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Our cleaners do a great job of cleaning. As in everything is very clean. No crumbs, no hair, no grease. Restocking and setting up does not come as naturally. We have pictures and a check list, but on my walk thru I always find something.
My husband would like to travel, which would not work as long as I’m doing the walk thru. I enlisted family members, but we really would love to just trust the cleaners, so we’ve been training.
On my most recent walk-thru I thought they did great. The right number of towels were display out and displayed correctly. All beds were made with the right sheets and comforters and throw pillows. The bathrooms amenities were all there and set out nicely. The coffee was refilled. All the open food was gone. The dishwasher was empty. The refrigerator was cleaned out and wiped down. The empty garbage cans had new bags in them.
The only thing I found was the TP on the roll was not new. Not close to empty, and all the extras were in the bathrooms under the sink, but the one on the roll was not an unused one.
Same with the soft soaps. All were over half filled, but not fully filled or new. And the paper towels were about 2/3 a roll.
I fixed all these, but did come home to my husband and said I wouldn’t have been horrified if the house looked like that when guests showed up. He disagreed. What do you all think. What is good enough?
This is always subjective for each business owner – where you want to set the line. My wife and I have a saying with the Airbnb: “Good enough” is Not. Good. Enough.
We also have another saying (well, not really a “saying”): “If we were as perfectionist in our own living space as we are in the Airbnb, our family would hold an intervention that would end with us in a padded cell,”
Every one of the things you caught that your cleaners missed are on our list as well. New rolls for TM and towels, every liquid soap (and spray cleaner) not only filled to the brim, but rinsed and buffed so it feels like it’s brand new off the store shelf. None of it should feel like the guest is stepping into someone else’s space and someone else’s leftovers.
From the number of times I’ve heard a guest volunteer an “It’s so clean” five minutes after they arrive it’s clear to me that Airbnb travellers do fret and do hope that each new destination will be “one of the clean ones.” If they are going to a Four Seasons Hotel or a Fairmont they take the cleanliness for granted, with an Airbnb, they never know until they get there.
As hosts, we are judged (in writing and online) about whether our place is reassuringly clean, and your cleaners are not. (They may be judged by you, but that is different than being judged by the marketplace, because the reputation is ours, not theirs.)
In the end, all I can really say is this: if you are worried about being a hosting overachiever, you’re not alone.
The things you mention that they did not do aren’t things I would be horrified about, but I would certainly be highly irritated that the cleaners cannot follow the checklist in its entirety- they are simple things to do. And I agree with you that leaving half used items does not come across well. And could affect reviews, even though it’s not like there was no soap, tp and paper towels missing from the place, because it makes it feel like guests are being given someone else’s leftovers.
It doesn’t seem worth it to pay anyone else to come over just to check that those things have been done, so it seems you either need to have a serious talk with your cleaners, or maybe better still hire a friend or rellie to actually do all those restocking chores and pay the cleaners for less time.
Are you sure you are giving the cleaners enough time to do all that, though? It seems they did make an effort to get some of the list done- maybe they just need another 15 min. of time to accomplish all of it. Finding cleaners who actually clean thoroughly, as you say yours do, can be hard to find, so I’d try to come up with a solution which doesn’t mean you end up losing them or never being able to get away yourself.
Like you, I have a very high standard that includes things like a new roll of TP on the holder. However, I don’t refill the liquid soap each time, I just make sure there’s enough for the next guest if it’s not full.
Based on staying in Airbnbs that are all rated 4.8 something, and usually above 4.95, I’d say that your cleaner is doing fine and you should do some traveling. Ask yourself…at the end of your life will you regret not traveling more or those three 4 star reviews from an overly picky guest?
After I reopened after the pandemic, I had trouble getting reliable cleaners and decided to do the cleaning myself. I also lost my backup-host when I travelled. I decided that it wasn’t worth stressing over so I close my STR when I travel. I try to schedule my trips during my slow season so I’m not losing too much revenue. It’s made hosting and relying on cleaners so much less stressful.
I too prefer everything to be topped off or unused. It makes a good first impression. I do think it’s unfair to expect the cleaners to clean and also set up, unless you’re paying them extra for their time.
I know that the hotel maids restock and set up but they are also full time employees that get medical insurance, unemployment benefits and hopefully some type of pension plan.
House cleaners usually want to be in and out as quickly as possible because they usually clean 4 to 6 places a day.
This house cleaning service does exclusively STR. I know some of my competitors use them and don’t do an inspection. I also hear from my guests that they are surprised the house looks so good when they show up.
I understand exactly what you are saying. My standard is the nice hotels I’ve been fortunate enough to stay at, but for that level of service I need to go back in after the housekeepers have left and work another 20-30 minutes. This is for a 1 bedroom cottage with patio. This includes things like shampooing the rugs if the vacuum didn’t suffice.
My current plan for when I travel is: Change to a better housekeeping company I just found out about; increase the time and/or the number of housekeepers and increase their pay accordingly; and provide a check list with pen that must be checked off and delivered to me with all boxes checked.
I will simply make less money when I’m on the road because I’ll be paying for a higher level of housekeeping service. And I’m not going to worry while I’m gone.
BTW as an AirBnB guest the most common lapse is burned out or missing light bulbs, even at a clean place. Hosts and housekeepers enter during daylight hours and nobody checks lighting.
As guests (we’re staying AirBnB next week) we now walk into an AirBnB and do an inspection before we bring our luggage through the door–is it clean, do sheets look fresh, is there hot water, do important lamps work, is the fridge reasonably clean on the inside, does the wifi work. And if anything is too off we are complaining and/or leaving.
I’ve stayed at rural roadside chain hotels with similar amounts of dust and carpet stains as I’ve seen in AirBnBs. But for my own property I want it to sparkle–that level of clean is not acceptable.
The checking all bulbs is a good point. When I got to the house there was no electricity. And all I could think was damn, I have to come back to check the TVs and light bulbs. Luckily the electricity clicked on just before I left.
In my case, my soap dispensers aren’t clear so a guest can’t see if they are full. I don’t want them to feel empty but they don’t need to be topped off. If I had one of those wall mounted dispensers with the clear canisters I’d probably make sure they were close to full and all at the same level, whatever level that was.
It might be a location thing, but I do not put a brand new TP roll or Paper Towel roll for each guest. I also don’t put fully-filled hand soap or shampoo/conditioner. (Granted, I use Costco-size shampoo and conditioner, with a brand new one of each under the bathroom sinks, just in case.) If the rolls are less than half, I do put a new one out. And they have plenty of new rolls in the bathroom drawer.
That said, I CONSISTENTLY get reviews saying that our place is SUPER clean, and no one has ever mentioned not getting brand new TP or paper towel rolls or soaps filled up (over 100 reviews). So, I truly don’t know how big of a deal that is. As far as everything else you said, I have the same issues as you when trying to find a cleaner. Nobody makes it look as good as my husband and I do (except for my good friend, who does it for us in a bind, but definitely does not want to do it full time!). My question is: what do you do with all the partly used rolls?
same, we buy very large bottle of boujie s/c and I monitor them, wipe them down etc. Once they get down to about 20% we put them our own house.
hahaha, FACTS. Hubby opened a brand new roll of TP yesterday and i was “wtf are you doing?” and pointed to the collection of rolls on top of the vanity mirror. We’ve got bottles of nearly finished hand lotion in every room of the house!
It’s my opinion there are very few cleaners who can be trusted to double check their own work properly. To their credit, ceaning is a hard job and can be exhausting so I’d imagine in the last 30min when they should be double checking the checklist, they kind of rush it through so they can get out and go to the next job.
So what’s my solution? Well there’s no easy clear cut answer. First off I give people many chances because we all make mistakes. After a while if someone has a consistent problem with not being able to follow the checklist, I let them go. A couple of cleaners I let go after the first clean because I could tell their standards were too low.
As for how I know if they followed the checklist or not, I have what’s called a Quality Assurance personel go in and check on the cleaners work. They fill out a form which is similar to the checklist. I pay them $50. Where do I find the QA? They are the cleaners themselves. But obviously not the one that did the most recent clean. I just rotate who plays the QA role. Since I live long distance I consider it an absolute must to have the cleaners work checked up on about once every three cleavers or so by random chance. I’d imagine it’s the same thing for any hotel with high standards. They will give the cleaners the benefit of the doubt most of the time but occasionally they will have someone (maybe another cleaner) double check the work of the rooms they cleaned. It would be insane not to.
I can’t imagine most guests would give it a thought and if they did, they certainly wouldn’t mark down stars for it. In marketing things like visibly topped off soaps or a new roll of TP are having a subliminal effect which is a commonly used strategy in advertising.
I started using new rolls of TP after coming here to the forum. Several hosts talked about washing everything on the bed after every stay. At the time I was using the puffy US style comforter that I already had in the guest room. It’s impractical to launder it often. Like others here I was thinking that the comforter wasn’t being slept on and didn’t need to be laundered each time. But after having guests and reading many arguments here, I became convinced that the top layer (duvet cover, quilt, etc) was the thing that most needed to be laundered after the pillowcase.
Same for TP. Thinking about someone’s hand removing fecal matter with the same hand they use to touch the TP roll seemed like a good argument for having an untouched roll. I’d even started buying individually wrapped rolls online before the pandemic. Then the pandemic hit and we didn’t know how the virus was spreading. Through the sewer was one suspect at the same time that Airbnb installed new cleaning standards.
Lest anyone think TP is being wasted, it’s not. I use it in my part of the house.
The only location I find relevant here is the location of the guest’s hand adjacent to their toilet paper use. LOL.
The problem with most of the cleaners I have hired is they are stretched too thin. They are in a hurry to move on to the next job. I am in an area with a lot of STR’s and the cleaning crews take on too much work.
I did find a great cleaning couple, they are mostly retired and have their own STR so they get it. Unfortunately one of them has developed an allergy and the DR said no chemicals/cleaning for six weeks while they try and figure it out.
So this month I am doing it all myself, with more than a few same day turnovers, oh well.
Nobody cares like we do, in the end I am always satisfied when I do it myself as I know I am getting stuff that the cleaners would likely miss.
We buy toilet paper and boxed facial tissues from a janitorial supply company in the US. MUCH cheaper than anywhere else we’ve tried. Toilet paper is a case of rolls from 40-some to 80-some, depending on the size. Each roll is individually wrapped.
Like others, we use the partial rolls in our own bathroom. We put a new one, wrapped, on the dispenser. We stack two new ones, wrapped, on the back of the toilet in each guest bath. Since we’re home-share hosts, we can always give the guests more if they run low.
As for facial tissues, we have a different tissue box cover in each bath. No one sees the brand name and probably never gives it a thought. The brands we buy would probably be unfamiliar, even to US guests.
This picture shows the copper tissue box on the counter, a new toilet paper roll hanging, and two extra rolls on the back of the toilet in our red glass bathroom.
