But Airbnb's advertised nightly rate on the site includes the cleaning fee, so this does not seem to be an effort to compete on base price.
I wonder where the author lives. I am in the US. I picked an airbnb listing at random from the home page:
https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/52569310?adults=1&category_tag=...
$230 night
$230 x 5 nights $1,148
Cleaning fee $390
Service fee $217
Total before taxes $1,755
The cleaning fee is expressly NOT part of the advertised rate.
Also kind of hilarious the example I landed on has a $390 cleaning fee.