There have been a huge number of complaints about cleaning fees on Airbnb lately. To dig in I scraped listings for 12 cities around the world. This chart was one of the most interesting insights from that analysis.

If you would like to see the full blog post check it out here. To see the code and data for this check it out on Deepnote.

Tools used: Python, Pandas, Numpy, Matplotlib

Approximately 300 listings from each city were scraped from Airbnb. The majority of listings in this chart had a stay duration of 5 days.

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I would like to see average price per sq ft to clean please 🤣

Find me a good Marriott or Hilton...

What does this mean? There's plenty of nice hotels out there..

I wouldn't even care if they just added the fees to the price that shows on the map. This would be so stupidly easy that they must be not doing it on purpose, and I just can't imagine why.

cleaning fees are set by the hosts. since they don’t pay commission to airbnb on those, they usually tend to pump them up while lowering the per night price

Missing a very important data point. How big is the place? These numbers seem low to me for a whole home. Are these single bedroom apartments?

I assume what they are saying is "Why not just stay at a Marriott or Hilton if it's no cheaper to do Airbnb?".

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Austin, TX might be a lot higher than normal this week because of the F1 race nearby

Alternative title: Dirtiest cities to rent a place

yea they should probably just charge commission on the total regardless of how it’s split, but i guess there’s some reason why they don’t do that

Exactly for those prices may as well get the hotel, forget the creepy owners n fees, and have spare money.

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So the same software issue doesn't apply for countries where they are forced by law to not try to trick customers? Using any EU vpn they can't try and screw you.

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I stopped using AirBNB for that reason. Spending a lot of time searching for a nice place that looks like it has a decent price to then realize it costs more than a hotel stay after adding all the fees.

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That is true. For longer stays usually is a good idea.

Having had Texans and Germans are house guests before, this makes perfect sense.

I’ve never seen a cleaning fee under $150.

Air B and B has so many fees now, that I’ve switched back to hotels.

Imagine getting an Airbnb in Austin, what an awful place

Actually cleaning fees are included in both the AirBnB host fee (commission) and guest fee calculation:

https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/1857/airbnb-service-fees

If you read the OP's blog post, he explains that it's an average. There are a lot of listings with $150 cleaning fees, but there are also a lot with $0 cleaning fees (and presumably higher nightly rates that compensate).

Can you elaborate a bit? What exactly is it that you see differently when you're in the EU?

From Berlin, does the map still show you just an average nightly rate? Or does it show you the full price for the entire stay?

(From the US, the map just shows an average nightly rate for me, but the listing shows the exact breakdown.)

they weren’t a few years ago, doesn’t explain why they are still kept separated (unless it isn’t the same in every country, I can speak only for Italy)

>People would be so much happier to pay $120/night for 4 nights than $100 + $80 cleaning fee

That calculation works for 4 nights. But what if the vast majority of your guests stay for 2 nights, and only some stay for longer?

The nightly fee would be $140 to cover the cost of cleaning, so a 2-night stay would end up being $280.

The problem then is that a 4-night stay would be $560, instead of the $480 it would have been with a separate cleaning fee.

I can't speak for other hosts, but we have a cleaning fee because most guests stay for 2 nights, so it's unfair to the ones who stay longer to have a higher rate.

Don't seem slow on the Australian one where the government mandate makes them show the prices as they are. https://www.airbnb.com.au/

Think everywhere else should jump on that because the fees are ridiculous oh its only 200 a night good deal actually 400 with fees taxes and everything.

I'm in Souther CA, and never had a cleaning fee under $100!

Austin's visitors have a bad reputation. People here for festivals and F1 really don't care about others' property. You also get the people puking from the UT games and worst of all, legislators.

Yeah they should just ban cleaning fees and force people to include it in their rental costs

Airbnb’s cleaning fees are set by the host. They keep the money.

10/10 I’ve completely switch over to the Marriott/element chain. For a vacation Airbnb can be nice (engross ur self in the Culture) but when you don’t even want to be there? The last thing needed is another fee.

Hah want a laugh? Check out the cleaning fees for Hawaiian rentals.

Like I posted above, you should have included Hawaiian listings, though they would have skewed TF out of your chart from their sheer ridiculousness.

Vegas was 150-250 on almost every listening I looked at for a 3 bedroom

Does Austin party that hard? Or does Berlin have poor hygiene??

That's the US for ya! Money, money, money,

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Airbnb is only worth it if you’re staying with like 10 other people

I was looking for a place in Berlin and found one with a cleaning fee of 250 euro if you didn't fully spring clean the place yourself at the end. Owner responding to poor reviews "well the company sends a team of six for a minimum of four hours and I can't get them to do less than that", sourced from the Tome of Implausible Excuses.

Same owner also tracked electricity usage and charged someone 50 euro for occasionally using the inbuilt washing machine. Complaint in review lead to a paragraphs-long diatribe on the cost of German electricity.

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Yeah, I'm going to book a hotel.

I stopped using them when I read about their business model. I sometimes use them to find places and then get a different arrangement if I like the look of it.

In which case the data would be better represented as "percentage of listings with cleaning fees" and "average cost of cleaning fee if there is one"

Otherwise it's an exercise in misleading statistics.

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But it is cheaper in the vast majority of cases

That use to be the case but with the added fees, it not always true now.

Yeah, although that is how averages work. It's important people understand this when they look at data.

Personally I think it's much worse that the OP doesn't control for unit size. (In the article, he says he collected that data, but didn't mention doing anything with it.) There's a huge difference in the effort to clean/launder a 3-bedroom house say, and a studio.

If for some reason they tracked the electricity and they charge you, do you need to pay for that as well? Would't that come in the expenses that you already payed?

You're not wrong in being surprised by how expensive the US is vs. the others. I'd be really interested in seeing more cities on it now to see if the trend continues to hold up.

I think the best explanation is probably that people in the US are less likely to do the cleaning themselves, but that's a pure guess. The reasons for suspecting that are: my impression is that the cheapest ones seem to correlate with where I imagine people being less likely to hire someone else to do something they can do themselves; perhaps connected to this, I'd suspect cleaning services in the US are much cheaper than other places in your data because of different minimum wage laws.

I also wonder about the size of the homes being compared. I think that the size of the homes in the US tend to be large, while Paris and Berlin are known for having small apartments.

Imagine people read fine prints and find out that the penalty to cancel a long term rental is, try compare guest cancel and host cancel. That cleaning fee is nothing compare to the hostile aggressive penalty of guest canceling a long term stay. I was lucky that it didnt happen to me but i read it when i had a long term rental and it was disgusting. I never booked Airbnb since

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It's legal. Scraping from public sites has been upheld by multiple federal courts in the US.

What type of Airbnb analysis would you like? Also feel free to email me (robert@datafantic.com).

This is mostly a function of price. I showed the cleaning fee as a percentage of the total cost on the blog. This percentage held true for both the US and non-US cities.