Despite years of investing in bigger and better Sky Club airport lounges, Delta Air Lines still hasn't solved the nagging overcrowding issue.
Short-Term Rentals Can't Rely on Tech to Solve Its Labor Shortages — Yet Short-Term Rentals' Labor Shortage Cannot be Fixed by Tech
25.08.2023 - 13:58 / skift.com / Srividya Kalyanaraman
Technology, powered by artificial intelligence, is coming after many jobs. But in the short-term rental industry where human capital is vital, labor shortages are still a problem.
Cleanliness and good housekeeping are cornerstones of hospitality. And as users of short-term rentals increasingly expect hotel-equivalent service, delivering that experience comes with a cost — and without the necessary workforce.
“I don’t see human workers getting out of the picture for at least another ten years,” said Guy Westlake, founder of Lavanda, which sells property management software to student, multi-family, co-living, and serviced apartment rentals. “Robots cannot clean and maintain apartments yet.”
That said, Westlake maintained that it’s harder to find the workforce willing to do the manual labor at a particular price point feasible to the short-term rental market.
Labor shortages in hospitality aren’t new. The pandemic may have made it more acute, but it’s a problem the industry has been coping with well before the ‘work-from-anywhere’ times.
As short-term rentals grow in every market and expand to newer ones, the manual workload in maintaining the properties have proportionately increased.
“The average number of tasks per day, per property have steadily increased,” said Jeremiah Gall, founder and CEO of Breezeway, a property operations platform for the short-term rental market. “And there is the need for quality assurance, if the work is outsourced — a second crew that comes in to inspect and make sure everything looks great.”
Gall noted that guest expectations put pressure too.
“Guests are expecting a hotel-like experience at a vacation rental,” Gall said. “10 years ago, you took your own sheets, toiletries to a rental, but now that’s changed — we know everything is going to be sanitized and very clean when we check-in.”
The national average cost of cleaning for a 1-bedroom property in the United States was $60.68 in Q4 2021, which was an 18.31 percent increase compared to the previous year during the same timeframe.
But cleaning costs vary depending on the location and type of property. In 2022, the average cleaning fee in the U.S. for a private/shared room on Airbnb was just $47 per stay, while the average fee for a house with five or more rooms reached $333, according to data from AirDNA. But overall, cleaning fees have risen by 28 percent since 2019.
Not surprisingly, a lot of this can be attributed to stringent sanitation policy required during Covid — that alone pushed cleaning costs by 11 percent in 2021.
But also, a lot of local workforce in holiday destinations do not depend on the hospitality industry for work anymore. A lot of the workforce are abandoning labor-intensive manual jobs for
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