Revenue management, answered

Should cleaning fees be adjusted per night, and how does that affect longer versus shorter stays?

Keep cleaning fees fixed per stay, not per night. A flat fee compresses the nightly rate on short stays, making them pricier and filtering low-value bookings, while long stays absorb that cost across more nights, improving their perceived value and your occupancy yield.

By Jack Murphy, Head of Revenue Management at UpRev. Running pricing for US vacation rental managers since 2017.

Using Cleaning Fees as a Short-Stay Filter

A fixed cleaning fee naturally inflates the effective nightly rate on one- and two-night stays, which is exactly the outcome you want during high-demand periods. This discourages low-margin short stays without requiring you to set restrictive minimum-night rules that could hurt visibility. When demand softens, you can revisit minimums rather than cutting the cleaning fee, which protects your cost recovery on turns.

Long-Stay Competitiveness Without Sacrificing Revenue

For stays of a week or more, the cleaning fee becomes a smaller share of the total booking cost, so it rarely kills conversion on its own. If long-stay bookings are underperforming, the issue is almost always nightly rate or minimum-night friction, not the cleaning fee. Resist the temptation to waive or reduce cleaning fees on extended stays unless your cost structure genuinely supports it and the market data confirms a meaningful conversion lift.

Portfolio-Level Calibration

Across a managed portfolio, cleaning fees should reflect the actual turn cost for each property type and size, not a blanket number applied everywhere. Misaligned fees, either too low or too high relative to unit size, distort your length-of-stay mix and can quietly erode margin. Review cleaning fee positioning property by property on a regular cadence, especially when owner costs or market comp structures shift.