Airbnb logo displayed on a phone screen laying on a map of Krakow

Airbnb is making progress to get rid of those hated cleaning fees

by with No Comment Tech

Airbnb logo displayed on a phone screen laying on a map of Krakow

Image Credits: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto / Getty Images

Airbnb is slowly killing the cleaning fee as it aims for more transparent pricing.

Since early last year, when the company started showing guests all-inclusive pricing when booking a property, almost 300,000 listings have removed or lowered cleaning fees, Airbnb said in its earnings report today. Now, nearly 40% of active listings no longer charge cleaning fees.

On the customer side, these cleaning fees had been a longtime frustration. You could spot a bargain on a vacation rental on Airbnb, only to navigate to checkout and see hundreds of dollars of cleaning fees piled on at the last second. As cleaning fees climbed, so did the platform’s average rental price, making Airbnb a less appealing choice when booking a getaway.

The decline of the cleaning fee does beg the question — are Airbnb hosts just not paying for cleaners anymore? Or are they just baking the costs of cleaning their properties into the list prices? When Airbnb first launched what it calls its “Total Price Display,” it seemed intent on finding a happy medium.

“Guests should not have to do unreasonable checkout tasks such as stripping the beds, doing the laundry, or vacuuming when leaving their Airbnb,” Airbnb said at the time. “But we think it’s reasonable to ask guests to turn off the lights, throw food in the trash, and lock the doors — just like they would when leaving their own home.”

It’s hard to believe that just reminding guests to turn off the lights would make that much of a financial difference. Still, according to Airbnb, its average nightly price for a one-bedroom listing was $114, down 2% from last year, whereas the company says hotel prices rose 7% to a nightly average of $149 in that time period.

Overall, Airbnb increased its quarterly revenue 17% to $2.2 billion, year over year. But due to a one-time tax cost worth $1 billion, the company lost $349 million for the quarter.

Airbnb is rolling out a toggle to show you price inclusive of all fees

Starship orbital test flight 3

SpaceX makes significant progress with third Starship orbital test flight

by with No Comment Tech

Starship orbital test flight 3

Image Credits: SpaceX (opens in a new window)

SpaceX is continuing to make progress on the development of Starship, the largest rocket ever built, with the third test flight Thursday accomplishing considerably more than the previous two tests.

The 400-foot-tall Starship rocket lifted off from SpaceX’s Starbase facility in southeastern Texas at 8:25 a.m. local time. Although SpaceX has been developing Starship for years, this is only the third time the company has attempted an orbital mission.

After liftoff, Starship proceeded through a nominal — aerospace speak for normal — ascend. All 33 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy booster performed as designed, and the two stages separated around 2 minutes 45 seconds into the mission. Critically, the launch vehicle nailed a novel stage separation technique called “hot staging,” where the upper stage (also called Starship) lights its engines to push away the Super Heavy booster. The hot-staging technique was performed for the first time, ever, during the second Starship test flight last November.

From there, the Starship upper stage continued its ascent to orbit. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk congratulated the team on X, saying, “Starship reached orbital velocity!”

The booster executed what’s called a boostback burn to adjust its trajectory as it aimed to splash down in the Gulf of Mexico — Falcon 9’s booster performs the same maneuver to vertically land back on Earth — but its engines failed to relight for the landing burn phase. The Super Heavy was subsequently lost.

The company nailed another new milestone after it opened Starship’s payload door for the first time. This capability is crucial for SpaceX’s plans to rapidly deploy many hundreds of next-generation Starlink satellites. Another demonstration, a propellant transfer demo, was also completed, though the company did not go into the results of this test.

Propellant transfer is a crucial part of the company’s plans to return humans to the moon for NASA. As part of SpaceX’s plans for that NASA mission, the company has settled on a mission architecture that could include more than a dozen Starship refueling trips.

Being able to refuel the vehicle is also necessary for a future Mars mission.

Starship continued on its coasting phase, but after around a half hour the company said it wouldn’t attempt to relight the engines to proceed with the test. SpaceX didn’t elaborate on the livestream why it decided not to continue.

Instead, they let gravity do its work, and the Earth’s powerful gravitational forces pulled Starship back through the lower atmosphere. Ultimately, mission controllers failed to reestablish communications with Starship, leading SpaceX’s Dan Huot to announce that they had lost the ship: “No splashdown today, but again just it’s incredible to see how much further we got this time around,” he said.