I’m surprised that with all of Airbnb’s guest pandering, they haven’t thought to add this as a section on the listing information. Or added it as a question, with a checklist of chores the guest was asked to do before check-out, to their guest review form. Seems like more important data to collect than whether there was a hairdryer or an iron.
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I also find it really strange wording when hosts tell guests to “Leave it as you found it”. If someone told me that, assuming it was quite clean when I arrived, I would think they wanted me to clean it from top to bottom, washing the floors, scrubbing the bathroom, taking down every cobweb, dusting, cleaning it fully for the next guests.
Yep, that’s what I had to start doing. It became more work to find and keep cleaners that did a good job. Now I get rave reviews about how clean my place is.
After the pandemic, I set up my account to have a day between bookings. It makes the turn-over much easier for me to work in to my daily life. October is usually. my busiest month so I allowed back-to-back booking and I’m exhausted. I’m going back to my day between bookings.
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I have very basic checkout rules:
-
Do not strip beds.
(This make it much easer to spot treat stains.) -
Leave any trash in a trash bin inside the suite.
-
Hang up wet towels on the hooks behind the bathroom door.
(Again, easier to spot stains and prevents guests from hanging wet towels on the poster bed, wood chairs or leaving them in a wet clump on the floor.) -
Turn off lights, fans and AC. (Many guests seem to ignore this request)
-
Shut the door to the suite and the front door.
(I’ve had many guest chuckle about this one, but a few times a month, guests really leave the doors wide open when they leave.
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Bravo, I could not agree more. I don’t mind doing a few tasks as a guest, such as taking our trash and certainly I wash and put away all dishes, but I ask nothing, nada, of my own guests.
When I book as a guest I now inquire as to what the check out instructions are and if they want me to strip the bed and start a load of laundry I move on.
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Don’t shoot me, but for my airbnb I only see upsides with the ‘cleaning fee / chores’ kerfluffle.
I do the cleaning myself of private rooms in my home, and I am onsite, so my ‘cleaning fee’ is tiny. It becomes an advantage when guests compare ultimate pricing when they choose a place; when other airbnb’s in the area need to hire cleaners to service their places; they SHOULD be paying fair market rates to the workers.
And heads up - ‘fair’ is what the workers want, not what the employers feel the workers will work for or need.
In the USA, at least, there has been a lot of public discourse about workers and what they ‘should’ get. Many businesses were taking advantage of workers by paying substandard wages (often making a job in the service sector part time so they did not have to make them full employees to keep from paying taxes etc on them). It was getting so that people were thinking that someone who does manual labor should be paid less, simply because of the perception that a desk job somehow is better, rather than rightly paying someone doing manual labor MORE since their job is harder.
As workers in the USA unionize and strike for more equitable wages and get what they deserve for jobs, healthcare, and benefits, I applaud the higher wages of cleaning people. Odd but specific hours to work should pay more than a set time, for example. And sorry not sorry all of you hosts who are trying to compete with me and getting blowback about ‘cleaning’ and ‘quality’ - the original model of airbnb works just fine for us ‘small scale’ folks. We survive and prosper not because we are ‘cheap’ but because we are BETTER…
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A good friend cleans her rental too. 2b/2b walk to beach rental. June 15-Aug 15 is peak season so she too changed from a blocked night between bookings to back to back. 10/15-2/28 are historically slow. She says the same as @Lynick4442 back to back bookings left her exhausted. She is grateful for a break. She’s enjoying the slower pace & closing to do some maintenance.
It’s Definitely not passive income
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Reminder all, that hotels have very strong publicity folks and many of the stories probably are fed by a hotel chain’s PR - because this is really not ‘news’.
When was the last time you saw a story about complaints about parking fees, resort fees, etc being ‘too high’/
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I agree to this as well.
If a guest wants a hotel experience, well then, book a hotel.
Yes, and in some ways all publicity is good publicity. Despite all these negative stories for years, Airbnb bookings continue to climb.
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Really, the cleaning fee debate is more an issue for entire house listings than homeshares. Homeshares are generally private room listings (even though you might have 3 rooms), with maybe a private bathroom, not a lot of space to clean or mountains of laundry per booking. And while some may employ cleaners, many of us do our own cleaning (even though I have a cleaner who comes once every 2 weeks for 4 hours to do the rest of the house, I always do the guest room and bathroom myself for paying guests).
I’ve never had a cleaning fee and kept it from being a burn-out situation for me by having a 3 day minimum, and in fact my location is such that most of my guests stay for an average of 10 days. As it takes me an hour and a half- 2 hrs to do the cleaning, depending on whether it’s time to wash windows, get the ladder to clean the ceiling fan, take down the curtains and wash them, etc, a 10 day booking amounts to 10-15 minutes cleaning per day. I don’t need to charge a cleaning fee for that.
If I lived somewhere that one or two night bookings were my bread and butter, I’d probably charge a small cleaning fee like you do, or just raise my nightly price by a few bucks.
But guests don’t complain about $15 cleaning fees. They complain when there’s a $150 cleaning fee and they are asked to strip beds and start a load of wash.
We do our own cleaning, but occasionally, when we are out of town, etc, we enlist a crew that charges a flat fee based on the square footage.
In our area, especially during high season, the cleaners have multiple jobs on turnover days. So they can’t spend 4 hours somewhere.
The high season here is monthly. Almost every rental has people leaving the last day of the month and coming in the next day. So the homes are empty about 28 hours. A cleaning crew of 3 people can have 8 to 10 houses in that time. They just don’t have the time to spend waiting for the dishwasher or dryer to finish. I’m not sure what hosts that don’t live in the area do. We tend to go early to start the dishwasher and laundry and then come back later to finish the laundry a few hours after the cleaners are finished.
One of our yearly guests tend to have the grandchildren come visit their last weekend here, and the laundry (and dirt) quadruples. I looked into have a cleaning crew come twice, once the afternoon they leave and again the next morning before the next folks come in to pick up any dirt they didn’t get to but alas, no extra cleaning crews to be had. So my husband and I do the after cleaning. (Under the cushions, under the beds, all the nooks and crannies…)
What I meant is that I don’t understand why cleaners, (or anyone in any business, for that matter), needs to take on more jobs than they can handle. If one host needs them for 4 hrs worth of cleaning at a turnover, why wouldn’t they take on one less house that requires 2 hrs of cleaning? It’s the same pay for them, and they would have one less house to drive to.
In my upholstery business, if I’m swamped with work and a new client asks me to do a project for them, I tell them honestly that I can’t for awhile. I can put them on a waiting list and get to it in a month, or two, but not have something done for them in 2 weeks.
I’m certainly not going to stay up til midnight rushing through the stuff that’s already on my plate so I can get to their project in two weeks.
If they take one less client during high season they have one less client during the rest of the year. And that one client is no longer once a month but twice a week. During the rest of the year we have a three day minimum, and some have less. Calls for turnovers can be any day of the week, so they usually only have one a day. So dropping a client during high season so they could do one continuous 4 hour cleaning would impact their earning through the rest of the year.
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We are in competition with local hotels who don’t charge a cleaning fee nor do they ask guests to clean up after themselves. I can’t tell you how many guests have expressed their appreciation that we don’t charge a cleaning fee! We just raised the price to cover any expenses - as hotels do.
Great list, but I also ask them NOT to wash the dishes or run dishwasher. We are in a drought in California and often I have to rewash pots, pans, wine glasses, etc. due to poor cleaning. Often guests think starting the dishwasher is a help, but when it only has 2 cups, 2 plates, and 4 spoons - the answer is the power and water is a huge waste for me.
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I don’t have a sink in the kitchenette and I don’t want folks to wash their dishes in the bathroom sink. When I first opened up my STR I provided real dishwater and a busing bucket and just asked guest to leave the dirty dishes at the bottom of the stairs by the door each monring so that I could clean them and give them a new set. Most guests never did this and I ended up with food-encrusted dishes 4 days later and concerns about bugs.
I had to switch to paper and plastic ware. I bother me to be wasteful but I solar heating/hot water and try to buy recycled paper and do provide TP made from bamboo.