Why are laundry expenses not part of your 30% per booking service fees?

For the laundries in particular po, our scope is up to its handling only. This means removing the used sets and collecting them from the unit, delivering them to the laundry shop and picking them up when done, so that they’ll be ready for the next guest.

The hard cost of the laundry/washing service itself, that’s charged to the owner’s account already

The reason for this is because the laundry is not really part of the maintenance of the property itself which is the main purpose of the services we provide. For properties we manage that are operated for short-term rentals, we facilitate the handling of the laundries only as an added value, for the convenience of the unit owner, and at no extra/separate charge.

Operating short-term rentals, in reality, really costs more. This is basically the reason why in our service agreement, you’ll notice that we also charge more for short-term rentals than for the long-term ones – 8.33% to 10% for long-terms and 30% per booking for short-terms.

The 30% per booking that we charge, covers the extra personnel time that’s required for facilitating checks in and out, housekeeping services, handling of security deposits, inspection of the property upon every guest’s check out, handling of the laundry as described above, more transactions to account = more accounting personnel requirements in the back end, more documentations to keep for the bookings, and all the other little things that we need to mind when operating short-term rentals.

To keep our fees reasonable for our client property owners, we cannot anymore include the cost of the actual laundry/washing service as part of the fees we collect. Instead, what we do is we charge a P500 cleaning fee for each booking as part of the amount the guests pay.

This cleaning fee is separate from the rent which the guests have to pay and it’s the same for each booking whether they stay for 1 night only or 1 week. We pass this amount to the owner also as part of the total rent paid by the guest.

This additional P500 per booking (net of P350 after our 30% fee) in almost all cases, is more than enough to cover the laundry costs. You’ll see from your statements that the laundries rarely go beyond P300 if they reach that high at all. So all in all, the net effect is that you are actually not paying for the laundries anymore, we even give you more.