Many Travelers to Panama or Other Countries Often Use the Booking Platform AirBnB.
Recently, Airbnb updated its policy on checkout chores for all reservations booked on or after November 20th. The past policy allowed the hosts to ask the guests to do various chores prior to checking out, as well as charging a “cleaning” fee. The new policy prohibits hosts requiring guests to perform tasks normally handled by a professional cleaner. For example, guests will no longer be required to strip beds or start laundry loads, washing, drying, putting away dishes or hauling trash offsite. Nor will hosts be able to introduce new rules or requests via private messages, signs in the home, or after a booking is confirmed. Hosts may set up to seven standard house rules, and continue to ask guests for simple, reasonable courtesy tasks, such as such as check-in times, pet restrictions, quiet hours, and smoking limits.
The house rules may include the following: Placing used dishes directly into the sink, gathering damp towels, sorting recycling or trash into designated indoor bins, complying with local considerations,such as animal-proof trash bins in wildlife areas or water-saving limits during droughts. All house rules and requests must be clearly shown in a dedicated section of the listing page at the time of booking. “House rules help guests understand what hosts expect, but we’ve heard from our community that they can be confusing, onerous and hard to manage,” Airbnb said in a statement. “So we’ve redesigned them to make them easier to discover and clearer to set, alongside a new policy that keeps requests reasonable, with no surprises.” Hosts who violate the policy or enforce surprise checkout fees risk receiving warnings or lower search visibility on the platform. Airbnb banned indoor surveillance cameras in all listings worldwide in April of 2024, however, noise decibel monitors and outdoor security cameras such as doorbell cameras continued to be permitted as long as they were disclosed in advance and do not monitor private spaces.
