There’s a version of this post I’m not going to write.
That version is called “Why Cleaning Fees Are Justified,” it’s written by a cleaning company, and you’d stop reading by paragraph two — correctly. So let me start somewhere else instead.
Guests are right to be annoyed. Not about all of it. But about a real, specific thing that a lot of hosts are doing, and that our industry mostly declines to talk about.
Here’s the honest breakdown.
The number nobody publishes
Most articles about cleaning fees quote you a national average and leave it there. The current US average sits around $188 per stay, and fees climbed roughly 68% between 2020 and 2024 — which tells you why guests got loud about it, but tells you nothing about whether any particular fee is fair.
So let me just show you our actual pricing, because I’d rather you have the real number than a benchmark.
For a foothills short-term rental, a full turnover from us runs $125 for a studio or one-bedroom up to $350 and change for a four-bedroom-plus. A typical 3BD/2.5BA cabin in Bailey is $250. If the property has a hot tub and we’re balancing the chemistry, add $35. If we’re hauling the trash off-site because you don’t have pickup — and up here, plenty of people don’t — add about $35 more.
That’s not a markup on a quick wipe-down. Here’s what’s inside it.
A mountain turnover is not a city turnover. There’s the standard work — every surface, every bathroom, kitchen, floors, beds stripped and remade, laundry run and folded, dishes done, staging reset so the next guest walks into the photos they booked. Fine. That’s everywhere.
Then there’s the part that only exists at 8,000 feet. Wood stove ash and soot, which get everywhere and don’t come out of upholstery with a paper towel. Pine needles tracked across every floor between May and October. Mud and snowmelt from November to April, which is a genuinely different cleaning problem than dirt. Hot tub chemistry, which — and I say this as someone whose actual professional background is in water and wastewater engineering — is not something you eyeball. Alkalinity first, then pH, then sanitizer, in that order, or you’re just adding chemicals to water and hoping. Get it wrong and you don’t get a slightly-off hot tub. You get cloudy water, a corroded heater, and a guest complaint that costs more than a year of doing it right.
Add the drive. Our properties are spread across Conifer, Evergreen, Pine, Bailey, Kittredge, and Indian Hills. That’s not a ten-minute hop between jobs. Add the same-day turnaround that mountain bookings demand, because your guests are checking out at 10 and the next ones are pulling in at 4, and there is no slack in that.
That’s the fee. It’s a real number attached to real hours.
Now the part hosts don’t want to hear
Here’s where guests have a point.
Somewhere along the way, the cleaning fee stopped being a cost and started being a tactic. Airbnb’s search ranking has historically rewarded a low nightly rate. So the move — and everybody in this business knows the move — is to drop your nightly rate to look competitive in search, and quietly park the difference in the cleaning fee. The guest doesn’t see it until checkout. By then they’re already invested, and most of them book anyway, annoyed.
That is not a cleaning cost. That’s a pricing maneuver wearing a cleaning cost’s clothes. And it’s the actual reason people are furious about cleaning fees — not because $250 is an outrageous price for eight hours of skilled work, but because they can tell when a number has been reverse-engineered rather than calculated.
Guests are not stupid. They can do division.
And then there’s the checkout list
The second offense is worse, because it’s the one that turns an annoyed guest into a bad review.
You charge $200 for cleaning. Then you leave a laminated card asking guests to strip the beds, run the dishwasher, take out the trash, and start a load of towels before they go.
Pick one.
I understand how hosts end up here — it’s rarely malice. It’s a fee that got set once, three years ago, based on what the listing down the road was charging, and a checkout list that got added later during a bad week when a guest left a disaster behind. Nobody sat down and decided to double-dip. It just accumulated.
But the guest doesn’t see the history. They see a bill for cleaning and a chore list, and they draw the obvious conclusion. That’s a one-star review with a paragraph attached, and it will cost you more bookings than the cleaning fee ever earned you.
If you’re paying a professional, let them do the job. Ask guests to do the things that genuinely protect the property — lock up, don’t leave food out for the bears, let you know if something broke. Not the labor you already charged for.
What the data actually says
Here’s the part that should reassure the honest hosts.
Charging a real cleaning fee doesn’t hurt you. The AirROI analysis of millions of listings found that 89% of Superhosts charge a cleaning fee, and they earn substantially more annual revenue than Superhosts who don’t — while holding the same 4.9 average rating. The fee doesn’t damage guest satisfaction when the cleaning quality matches the price.
Read that last clause twice, because it’s the whole ballgame.
Guests aren’t rejecting the concept of paying for clean. They’re rejecting the gap between what they paid and what they walked into. A $250 fee and a genuinely spotless cabin is a happy guest. A $250 fee and hair in the shower drain is a review that follows you for a year.
The other useful figure: guests start abandoning bookings when the cleaning fee crosses roughly 15–17% of the total booking price. That’s your actual constraint. Not “is my fee too high in the abstract” but “is my fee proportionate to what this stay costs.” A $250 turnover on a two-night $200-a-night booking is a problem. The same $250 on a week-long stay is invisible.
Which points at the real fix for most foothills hosts, and it isn’t lowering your fee.
What I’d actually do
Set a minimum-night requirement.
Most of the cleaning fee outrage is a math problem in disguise: a fixed turnover cost spread across too few nights. Two-night bookings are where cleaning fees look insane, and they’re also the bookings that make you the least money for the most operational hassle. A three-night minimum solves the guest’s math problem and your own at the same time.
Charge a fee that matches an invoice.
If a guest asked you to justify your cleaning fee, could you? If the answer is a real number from a real cleaner, you’re fine — say it out loud, even. Some of the best-performing listings I see now put a line in the description explaining exactly what the turnover involves. It disarms the whole complaint. If the answer is “it’s whatever I needed it to be to hit my nightly rate target,” that’s the thing to fix, and no amount of clever wording will cover it.
Kill the checkout list, or kill the fee.
Not both. There’s no version of both that ends well.
Then actually deliver.
This is the part I can’t do anything about from a blog post, but it’s the one that matters most. The fee isn’t the problem. The gap is the problem. Close the gap and guests will pay you happily.
Reaching to new heights of cleanliness — and, apparently, to some slightly uncomfortable honesty about our own industry’s pricing.
If you’re a foothills host trying to figure out what your turnover should cost — or you’ve got a cleaning fee you can no longer defend with a straight face — I’m always happy to walk through the actual numbers with you.
— Hannah, Mountain Marvel Cleaning Company
(720) 513-9689 · hannahs@mountainmarvelcleaningcompany.com
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