Deep Cleaning Hacks for Busy Airbnb Hosts

It is a pain to clean your Airbnb between guests. But that doesn’t mean it has to be a dragged-out nightmare – there are ways to speed up your hospitality and still do a pretty good job.

High-touch items, such as door handles, light switches, telephone receivers, restaurant menus, cloakrooms and cupboard handles, television remotes and bathroom fixtures, should be disinfected on a regular basis. Ensure adequate and on-going inventories of all linens and supplies are carried out on a frequent basis.

Automate Your Cleanings

Putting together an effective room-by-room approach to cleaning will get your home guest-ready in a flash. An Airbnb checklist will also help you ensure that little is left undone (such as taking limescale gunk from pipes).

You can use automation to free either yourself or your cleaners from the task of ensuring that your last roll of toilet paper hasn’t been used up and your last towel hasn’t been misplaced. Have your cleaners keep an inventory of items, and have them send you automated reminders when items run low.

If you don’t meet your cleaners face-to-face, communicate with them by text or phone; it will help you establish this professional relationship, and furthermore it will help you avoid ticking them off, which is often the cause of them quitting on you at the last minute – when you really need them. Make sure you pay your cleaners on time and allow them to do a good job. This will guarantee that your property is clean and, furthermore, that guests happy, with great ratings, reviews and repeat business.

Make a Cleaning Checklist

Having the right tools and a thorough checklist at hand would be your best cleaning hacks as a busy Airbnb host, as would detailed communication with your cleaner. It’s important that your cleaners know what to expect and that you are clear about their obligations.

It’s not only keeping your place nice for your guests, it’s about preserving their health (no one wants to stay at a place where they have to fear sickness or allergic reactions). But what is a deep cleaning, really? Obviously, it does not entail just sweeping the floor and dusting off the shelves and furniture in your place but includes sanitising everything from the showerhead to the sink to the kitchen cabinets.

It makes things easy if you create a cleaning checklist on every room of your vacation rental home. This way your cleaner knows exactly what to clean and in what order. This will make sure that the entire house is cleaned from top to bottom between every guest. You can also use the cleaning checklist to identify a guest-related damage or theft and then to file a claim with Airbnb’s host guarantee programme. Our Airbnb Cleaning Checklist PDF is free to download here.

Schedule Regular Cleanings

The required cleaning between guests is part of the five-star hosting experience, but time-consuming and labor-intensive, and typically a top guest complaint and poor review.

If you hire helpers to do such things, creating a schedule of recurring maintenance and seasonal cleanups can save you time and money, not to mention a tremendous amount of grief. Or, if you’re like me and do the work yourself, such a schedule can eliminate an anxiety-inducing aspect of homeownership – hoping that the unit will function properly.

A lot of Airbnb hosts like to run the shower and do a quick polish and vacuum between guests on their own. Kitchens and bathrooms are easy enough to do. For a host who likes to be close to their listing, this works.

But if you’re going to do this, then you want to make sure they know what you want, and they know what you want from them. During the cleaning, don’t spy on your cleaners – they’ll stop trusting you, and they’ll stop working for you. If possible, meet all of your cleaners in person; show up on time and leave on time, too. You want to have a healthy working relationship with your standard bearers.

Get Organized

Organising – or, more precisely, getting organised – is the most important secret to successful Airbnb cleaning. For example, always keep a cleaning caddy stocked with staples (floor cleaner, oven cleaner, all-purpose cleaner, glass cleaner) so that you can just move from room to room. There is no time wasted searching for supplies.

You can also do what most Airbnb hosts do, which is to buy extra linens so that you can double up or triple up. That way you’ll have enough to refresh everything between guests, being able to keep a guest-ready Airbnb even through the busy season, with no days off – back-to-back bookings only.

You could get away with letting the guests clean up after themselves, although I find that willingness to clean up oneself is a great way to boost those 5-star reviews without having to pay additional costs to a professional cleaner. Be sure to have clean-up expectations spelled out clearly with your checkout instructions.