Anyone who's stayed in an Airbnb knows the experience can be a roll of the dice. Anything can happen when you roll up to your rental. That's part of the charm — you might be pleasantly surprised by a free bottle of wine waiting for you in the kitchen, or you might have an adventure just trying to unlock the door with the weird skeleton key that you had to dig out from behind a tree in the backyard.
But renters are getting increasingly fed up with lists of do's and don'ts that await them inside. Strip the beds, wash the linens, load and unload the dishwasher, water the plants, mow the lawn, don't touch the record collection...
And that's on top of triple-digit cleaning fees.
The backlash against persnickety hosts is growing, according to reporting from the Wall Street Journal. One traveler told the Journal that her $299 a night Airbnb in Sedona, Arizona, came with a $375 cleaning fee, plus a list of chores.
Which is pretty much the last thing anyone wants to do on vacation.
Airbnb hosts say there are two reasons for the higher fees and the chore demands: Covid-19 raised sanitation requirements, and — you guessed it — inflation. The cost of hiring cleaners is up, as are utility bills. And hosts aren't renting out their properties just for fun — they're running a business.
Airbnb allows hosts to set their own rates and encourages them to avoid cleaning fees if possible. The company says a little over half of its active listings charge such fees, which on average make up less than 10% of the total reservation cost.
For some travelers, those added costs and labor have served as a reminder that, once upon a time, before the gig economy, there were these other places you could rent in buildings across the country where the cleaning is done for you. Ah yes, hotels! Remember them?
To be sure, some travelers with bad Airbnb experiences are fleeing to hotels, but there doesn't appear to be an existential threat to the homestay model Airbnb pioneered.
It's a bit like choosing between Starbucks or the local indie coffee shop when you're in a new city. At Starbucks, you know what you're getting. Will it be the best cup of coffee of your life? Probably not, but at least you can count on it. The local spot probably has unexpected charms, quirky art on the walls, maybe even superior coffee, but it could also smell weird or play pan flute music or just take too long to make your order.
Hotels cater to the Starbucks crowd; Airbnb is counting on the indie café set who tend want to feel as if they live wherever they're visiting.
BOTTOM LINE
The social media outrage about cleaning fees and chores is certainly a PR headache for Airbnb, but it's far from a crisis. The Airbnb model is now fully woven into the fabric of the hospitality industry, even if it still has some growing pains to work out.
Pent-up demand this year has helped the company swing to a profit in the second quarter, even as inflation ate into travelers' budgets.
Airbnb is also leaning into the work-from-anywhere model — its own CEO, Brian Chesky, announced earlier this year that he'd be living full-time as a digital nomad, bouncing around from one Airbnb to another every few weeks. That's something hotels can't sell in the same way (according to me, someone who spent three full weeks in a 100-square-foot hotel room earlier this year and nearly lost her mind in the process).
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