The cleaning fee is the number guests squint at before they book, and it's the number hosts get wrong more than any other. Set it too low and you eat the cost of the turn yourself. Set it too high and your listing loses the click to the unit two doors down. Here's how the math actually breaks out for a Savannah turnover, and what pushes the price up or down block by block.
Start with a base by bedroom count
Size is the honest first cut. A one-bedroom carriage house off Jones Street is a different job than a four-bedroom in Georgetown, and the fee should track that. The rough tiers most operators here work from:
- Studio / 1BR: the fastest turn, assuming one bathroom and a single set of linens.
- 2BR: a second bath and a second bed almost always mean a second cleaner or a longer solo visit.
- 3BR and up: full-day territory, especially with more than two baths, and where a flat rate starts hurting you if you don't scope it right.
Bathrooms drive labor more than bedrooms do. A 2BR/3BA rents like a 2BR but cleans like a 3BR. Price the baths, not just the beds.
The upcharges that are real in Savannah
This is where local knowledge pays for itself. A generic per-square-foot quote misses the things that make our units slow.
Historic-district access
Downtown units skew to walk-up carriage houses and multi-story townhomes with narrow stairs and no driveway. That means hauling linens and a vacuum up two flights, then circling for street parking that during St. Patrick's week simply does not exist. A three-story townhome off Abercorn genuinely takes longer than a same-size home in Pooler with a garage and a driveway you can back the van into. If you own both, don't price them the same. Our Pooler and Richmond Hill homes are newer detached stock, and the turn is simpler for it.
Beach sand
Anything near Tybee or Wilmington Island comes with sand tracked through every room, in the grout lines and down the shower drain. A proper beach turn includes a deep vacuum and a floor pass that a downtown unit doesn't need. It's a legitimate line item, not a favor.
Humidity and mildew
Savannah is humid subtropical, and roughly half the year's rain falls June through September. Constant damp plus salt air means mildew shows up on grout, upholstery, and linens if a unit sits empty a few days between guests. Treating it is real work. It's also why we push hosts toward mildew-resistant blended-synthetic linens and quick-dry upholstery over pure cotton, which sours faster than you'd think in August.
Same-day peak-season turns
April and October are the busiest months, and St. Patrick's Day stacks back-to-back checkouts and check-ins on the same afternoon, with the worst downtown traffic of the year to go with them. A guaranteed same-day turn during that window carries a premium because it has to. We're building the schedule around a 10:15 parade step-off and a causeway that's already jammed.
Don't forget the fee is taxed
This trips up more hosts than any pricing question. In Georgia, sales tax applies to the total listing price and the cleaning fee for any reservation of 89 nights or less. So your $150 cleaning fee isn't $150 to the guest. Stacked on top: Savannah's local hotel/motel excise tax is 8% (it went up from 6% on September 1, 2023, the first bump in about thirty years), plus 4% Georgia state sales tax, plus a flat $5-per-night state hotel-motel fee on stays of 30 nights or less. The excise tax is due by the 20th of the month after occupancy. If you're setting the guest-facing fee to exactly cover your cleaner's invoice, you're short, because the tax rides on the fee too.
A quick way to sanity-check your number
Take what a professional turn actually costs you, add a margin if you're marking it up, then remember the guest sees that number with tax layered on at checkout. Compare the all-in figure against comparable listings in your ward, not against the raw fee. A $95 cleaning fee that reads as $120-plus at checkout can lose to a $110 fee on a better-photographed unit.
Every legal STR in the city also carries an annual STVR certificate that runs about $150 a year and doesn't come back if you let it lapse, so factor that fixed cost into your season, not just the per-turn math. If you want a straight quote for your specific unit, with the stairs and the sand and the summer mildew priced in honestly, tell us the address and bedroom count and we'll give you a real number. You can see the areas we cover on our home page.