19:12
It's long been a complaint from Airbnb guests. The last thing I want to do is ever do this pile of dishes again. Why would I want to stay somewhere where they want me to clean up after the fact? Nope. Unlike a hotel stay with housekeeping, Airbnb hosts often require guests to complete household chores before checking out. From putting sheets in the washing machine to loading the dishwasher, even taking out the trash. So, what they wanted us to do was gather all the trash in the house, put it in our car, and take it several miles down the road and put it in the dumpster.
This on top of cleaning fees that can commonly range from $50 to $150 per stay. The fees climb even higher for large and luxury properties. Now, Airbnb posting new policies to curb checkout chores, saying for reservations starting after November 20th, hosts are generally not allowed to ask guests to complete tasks that require significant effort or time, or would typically be performed by a cleaner, including stripping the bed, taking trash off site, or washing and putting away dishes. Somebody at Airbnb finally took a look at their hosts and said, "Enough is enough." brings me so much joy to know that somewhere out there the crazy Airbnb host I had 5 years ago is punching the air. In a statement, Airbnb said, "House
rules help guests understand what hosts expect. But we've heard from our community that they can be confusing, ownorous, and hard to manage. So, we've redesigned them to make them easier to discover and clearer to set. But not everyone is celebrating. Ew, I don't want to be touching people's sheets." Hosts Laura and Gabriel Vog rent out two properties near Greenville, South Carolina. They say their checkout list is based on common courtesy. We ask for guests if they are staying there on a Thursday if they could roll the bins out to the curb. We ask for guests to place their dishes in the dishwasher, place the towels and the sheets like in a pile.
The couple says they don't plan to change their $99 cleaning fee for now. I think some of the push back comes from guests wondering why are we paying a cleaning fee if we've got to strip the sheets and take the trash out and do all of these chores. What do you say as hosts? Yeah, that 100% makes sense. We're not asking them to do hours worth of work. It's literally 5 minutes on the way out. My reaction is more like I we all have parts of our job that are not our favorite. Do I want to take off the sheets after someone? Not really, but it's a part of the job, so I got to do it.
New rules for Airbnb users looking to relax without the same responsibilities they have at home. And that new policy also prohibits hosts from imposing their own fines on guests. Any risk of a fine from a community association like an HOA must be approved ahead of time in the listing. Airbnb says rules will also be displayed more prominently in a designated section on the listing as well.
