I have my entire house deep cleaned for $200 for 3 people over two hours. There’s no way that takes place for a two bedroom condo.
My last rental charged $140 and we talked to the owner who said she comes and changes the sheets, sweeps up and washes the dishes. The owner of the cabin.
I don't think most hosts are gaming it to make money, it's just expensive in relation to the nightly. Usually when I explain the costs the guests understand.
Many see the actual cleaning fee, think it's ridiculous even though it's not and then decide to trash the place because they think they paid to do so. And then that causes you to have to go higher to cover the average turnover.
If I had to do your dishes, I definitely wouldn’t charge a small cleaning fee either :)
I actually prefer this to bundling a cleaning fee into the nightly price. I don’t want the place cleaned every day and it would make Airbnbs unaffordable for longer stays to do so.
On EBay they would just lie and call it all shipping so they didn’t have to pay fees on the “shipping”. With Airbnb, hosts should actually prefer higher nightly prices as they’ll get those prices for every night of the reservation and not just once like on eBay. The comparison to eBay would be paying separate shipping costs when buying several of the same item when they could all fit in one envelope.