How to Reduce Airbnb Cleaning Fees and Boost Bookings with Hotel Tactics

if you've ever been on Tik Tok then you've probably heard the Airbnb haters say things like these people don't want

to be good hosts they want to be landlords and things like y I try to go back in the house the door's locked and

things like one of the times we walked into the kitchen and there was mold on the ceiling and things like this book a

hotel it is so much better and things like that it's actually not that much cheaper than a hotel and even major

hotel chains are starting to throw a little shade at Airbnb hosts too when you'd rather enjoy the pool than clean

someone else's what is that for whatever reason prospective guests just can't compute that we have to charge a

cleaning fee so that we can pay our cleaners a fair living wage which for many of my airbnbs come out to about $2

to $50 per hour many of these prospective guests often comment on Tik Tok or my YouTube channel saying that

they'd rather stay at a hotel where cleaning staff are routinely paid minimum wage or 725 an hour but that is

neither here nor there the point is that whether we as hosts like it or not hotels have a competitive Advantage

because of the Optics that guests don't have to pay a cleaning fee even though they totally are but that cleaning fee

is just baked into the nightly rate So today we're going to work on how to use these exact Hotel tactics and how to

bake your cleaning fee into your nightly rate so that it appears significantly lower to your guest thus driving more

bookings so let's jump into this 5-minute hack that you can do right now to get more bookings let's take a look

at this listing here I've got the cleaning fee set to to $225 and as you can see the total before

taxes is $147 now I'm going to make a quick change so hold

on all right so check it out I'm going to refresh and now you'll see that for those same dates my cleaning fee is now

$125 but make note that the total before taxes is still $147 so as you can see my cleaning fee

is reduced but my actual payout is still the same now I know you're probably thinking well how the heck did you do

that let me show you so whenever you're adjusting any of the price settings in your Airbnb listing one thing to keep in

mind is you're never going to make the changes from inside of the listing like this I always see a lot of people

looking for the cleaning fees in the listing editor and Airbnb changed that a few years ago it's kind of confusing

it's kind of annoying so you're going to go over to calendar here you're going to go over to your specific listing right

here okay pink pickle and then on the right you're going to see all of your settings here and this is where you can

actually customize your settings so you'll scroll to the very bottom where it says additional charges because I

guess a cleaning fee is an addition addition charge now you'll click on fees and you'll see that originally my

cleaning fee here was set to $225 now if you want to get a little sneaky here and use these Hotel tactics

here's what you're going to do you're going to drop your cleaning fee to whatever you feel is going to be more

palatable to your guest in my instance I feel like $125 is a pretty big steal for this

property it's a three-bedroom two bath that can host up to 12 people similar listings are going to run anywhere from

$200 to $225 so for me 125 seems pretty good and here's the trick we're going to scroll

roll down to the bottom here and there's this little section right here called the management fee and that is where

we're going to put that extra $100 that I took off of the $225 and so when we do that we're going to now add that $100

that I took off of the cleaning fee and we're going to hit save now here's how this works whenever you add a management

fee that management fee is now going to get added to your reservation but it's going to be spread out over the nightly

rate of your Airbnb I'll show you what I mean here so we're looking at the original listing where the cleaning fee

was 225 and as you can see for these specific dates my property is listed at $54 a night now watch what happens when

I go in and I make the change that I just showed you when we hit refresh check it out that $100 is now going to

be divided over the nightly rate so $554 there is now an additional $50 on each night it's a two night reservation

50 + 50 is 100 bucks so there's a bunch of different ways you can do this you can mark down

your cleaning fee 50 bucks 100 bucks 150 bucks it's totally up to you just keep in mind that it will inflate your

nightly rate because we're now taking that management fee and spreading it out over the dates of a reservation and

there you go a simple little hack to reduce your cleaning fee significantly but still make the same amount of money

so let's talk about the philosophy here and why this is important if you're comparing Apples to Apples on

competitive listings meaning two listings look pretty much identical people will ABS absolutely what people

will absolutely choose the list lifting with the lower cleaning fee it just matters to them and even if you aren't

comparing like kind airbnbs many guests will not book a place with a high cleaning fee simply out of principle

people just don't like it because there's this stigma around Airbnb cleaning fees and guests being asked to

do all of these crazy tasks when they check out like repainting the house mowing the yard reshingling the roof

mopping all that stuff there's just this inflammatory Tik Tok narrative that has really turned people off to cleaning

fees this specific strategy has been super helpful on really premium listings like my Scottsdale property where my

cleaning fee is $750 like it actually cost me $750 and that's so high so before I used

to do this little trick I marked my cleaning fee down from $750 to 700 and I would just eat the $50 loss every single

reservation but now since we've implemented this new little hack what we've done is we've dropped my cleaning

fee from $750 down to $450 and we've added a $300 management fee that gets spread over the course of the

reservation making the overall cleaning fee feel far more reasonable if you've ever been to

Las Vegas and booked a hotel you're probably used to seeing a resort fee on your bill beill on your beill your alley

your alley MCB okay this is so dumb all right on your bill same thing that's basically

what they're doing here a resort fee just covers their operating expenses which is exactly what housekeeping is an

operating expense house housekeeping H

housekeeping longest buildup to a joke ever lastly anytime I talk about this sneaky little tip lots of people will

say well why not remove the cleaning fee Al together and bake it into your nightly rate via management fee and you

could totally do that I'm sure that works as well it's not something that I do but I have my own reason for it and

that reason is that I just like having a low cleaning fee because I like to bring attention to my low cleaning fee

compared to my competitor's higher cleaning fee I kind of feel that by removing it all together it may get lost

in the sauce a little bit and may go unnoticed and unappreciated whereas if it's like $50 like it is on my Joshua

Tree listing that cleaning fee is actually $90 but I've added a $40 management fee so my cleaning fee looks

like it's only $50 I want to guess to see that and think wo $50 that is dirt cheap that's so dang reasonable that

people just kind of have to book because they feel like they're getting a deal and the last point that I want to make

here is that you should never and I repeat never be the highest cleaning fee in your Market respective to the

competitive listings in your neighborhood this will just hurt your conversion and drive down your booking

so no matter how you decide to shimmy your cleaning fee just at a bare minimum make sure that you're not the highest

cleaning fee I really do think that will affect you when someone's examining three or four airbnbs they're turned off

by the cleaning fee to begin with they see that yours is higher than everyone else's it'll just make it easier for

them to pull you out of the mix first which obviously we don't want because we're here to make money right if you

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more tips and I would definitely recommend that you check out this video right here where I will teach you how to

curate and craft the ultimate Airbnb listing that will make you tons of money new bookings is very good and very

comprehensive so go check that out after you like And subscribe bye bye bye bye bye see

youy bye