Short Term Rental Cleaning: Art Of Hospitality

Short Term Rental Cleaning Tips: The single biggest pain in managing a Short-Term property has to be the cleaning. It either takes forever, or costs a lot and reduces your profits. Adam from GuestPrep runs through his tips for cleaning your Vacation Rental property.

Three years ago, my co-founder, David McDermott, and I had both been successful full-time Airbnb hosts for over 6 months, running a total of 6 properties on a short-term basis and the cleaning operations were becoming an absolute nightmare! Existing residential cleaners did not understand the demands of the travel industry and so we decided to create a specific service company, GuestPrep to solve these problems in this new and expanding market!

David had 15 years experience running housekeeping and operations in 5 Star hotels and so his idea was to adapt many of the techniques used in these hotels. Short-Term Rental / Airbnb properties share a lot of similarities with hotels rooms:

they are turned over frequently
there is often a short time period between check-in & check-out
the standard needs to be high, because traveller have high expectations
mistakes are costly, because often refunds need to be given

However every Short-Term Rental / Airbnb property is unique and therefore the same process will not apply every-time, they are also on average a lot bigger and so it’s easy to spend huge amounts of time on every single turnover!

We realized we could take a lot from Hotel routines but we had to prioritize, understand the key tasks that when completed would leave the property looking fantastic while not taking half a day! Through our first 500 short-term cleans we refined this process and built a modular process we now call HOSPITALITY CLEANING, it’s served us well as we’ve completed over 10,000 turnovers in the last 2 years.

I suggest you use the same process in your own Airbnb to save you time, you can find a detailed description of all the tasks here, but below are the key time saving tips for each room type:

Kitchen

Always clean this first, this way if you have dirty dishes you can get the dishwasher running and it will be finished by the time you complete everything else.

Bathrooms

Here you can’t leave anything out, a deep clean in each bathroom is needed every time, these are where most of your time should be spent.
Use vacuum all over the room (including inside the shower/bath) first to remove all hair – this is the most essential task in the entire clean!

Living Areas

Stage furniture, cushions, ornaments with symmetry where possible. The human eye loves symmetry and so rooms arranged in this way automatically look more orderly and clean.

Have two sets of bed linens so that you can quickly change the sheets and make the bed without waiting on a washer / dryer cycle.
Then maybe use a laundrette or do the laundry off-site ready for the next turnover.

Floors