Hi,
I’ve read opinions about charging cleaning fees or not, and I see pros and cons to both.
So I was wondering: what if we give guests a choice? They can either leave the home as they found it or pay a reasonable cleaning fee.
Does anyone have experience with something like this?
Thank you
Hello. It’s a good possibility, I had it myself already and I chose depending on each situation ( flight or not, Big place or not, age of my kids etc)
We do this but spell out expectations. If you don’t pay cleaning this is what we mean by leave it as you found it. People still can mess up. Sometimes its not a big deal but sometimes it is so you have to know when to offer a choice. For example one weekend traveler did not empty the in house trash when asked. We came back a day later, because of what they had cooked the place smelled. Now had I realized this and understood more how time pressed them were we would have either turned them down or insisted on a cleaning fee. Had we been gone longer it probably would have been worse.
It really depends on the type of guests, and that’s where this idea gets tricky in practice.
Short-stay guests (weekends, 1–3 nights) usually expect more of a hotel-style experience, so offering a “clean it yourself or pay” option can actually confuse things more than it helps.
Longer stays or more experienced guests are generally more open to leaving things tidy, but even then “clean enough” can vary a lot from person to person, so it’s hard to keep consistent standards.
The biggest issue is what happens on turnover day if something isn’t cleaned properly, it still ends up on the host or cleaner at the last minute, which is where most of the friction comes in. Maybe instead of a choice system, a standardized cleaning fee and clear checkout checklist would keep things more consistent and easier to manage for everyone.
Yeah, a simple cleaning fee and checklist sounds way easier for everyone.