s experience of it does, enormously.
Some hosts do use it as margin. A $200 cleaning fee on a two-bedroom apartment is not a cleaning fee. It’s a rate increase in a place where it’s less visible in search results.
Charging a fee and assigning chores is genuinely unreasonable. If a guest is stripping beds, running the dishwasher and sweeping, and still paying $120, the complaint is fair.
Late disclosure feels like a trick. A fee that only becomes visible at the final checkout screen reads as bait-and-switch, even when it isn’t.
Where guests are wrong
Cleaning is not one hour of work. A proper two-bedroom turnover is 2–3 hours: strip and remake every bed to hotel standard, deep-clean two bathrooms, empty and clean the fridge, wash every glass, vacuum and mop everything, restock, and photograph the result.
It’s not the same as a hotel. Hotels amortise housekeeping across hundreds of rooms with staff on site all day, industrial laundry on the premises, and consumables bought at scale. A single house cleaned by someone who drives 25 minutes to get there has none of that.
Linen is a real cost. Commercial laundering runs $25–$40 per changeover for a two-bedroom property. It’s not optional if you want turnovers to happen on time.
Someone is being paid properly. A $100 cleaning fee, after linen, consumables, travel and the cleaner’s actual wage, is not making anyone rich.
What the money actually goes on
For a typical $110 fee on a two-bedroom property:
| Item | Approx |
|---|---|
| Cleaner’s time (2.5 hrs) | $65 |
| Linen laundering | $30 |
| Consumables | $10 |
| Travel | $5 |
| Total | $110 |
There’s no margin in that. The host isn’t profiting from the fee, and the ones charging $200 for the same property are, which is the actual problem.
The fix is on the host side
Hosts who want to stop attracting this complaint have three options:
- Set the fee at real cost, and say what it covers. A one-line explanation in the listing defuses most of it.
- Build it into the nightly rate. Costs you nothing and removes the psychological sting entirely.
- Set a minimum stay rather than using the fee to discourage one-nighters.
And one thing not to do: don’t cut the fee by cutting the clean. That trades a booking-page complaint for a review-page one, and reviews compound.
For guests
If a cleaning fee looks disproportionate, compare it to one night’s rate. Under 70%, it’s probably genuine. Over 100%, the host is using it as pricing.
And if you arrive to a property that isn’t clean and you paid a substantial fee, say so in the review. That’s the mechanism that keeps the standard up for everyone.