Whether you run one vacation rental property or are working to grow your Airbnb business, you’ll know how important cleanliness is to the guest experience. One dusty shelf or a stain on a towel can undermine all the effort you put into giving your guests an exceptional stay, and result in a negative review that hurts your host rating. But turnovers are fast-paced and sometimes you have mere hours between one guest leaving and another checking in. It’s important to be thorough with your cleans, but you and your team don’t have hours to spend double-checking to make sure your unit is in prime condition. So how can you ensure you meet guests’ standards of cleanliness while maintaining an efficient operation? By using a vacation rental cleaning checklist! Use this checklist or share it with your cleaning staff to make the cleaning process more thorough and efficient. This way, you can easily give every guest the experience they expect–one that will result in 5-star reviews–from your vacation home.
Let’s face it, turnovers can be stressful. There’s no room for error when you have one guest checking out at 10 in the morning and the next arriving at 3 p.m. And a simple error like forgetting to sweep under the bathroom cabinets can mean disappointed guests and negative reviews. The best way to stay organized and efficient with your cleanings–and make sure you always meet guests’ expectations–is to use a vacation rental cleaning checklist. This means your team will never have to wing it and your guests will always arrive at a property that matches their high standards of cleanliness.
Use this checklist to streamline your cleaning process. And remember that cleaning a house in the proper order is essential to ensure your cleaning team isn’t creating more work for itself. It’s best to have cleaners use a top-down strategy and work their way out of the room they’re cleaning to keep footprints from spoiling freshly mopped floors and dust from settling in places they’ve already cleaned.
A clean rental means happy guests. Download our vacation rental cleaning checklist and share it with your cleaners to ensure your properties are always spotless.
Living rooms and common areas are where guests will spend a lot of their time, so odds are these spaces need a bit more attention than the rest of your property.
When cleaning the kitchen, not only do cleaners have to wipe down surfaces, but they also need to tidy the inside of drawers, cabinets, and the refrigerator.
Just remember that guests are hyper-sensitive to any missed areas in the kitchen—no one wants to prepare food in a dirty area.
While bathrooms are generally built with materials that are easy to wipe down, it’s important that your vacation rental cleaning checklist include specific checks for areas where dust or hair can easily accumulate.
Bedrooms are straightforward rooms to clean. But, while they may be less time-consuming, you still need to pay attention to detail.
Even the smallest stain on a sheet can stand out to guests and hurt your review score.
Although guests won’t spend a lot of time in utility rooms, these spaces should still be pristine.
Here’s a quick cleaning checklist for these types of rooms:
Don’t underestimate the importance of tidying your outdoor space if you have one.
Without a checklist, it’s very easy to miss out on key areas and create a poor impression.
A clean rental means happy guests. Download our vacation rental cleaning checklist and share it with your cleaners to ensure your properties are always spotless.
Having a plan and a rental cleaning checklist is only half the battle. If you’re going to succeed at your cleaning routine, you’ll need the right items to get the job done.
Here’s a list of cleaning products that we recommend adding to your vacation rental cleaning checklist:
It’s also a good idea to laminate your cleaning checklist template and keep it with your cleaning supplies, along with an inventory of your cleaning products.
That way, you or your cleaning team can easily keep track of the tasks they need to complete and note down if any cleaning items need to be replaced.
While turnover cleans are your biggest housekeeping responsibility, don’t forget about occasional additional cleaning tasks like deep cleans, cigarette smoke cleans, and mid-stay cleans.
Deep clean
During your off-season, either once a quarter or twice per year, you or your cleaners should conduct a deep clean and in-depth inspection of your property.
This is important to catch major maintenance issues before they occur, as well as keep your property in prime condition.
During a deep clean, inspect your HVAC system, steam clean your carpets, clean light fixtures, and air vents, inspect kitchen supplies and linens, and check the state of your electronic devices to ensure everything is functioning properly.
If you’re a non-smoking property, guests won’t want to smell it on arrival. If any guests break the house rules and smoke at your property, you’ll need a plan to eliminate the smell fast—before the next guests arrive.
One way to do so is with an ozone generator. But because these treatments can be costly, you should have a policy and extra cleaning fee in place to charge guests who smoke in violation of the rules at your property.
If you have guests staying for an extended period of time, a mid-stay clean is an excellent upsell opportunity.
You can use guest experience tools to automatically offer this service to your guests.
For example, Hostfully’s Digital Guidebooks have a marketplace section where you can upsell mid-stay cleans, extra linens, bed turndowns, etc. That way, you make it easy for guests to request a clean whenever they want and can boost your revenue.
Many hosts underestimate the time it takes to maintain a rental property, especially when there are frequent turnovers. High booking rates are a great problem to have, of course, but it can mean you struggle to keep up with all the administrative work—especially if you’re still at the stage where you’re handling maintenance and cleaning personally.
To be more efficient with your cleaning, create and document a repeatable, scalable process that you and your cleaners can follow. This can be centered around your cleaning checklist and include devices that help cut down on turnover time. The aim is to make it easy for cleaners to complete tasks quickly. Also, to easily onboard new cleaners.
We’ve also compiled a few devices that can help cut down on the time spent on turnovers:
When you manage vacation rentals, automation is a powerful tool to reduce workload, especially when you deal with numerous properties and frequent turnovers. So if you outsource your cleaners (or have hired in-house cleaning staff), here are a few tools you can use with the vacation rental cleaning checklist outlined above.
If you outsource to a cleaning contractor
With Hostfully’s property management system (PMS), you can create a profile for your cleaning contractor. Then, just copy-paste your cleaning checklist into a template and set up a trigger that sends the cleaner an email whenever a new reservation is generated in the PMS.
This helps contractors plan their schedule and, since each property is unique, you can also automatically share the checklist that corresponds to the unit in question.
Hostfully partners with vacation rental cleaning platforms like Breezeway, TurnoverBnB, Properly, Operto Teams, and EZcare. Have your cleaners use the mobile versions of these apps to streamline your cleaning processes and communications.
When you use one of these cleaning apps, they integrate with your PMS. That way, whenever a guest makes a new reservation, your cleaner will automatically get all the info and checklists they need for each unit.
Some of the cleaning apps mentioned above will create jobs/tasks if something in your vacation rental maintenance checklist is marked as needing attention (for example, if the cleaner finds the heater doesn’t work). If you don’t use a cleaning app, there’s also a simple hack to automatically get notified of issues.
Choose a PMS that integrates with Zapier, like Hostfully, and create a Google Sheet with the complete vacation rental cleaning checklist. Then, you can set up Zapier to alert you if one of the cells gets marked with anything other than a check.
Turnovers don’t have to be a source of stress. By following this vacation rental cleaning checklist, you can streamline your cleans and ensure your short-term rentals exceed guests’ expectations. In turn, you’ll see your host ratings on booking platforms rise thanks to glowing reviews from satisfied guests.
To optimize your vacation rental cleaning process, your next steps should be:
Because a clean vacation rental means happy guests, positive reviews, and repeat bookings.
