Airbnb users have repeatedly highlighted high cleaning fees and non-transparent pricing as pain points — AP reported in 2023 that more than 260,000 listings lowered or removed cleaning fees after all-in pricing tools were introduced. Guests see a ¥8,000 fee tacked onto a ¥6,000/night stay and feel like they’re being tricked. As an operator, you see it differently: you’re paying a professional team to restore your property to hotel-level cleanliness in under two hours.
Both perspectives are valid. The challenge is designing a cleaning fee strategy that covers your real costs without tanking your conversion rate.
The question comes up constantly in small operator circles: should I build a direct booking site and stop paying Airbnb, Booking.com, and the rest their cut?
It sounds obvious at first — of course you’d rather not hand 15–18% of your revenue to a platform. But after running a guesthouse in Tokyo and managing properties across multiple OTAs, I’ve landed somewhere more nuanced. OTA commission and direct booking costs are different shapes of the same expense — and for many small Japan operators, OTAs are genuinely the better deal, at least at first.
Run a guesthouse or short-term rental property long enough, and it’s inevitable: a guest checks out, and something is broken, stained, or gone. In most Western markets, you’d have a security deposit in escrow ready to draw against. In Japan, the picture is quite different — and understanding how damage claims actually work here can save you a lot of frustration when it matters most.