> Not disagreeing with you except about the cleaning fee.

Having different fees is fine. What is troublesome is that AirBNB doesn't immediately show the total price (including all surcharges). I think recently they finally were forced to do that in the EU (before that I used a browser addon). That the initial price includes all the additional surcharges has been mandatory for quite a while due to companies using this to trick customers (e.g. advertising 200 EUR for renting 1 week; practically you need to pay 700 EUR).

Note that various companies still try to skirt that bit (surcharges only shown at a later stage). E.g. mandatory "booking fees" and so on.

Hotels are as bad about this or worse. At least the cleaning fee is only paid once for the booking. Lots of hotels now charge nightly resort or destination fees. There is no excuse for that not being part of the nightly rate.

...which is baked into their room rates? It’s predatory to advertise a lower rate and then inflate it after the fact with all kinds of tacked on fees. People (rightfully) go nuts at hotels that try to do this.

For condos rentals through realtors cleaning fees are often a norm - although they often have a baseline level of cleanliness where you don't have to pay a surcharge if it is to a certain standard such as all of the dishes either cleaned and put away or in the dishwasher cleaning while you check out and all trash cans emptied.

That sort of thing is a legitimate reason for a separate fee. I guess pedantically it is "non-baked in unconditional cleaning fees" essentially.

Although, many hotels have managed to wedge a mandatory “resort fee” into the final bill (and I’d like to see this nationally prohibited).

Resort fees are annoying especially when someone else prepaid your hotel bill but you are still asked to pay extra on checkin, even when it provide no resort amenities and is obviously just a business hotel.

What is being inflated after the fact? When you book on Airbnb it shows you all the fees including cleaning fee before you book...

It actually doesn’t always. If Airbnb doesn’t support your local taxes system, you will have to submit a request for payment to your guest for more money. For instance in Hawaii until a few months ago, there was no way to add the 14% hotel tax to the listing. We had to put a note in the description that said they would be charged an extra 14% after booking. I think many hosts simple don’t charge/pay the hotel tax because of the friction it adds to the transaction. We could ad it in the nightly rate, but then a service fee will be paid on it from the guest and the host.

Oh please. That's a complete excuse. One is more than capable of rending out the room then keeping price/1.14 for themselves. These fine print notes for taxes were such malarky.

That’s a pretty harsh response given that we went through lots of work to inform our Airbnb guests about the tax and provide local municipalities their hotel tax. It’s hurtful to here that called an excuse. Do you have rentals? Are you familiar with what the hotel tax can and cannot be applied to? We’ve been asking Airbnb for to natively support hotel tax in HI for years. Vrbo supported hotel tax from the beginning. You can’t just add 1.14 to the total and call it good. The taxes isn’t on the cleaning fee or service fee from Airbnb. They need to be separate. Are you implying that we preferred something unethical, but we had no choice for HI taxes. Most states had been supported for a while, but not all.

Are you saying that the law requires you to advertise the minus-tax amount? You can't work out what the hotel tax would be and include it in the price?

I understand that showing prices without the sales tax is commonplace in the USA. I find that practice quite dodgy and "everyone does it" is a poor excuse.

you actually can’t just multiply the total by the tax rate. typically only non-negotiatable items can have the hotel tax, so mid-stay cleanings, early/late check ins, and other charges cannot be taxed.

Go look at an Airbnb listing, it will be advertised at a lower, per night rate, but when you go to book, it can jump up as much as 50% with tacked on fees. Hotels don’t do this.

I just went on the site and looked at an advertised $80 per night listing. On booking it became $137, with the $40 cleaning and $17 service fees. That’s a $137 room not an $80 one and I doubt it costs $40 to clean it.

Hotels do this all the time. Resort fees. Taxes. Surcharges. Amenities.

Only airlines publish full fares and that’s because of a federal law. I remember back in the day when it wasn’t the case and you had to click through to the final pricing page to do any serious fare comparison.

No hotel I've ever stayed at has done this. At least not the big names. At most you'll get a different price for halfboard/fullboard. And a price bump for an extra bed.

Also, in my encounters, resort fees are in lieu of being a boarder. The resorts by me, Miami Beach, charge visitors for access to the pools and spas, not their guests.

Many hotels have started charging resort/amenity fees for guests as well. Traditionally commissions were only calculated on base room rate, so making up a mandatory fee and shifting some of the rate over acted as a super handy "tax dodge", artificially lowering the commission owed to all their booking partners. The same applies to pre-negotiated corporate and event-block rates – they can win business with an artificially low price, then pad the actual margin of stays via an ambiguously defined and undisclosed but "industry standard" destination/resort/amenity/urban fee.

Between that too-easy-to-pass-up profit optimization, and the marketing benefits of deceptively low list price, it's become pretty pervasive. And isn't limited to actual resorts – I've had bog-standard business hotels in the suburbs tack on a $30/night non-waivable "destination fee". Luckily it got to a ridiculous level recently, triggering a lot of media backlash and class action lawsuits last year[1][2].

It's also losing effectiveness, as things like online booking websites start displaying all-inclusive pricing and renegotiate their commission structures to be inclusive of mandatory, non-governmental fees. Between that, all the negative sentiment, the spate of lawsuits and legislation its triggered, the fees are hopefully on their way out.

[1] http://killresortfees.com/

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/07/resort-fees-being-addressed-...

Go to hotels.com or any other hotel aggregator. Look at any hotel in New York City or Hawaii. Almost every hotel does this and all of the major chains do this.

This is actually not the case in the UK. If you put in dates, then it will add the fees then average them over the days and show you a day price which includes the fees. Though as others have commented, this may well be EU-specific.

Hotels absolutely do this. Most egregiously in Las Vegas with 'resort fees', but try to book any hotel and you will get charged more than the advertised price due to 'taxes and fees'.

This doesn't happen in Europe. I assume we have consumer protections against this the same way as with flight prices.

Maybe it only applies to users from Europe but when I try to book a hotel room in Europe right now it happens.

I always just prepay through third party sites like Expedia and never have this issue. Sometimes the the advertised rate is for a smaller room than I need, but I’ve learned to check that and the difference is rarely on the order of Airbnb’s fee/price inflation.

airbnb makes a lot more sense for long term stays. I'm a nomad and hop between cities and countries so I book for a minimum of two weeks with a norm of one to two months.

The one time Cleaning fee is minimal compared to the total cost and I would not be able to afford my lifestyle if hotels were my only option.

I personally would rather hotels separate a per cleaning fee and allow me to choose not to have it done every day.

What does that change for the hotel at the end of the day? Cleaning a room that's been dirty for a week is the same (if not more) effort than cleaning it every day, considering they can't just hire staff for one day of the week.

I think there's two things missing here. One is that not everyone leaves on the same day, so cleaning would still be distributed throughout the week. Secondly. They could still require something like once every 3 days. My room is always spotless when I stay, I don't understand how cleaning it for most people would take much longer.

I've stayed in a few hotels that gave drink coupons or other perks for skipping cleaning during your stay. I greatly prefer that as well.

Lucky for you, hotels don’t clean every day anymore because of covid. They didn’t drop prices though. In fact Marriott added a new covid cleaning fee!

Some places will clean every 4 days, some won’t clean at all during your stay. I suspect this may be the new normal, even post-covid.

The last hotel I stayed in did not clean during your stay, and also left the room vacant for 24 hours after checkout before they allowed the cleaning staff into the room. I don’t know if the regulations required that, but I was pretty happy for the cleaning staff that their health was being looked after.

Extended Stay America cleans rooms once or twice a week while you are staying there, you can ask for fresh linens and toiletries at the front desk. But it’s a budget hotel, you get what you pay for.