Hi everyone,
What’s the most painful part of hosting for you? Are there any parts that you don’t enjoy or find particularly difficult?
Constantly cleaning the house.
5 Likes
Cleaning. Especially toilets, yuck
1 Like
Exactly. The hardest part of hosting for me is that it is far more time consuming than I thought it would be.
4 Likes
How much time do you think you spend? I heard that most homeowners are spending 10 hours/week!
cleaning take the most time
Except that very little to do
Drying sheets, lots of rain in ireland,
6 Likes
That’s really not a question that can be answered. If I have a week of one night, back-to-back guests, that’s obviously going to mean a lot more work than if I have one guest for the entire week.
Why the exclamation mark? Did you think that hosting should take less than ten hours a week?
5 Likes
I guess it depends. If people are hosting as their full-time job, 10 hours is fantastic! Otherwise, it seems like a lot—especially if your time is worth a lot.
10 hours a week seem like a lot for 1 unit.
I don’t know how some of you guys DIY on the cleaning. I couldn’t stomach cleaning the washroom after someone else.
Money 
I clean more cheaply and better than a cleaning service. Plus I know I am reliable and I have a couple of back-up people if I was every unavailable. But yes, cleaning even my own bathroom is a horrible job, let alone the rental!
11 Likes
If it wasn’t for ABB, my house would be perpetually messy. I do always worry that I’m not cleaning spotlessly! And I despise cleaning, it seems like such a waste of my time for the little I get for a private room/bathroom.
3 Likes
We spend 3 to 5 hours after each guest. We allow stays of as short as one day. Last month we had 6 back to back one day stays. Also we deep clean the kitchen weekly, vacuum all the floors and dust the furniture at least twice a week. Before we started hosting, nobody would have confused me with Martha Stewart.
I wonder why you asked the question only to be shocked at the answer.
2 Likes
We are the same and most of our guests have one-, two- or three-day stays. So in an average week, I could spend up to thirty five hours cleaning and prepping (full apartment with patio and dock).
Then there’s laundry, shopping for supplies (buying online isn’t always the most frugal way to go when you’ve got your eye on the bottom line), organising handymen/repairs, answering pre-booking queries, answering queries from current guests, bulk buying, storing the bulk buys, writing reviews, adjusting the calendar, adjusting the listing copy…
6 Likes
Fair. I cringed as I paid our monthly cleaning bill this afternoon 
We live pretty organized and clean lives, with or without ABB. As in bed made in the AM, dishes always put away, kitchen wiped down after every use, etc. However, I just can’t do the toilet! Even for my hubs and me, its like instant gag relfex. We charge a cleaning fee that is exactly what we pay our house keepers, I guess I could recoup that $$ doing it myself, but I think I’m OK with just writing it off.
That’s what men are for. (In our household anyway!) After all, it’s men who muck it up and therefore men should clean it 
3 Likes
HAHAHAH. So, I’m married to a Swedish Engineer, do you know how long it would take him to clean a toilet? He would need to devise a plan, possible schematic of how the toilet is laid out, then research the proper method for cleaning the toilet, make sure the supplies we had were up to his standard, blah blah blah…2 hours later my toilet MAY be cleaned.
14 Likes
Our cleaning takes 2-4 hours for each change-over - it varies widely based on how many days the people have stayed, and how much cooking they did.
However, my least favorite is this - I tell the 3 young guys from Denmark - all armed with iphones, educated, middle class or better - that the name of the metro station is Prince George Plaza Metro and it’s 2 miles west. They leave, then 2 seconds later, message me to say “what’s the address”? It would take them much less time to just google it - why do they ask me? The information is right in their hands. Someone mentioned on another thread that YOUNG people are more proficient at the internet and to that I say HA! Most of my young guests can’t find their way out of a paper bag…
THAT is the part I like the least about hosting - I enjoy helping them with travel plans or reviewing the map, but then being expected to answer every little question when the answer is right there in their hands…
rant over…
5 Likes
Actually cleaning the bathroom is less of an hassle than I thought it would be. I do mostly 3-nights stays and most of the time, water spots on the chrome fixtures is the only sign that someone actually used the bathroom. It is even rare that I find hair in the drain.
Like @jaquo I would not trust a cleaning service to do the job as well as I do it myself.
1 Like