Well, it's not Airbnb that implements the cleaning fee--it's individual hosts. But I guess you can boycott an entire platform if the majority of people who list their inventory on the platform engage in that kind of behavior and you don't like it.

But the reason that hotels (almost) never charge cleaning fees and short-term-rental properties (almost) always do is because they are different business models. A hotel typically (well, pre-Covid, anyway) cleans your room every day, meaning the cost of cleaning can be built into the nightly rate. They also typically have on-staff housekeeping, which they pay very low wages to, so the actual cost to the operator to clean your room is pretty minimal ($15 or so for the 30 minutes spent cleaning an average low-mid-end hotel room). And the math is easy: stay 1 night, it costs hotel $15; stay 2 nights: it costs hotel $30; stay 10 nights: it costs hotel $150.

Short-term rentals typically do not clean mid-stay. They clean one time: when the guest checks out. It also takes significantly longer to clean a typical short-term-rental property. In addition to multiple bedrooms and bathrooms, they also have kitchens, dining rooms, living rooms, and sometimes (depending on the type of property) game rooms, decks, barbecues, hot tubs, etc. Many (if not most) short-term rental hosts use professional cleaning services that charge higher costs and pay higher wages than hotels typically pay on-staff housekeepers; my cleaner in a relatively low-cost-of-living area charges me $75 for the standard two-hour clean it takes to clean my two-bedroom properties (and it takes that much for her to hire and keep good cleaners on her team that are reliable and willing to work hard on tight turnaround days). That relatively higher cost also doesn't scale by length-of-stay; a guest who stays one night incurs a cost to me of $75 per night, while a guest who stays 10 nights incurs a cost to me of $7.50 per night. (And actually, in my experience, guests who stay one night actually cost me more, since they tend to be renting a property to throw a party or do illicit drugs or something, and my cleaner has walked into a trashed home so many times after a one-night stay that I quit allowing them.)

So while it is entirely possible for a STR host to include the cleaning fee in the rate, invariably, someone loses. If the host doesn't charge a cleaning fee but bumps rates up by $75/night to cover the cost incurred on a 1-night stay, now the person staying 10 nights is penalized to the tune of $675. If the host bumps the rate up $25 a night assuming the average length of stay is 3 nights, then the host ends up eating $50 on a 1-night stay, but a guest staying 10 nights is still penalized to the tune of $175. The fairest and most equitable way for all parties involved is to set the charge equal to the actual cost, and if a cleaning costs a host $50, then you can't really complain about a $50 cleaning fee, because you're simply paying the cost that you incur for the host, and complaining is basically you asking the host to subsidize your stay. If the presence of a cleaning fee means you are going to favor hotels over Airbnbs for short stays, well, then, that's the way the cookie crumbles (and it makes sense, because it costs less for a hotel to clean up after you than for an Airbnb to do the same). And if you're going to complain that even a $35 cleaning fee is too much...well, why don't you go be a housekeeper for a week and tell us how happy you are to be making $15 an hour to scrub pee splatter off of toilets and launder sheets full of bodily fluids and fish hair out of shower drains and scrub grease off of the wall behind the stove for 8 hours a day? You can't expect an Airbnb host to have the same ability as a hotel to staff a low-wage cleaner full-time and only have to pay $15 or so to clean up your room behind you, even if it's just a small private room in a home.

And I do put my money where my mouth is: I travel as frequently as the next FlyerTalker, and even as a STR host with multiple properties myself, I basically never book stays on Airbnb or Vrbo, because the value proposition is simply not there for my typical travel patterns (short stays, almost always of just one night, at lower-end properties like Choice and Wyndham)...and that's OK. I am not my own target demographic for my own properties.