Originally Posted by
stef315
I think you should raise your rates if you're not charging enough to Make your business profitable. And excessive cleaning charge is offensive. Personally I am fine with 150 to $200 on some sort of beach rental but when I was staying at a dive house in the bad part of Tampa, it did seem excessive to me. And the biggest slap in the face is then demanding that I do a bunch of the cleaning myself. I do tend to pick up after myself but I will certainly didn't expect to have to get up early just to get laundry through two cycles.
Raising my rates punishes those who stay longer than a few days, which is most of my guests. As I said in my post, it costs me $200 whether you stay two nights or twenty nights. They charge by the clean. So I should raise my rates by $100/night to cover short stays? Or $50/night to cover a week stay? If I do that, anyone who stays longer is getting penalized. What is so offensive about charging an appropriate nightly rate plus the actual cost of cleaning? Why should I artificially raise my rates when I can be totally transparent about the actual cleaning charge?
And I have never, ever asked a guest to do anything beyond taking out the trash (about 10 steps to the trash room) before they leave. In fact, when guests tell me they will clean up or do laundry, I tell them that is what their cleaning fee is for and that I pay my cleaners the same whether they are there for 10 minutes or three hours (unless guests have trashed the room). They charge by the clean and they are going to do the laundry anyway as we need to know it was actually washed. If I have paid a cleaning fee at a rental, I am not about to do any cleaning beyond leaving things tidy and taking out the trash.