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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

One thing hotels are doing is essentially getting rid of cleaning during a stay for "COVID safety reasons." Now, I don't doubt that there is an element of that--and some chains have off and on been willing to trade cleaning for a few loyalty program points pre-COVID.

In general, I'd observe that hotel pricing, while certainly not dirt-cheap, is at relatively "rational" levels in places where you were easily getting in the $300-400/night range pre-pandemic. (And that was for generally midrange business hotels.)

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I've noticed that, too.

My guess is that both restaurants and hotels plunged a lot right at the beginning, and now they've recovered about 2/3 of that and that recovery has now stalled. People are still trying to figure out what is sustainable and what isn't, in terms of staffing.

We may not see this industry rebound to pre-covid employment levels ever. For instance, Uber delivery and other services may just be a thing and permanently shift labor away from waiters, and hotels may have permanently ceded market shares to AirBnBs or other lower service offerings. Maybe in the future, daily cleanings will be seen as some kind of odd luxury.

But I think it's all up in the air right now.

I agree with all that. Whether it's cheaper rates for "serviced apartments" that only clean once per week and tend to have cheaper rates, cooking at home, watching more movies at home, or any number of other behaviors that shift money from one group to another (including the consumers of the services), there's pretty much zero reason to expect that the new normal looks like the old normal.

Just to take one of the most obvious examples, there will probably be fewer person days in downtown offices which has all sorts of ripple effects. And I expect fewer flights to do a quick meet and greet lunch or to have various internal pro forma meetings every single quarter.

I've seen some surveys about this sort of thing but no one really knows what it will look like until it plays out.

How much cost does daily cleaning presumably add to a hotel room?

I'm imagining that the 20 or 30 minutes of labor is the majority of it. So like $10-15 dollars.

Where am I going wrong?

No, you're probably about right on a marginal basis. When hotel chains give loyalty points credit, they give about $5-10 worth. If you do it systematically at the level of an entire hotel/apartment, you can probably save more. But still. Probably less than $25-30 which isn't nothing competitively to slice off a room rate even at expensive urban hotel prices. (Or to add to your profit given that I honestly don't really care much about or value daily cleaning and, to be honest, it can be a bit of a nuisance.)

Just one more cost (from the perspective of the consumer) to take out of the system, which someone was making money to supply.

It depends on how consistently the hotel is occupied and how many rooms you can amortize the labor costs over. Quality housekeepers cannot be spun up on demand, so if you are not giving them consistent pay, then they will find something else, but you need to consistently sell room nights in order to do that.

Uber food delivery is insane and no way that its a sustainable business. It's absurd paying $25 for a meal that's $10

While I tend to agree--I've never used any of these delivery services--there is a slippery slope where you can also argue that local takeout and fast food generally is "absurd" compared to just cooking a simple meal at home, whether delivered or picked up.

In the higher cost of living areas I am familiar with, there is a material difference from 10 and 20 years ago. The calculus changes when a quality takeout or fast food meal goes from $10 per person to $20 per person. It might be worth purchasing meals when it is a few dollars extra in exchange for saving your time, but when it is a $10+ premium, it changes the calculus for a lot of people.

I don't really disagree. If I really don't feel like cooking/don't have stuff in the house, spending 20 minutes to drive (or walk if I were in a city) to my local pizza place for a $10 pizza or sub isn't that different from cooking--at least for a single person. I wouldn't spend $25 even though I could afford it.

But aside from some pizza delivery in college, I've never been in a situation where I had access to cheap and decent takeout delivery options.

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