Wondering if anyone else has run into this issue and if so, how you solved it. It’s a new and unique one for me.
A couple of our properties are fairly large (7 bedrooms). Our market is extremely seasonal but we keep these houses booked year round. In the peak summer season they book for thousands per night on the weekends. In the off-season we often drop the price all the way down to $90 for a mid-week night, which we still make money on and usually convinces a small family of 4 or even a couple to book a large house instead of something else. For every booking, no matter season or stay length, or number of people, we keep the cleaning fee the same, about $700, which means we employ our same good cleaners year-round fully booked and also encourages people to book more night in the off-season to get a better nightly overall price deal.
Last week, I noticed that the weekend of 1/3/26 was still not booked at one of our large houses, which is super rare, especially since I had been monitoring it and consistently reducing the price in PriceLabs below the competition. I had been confirming that the prices were being pushed to Hospitable, but neglected to see if they were being pushed to Airbnb, where I finally noticed that the pricing had never been updated for quite some time, leaving it at far out pricing that had been synced months ago.
After having Hospitable support dig into it, I received this message from Hospitable:
“Hi Kyle!
I’ve taken a closer look into the issue, and when we try to push the update to Airbnb, we’re seeing this error message: "Based on your cleaning fee of $758, the minimum nightly price you can charge is $632."
What’s happening is that Airbnb is rejecting the update because the nightly rate is set significantly lower than the cleaning fee. What I would do is either adjusting the minimum price in PriceLabs to $632 for the 12 Rocky Mountain listing—so the pricing we get in Hospitable meets Airbnb’s minimum requirement—or lowering the cleaning fee.”
I have never heard of Airbnb imposing a minimum nightly fee due to a high cleaning fee. Has anyone else run into this? When I dug into it more, I realized it is also happening at our other large property as well.
I am going to work on some of my settings in Pricelabs to see if I can overcome this by essentially eliminating the cleaning fee, but making a minimum price per STAY so we are always at least breaking even paying our cleaners and making a little profit.
