Cleaning your Airbnb rental is a time-consuming yet necessary task if you want to maintain your rank on Airbnb and continue to provide a desirable guest experience. Many hosts don’t look forward to having to clean and organize their space after each booking, but what they may not realize is that cleaning doesn’t have to be a chore. If you’re an Airbnb host looking to streamline all of your cleaning tasks, here are some vital tips on how to automate Airbnb cleaning with ease.
Time-Saving Cleaning Tips
Cleaning your vacation rental can be an extensive process, but only if you make it. The reality is that many of us complicate the process, which only makes it more difficult to automate the process because there are so many obstacles in our way. These time-saving cleaning tips will help you get out of the way so that you can automate your Airbnb cleaning process.
- Come Up With a List of Chores: It’s hard to know what you need to clean if you don’t have a thorough overview of your property and all the areas that get dirty throughout the year. A cleaning checklist is arguably one of the most valuable tools at your disposal. Create a list of all the areas of your home that need to be cleaned after each stay so you know what you need to tackle.
- Create a Chore Schedule: Some cleanings will require you to be more comprehensive while others will just require you to do a few things here and there to ensure that your high standards are maintained. Create a chore schedule for your property that will inform you as to how often things will need to be done to guarantee cleanliness and guest satisfaction.
- Shorten the Time Between Bookings If You Work Well Under Pressure: Are you someone who works well under pressure? Some hosts will opt for longer gaps in their booking calendar to manage cleanings, but others will shorten this gap so that they’re incentivized to work faster. While you don’t want to put too much pressure on yourself, this strategy could prove useful for some people.
Efficient Airbnb Cleaning Techniques
Efficiency is key when cleaning your Airbnb property, especially if you’re looking to get through your cleaning schedule so that you can make sure your property is spotless and ready for new guests. Here are a few efficient home cleaning strategies you can employ to not only get your work done faster but to do it in such a way that is conducive to effective cleaning.
- Always start with the things you need to pick up around the house. Trying to clean around clutter makes the process more difficult and almost certainly guarantees that you are going to miss spots you shouldn’t miss.
- Don’t start cleaning an area haphazardly. Start from the top and then clean your way down. For example, you might start by dusting, then cleaning walls and glass surfaces, then tackling counters and any other surfaces below or near these, and then get to the floor. This ensures you’re not left with dirt and residue you still have to pick up or scrub away after you thought you were done cleaning.
- Eat That Frog! Very few people want to clean, even when they know that it’s something they need to do. What makes things even more difficult is knowing how much needs to get done and knowing that you have limited time and energy. The key to getting through cleaning tasks efficiently and making sure you can do it with the time and energy you have is to start with the hardest tasks first. For example, the kitchen and the bathroom tend to be the dirtiest places. So, start there! Taking care of the hardest tasks first and then moving on to the easier ones is an extremely helpful strategy.
Streamlining Cleaning Tasks
Streamlining your cleaning tasks all boils down to organization and habits. We’ve already talked about the importance of a chore schedule and a chore checklist. However, there are other ways that you can streamline the cleaning process. For example, having all of your cleaning essentials in the various rooms throughout the house where they’re needed allows for easier access, which makes cleaning easier on you. Another example might be keeping the replacement bedding in the bedroom that you can put on while you launder the used bedding.
If you’re interested in automating your cleaning, you have to think smarter, not harder!
Automating Your Hosting Chores
The best way to achieve cleaning automation for your short-term rental is to hire cleaners. A cleaning service will help you keep your property looking its best without you having to go in and do it yourself. Better yet, the right cleaning team will deliver a deep cleaning that you may not be able to when they go to work on your property. Vacation rental cleaners are the pinnacle of automation as you hire them, they clean after each booking, and you just worry about the other elements of being a host on a platform like Airbnb. Keep in mind that you’ll want to think about other cleaning services, such as cleaning teams that are capable of cleaning homes with pets in them (if you’re a pet-friendly host) or even specialized cleaners like pool cleaners.
The only thing you’ll need to consider is how this will impact your guest. A cleaning service will undoubtedly require you to pass on the additional costs to your guests, which could impact bookings. Weigh the pros and cons and make sure it’s the right move for your vacation rental business.
Simplify the Airbnb Cleaning Process
When you’re tackling cleaning for your Airbnb, you must look for ways to simplify it. The tips above that help you streamline your cleaning tasks and save time are a great place to start. However, there’s another tip that will go a long way in making cleaning easier on you: be happy with what you consider good enough.
You must make your areas as clean as possible and safe for your guests so that your space is presentable and enjoyable. However, it doesn’t serve you or anyone else to spend hours upon hours painstakingly cleaning the same area because you want to get everything perfect. This will wear you down and make it so that hosting becomes a nightmare rather than a way to support you and your future. Be satisfied with getting something done well enough that it’s acceptable to you and your guests. It will save you time and sanity.
Maximize Hosting Efforts With Automation
If you’re a host with just one property to clean, it’s easy to automate the process. If, on the other hand, you have multiple properties, this becomes a bit of a challenge. Fortunately, you can maximize your hosting efforts and automate regardless of how many properties you own. If you want to become a host with a bigger presence and make cleaning easier, you should:
- Use Property Management Tools: Property management automation tools make it easier for you to manage all of the properties you own at a single glance through a centralized dashboard. How does this help with cleaning automation? Using these tools can make it easier to book cleaners, schedule them, and make sure that all of your properties are being maintained after check-out with an effective management system. If you don’t have a way to see bookings, vacancies, and whether or not properties have been cleaned, managing multiple ones on your own can be an impossible feat.
- Hire Property Managers: Don’t want to have to do it yourself? There are property managers out there who will help you run your vacation rentals, which includes booking reliable cleaning services. You’ll have to pay for these services, but it can be worth it if you can’t deal with everything on your own.
- Keep an Extremely Close Eye on Your Calendars: Keep a close eye on all of your listings and make sure that all of your availability settings are accurate so that you have time to get your properties clean. A mismanaged schedule for multiple properties is a disaster waiting to happen.
Tips for Automated Cleaning in Airbnb
If you’re planning on cleaning your Airbnb yourself, all of the tips above will be sufficient enough to help you tackle cleaning quickly and efficiently. But what if you’re going for full automation with professional Airbnb cleaning services? The best tips for these situations are to do your research, ask questions, and check customer reviews so that you can properly vet the cleaning company before they come to your vacation rental property. Just like guests look after you, you want to make sure your cleaners are professional and good at what they do.
Enhance Your Hosting With Automated Cleaning
Cleaning is a pain point for many hosts, but it doesn’t have to be something that continues to get in the way. Learning how to automate Airbnb cleaning makes your journey as a host simpler so that you have one less thing to stress over. Employ all of the tips offered above for both new hosts and more established hosts to make cleaning easier on you, regardless of whether you manage one property or plan on scaling over time.
