I spent three nights recently in the guest house at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo. Very pleasant — and it was priced at $20/night (obviously heavily subsidized). In addition, however, there was a one-time $16 charge for cleaning at the end of my stay.
This pricing scheme was clever since cleaning of the room, and certainly of linens, is typically done in full only at the end of a several-day stay. Why should someone pay the same per night for a one-day stay as for a three-day stay? They shouldn’t. Pricing like this in hotels more generally would reflect hotels’ costs more accurately and prevent long-stay guests from subsidizing short-stay guests. I would expect that, as concerns increase about pollution resulting from excessive use of detergent (“please place towels on racks if you don’t wish to re-use them”), we will see more of this kind of pricing.
and 
. You can also watch it on 
While @DaveyNC is correct about the existence of a longer-term pricing model defining certain chains, one of the interesting tricks to cheap weekend travel is that extended-stay chains often offer very cheap weekend rates to fill the rooms that have been deserted by consultants who checked out on Thursday or Friday morning to go home (but who will be back on Sunday night).
This leaves me inclined to agree with the posters who say that salaries are the major cost, as if cleaning were the key cost issue, it’d make more sense to leave those rooms empty until Monday rather than cleaning them a second time on Sunday afternoon.
I always thought the “leave your towels on the rack” had nothing to do with altruisim and everything to do with keeping laundry costs down. Culture changed enough so that guests might also think this is a hotel caring about the environment, not a cost control measure.
Hotels are already charging all costs, unless it Is heavily subsidized as in Daniel’s case.
Hotels can ask seperate and/or additional charges, when their rack rates are reasonable, other than that it will be double charging.
Giving additional discounts are better approach physcologically in many cases, as guests feel uncomfortable when they are paying seperately.
In my previous experience, We were having higher customer satisfaction, when we are applying all inclusive prices in a 4 -5 star hotel operation.
Generally The guests, feel more comfortable
Additional charges,
The biggest obstacle for hoteliers I
Pricing is not based on costs, but on what the market will bare, so I wouldn’t expect to see fluctuations like this occur for most hotels.
The only place I see this happening is in low cost hotels that would follow the easyJet/Ryannair model where the customer is nickel and dimed over all usage.
Hotels that want to use the ariline pricing model already add mandatory “resort fees” that may or may not be apparent at the time of booking. These are junk fees, since you pay them no matter what services you use. Surprzed no one mentioned these yet.
Jill, you don’t have to lower the wage of the cleaning staff, you just have to have fewer of them.
Interestingly enough, a hotel in Vancouver recently had its cleaning staff go on strike (or walk out, I’m not sure), in response to a policy of cleaning at the end of each stay. They insisted that they have to use way more cleaning product if they didn’t clean every day. Sounds to me it was more a case of not wanting to lose jobs.
I stayed in a hotel recently that offered me a $5 voucher or extra “reward” points if I opted not to have the room cleaned on a given day.
Same idea as airport parking services which can do much better with multi-day stays, since a large piece of their expenses is taking you to and then from the airport, each of which is done once on each stay. They haven’t priced them accordingly (say, maybe $15 for the first day and $5 for subsequent days, instead of $9 per day), but they could, and if some did the others could be forced, eventually, to follow.