Vacation Rental Housekeeping: Tips for Hosts

It's your responsibility as a host to provide a clean, comfortable, and functional space for each of your guests. Moreover, travelers consider cleanliness one of the most critical factors and look for hotel-level cleaning standards when choosing a vacation rental property.

Just one negative review from an upset guest can damage your reputation and discourage future guests from booking with you, impacting your occupancy and revenue. That's why housekeeping and regular property maintenance are instrumental to bringing about the best guest experience and ensuring the success of vacation rentals.

Vacation Rental Housekeeping: How It Differs from Normal Housekeeping

Guests staying at vacation rentals expect the property to be impeccably clean and well-maintained, so it's crucial to complete turnover cleanings to ensure your rental space is spotless before guests check in.

Remember that vacation rental housekeeping is far more extensive than cleaning your home. Vacation rental cleaning requires more attention to detail and efficiency and involves more tasks. You must thoroughly clean all your STR property's rooms and outside areas. In addition to dusting, sweeping, mopping, and wiping down surfaces, you also have to change linens, replace towels, and stock your rental with toiletries and other essentials.

Since you welcome new groups of people to your vacation rental each week, keeping a closer eye on furniture and functionality is important. That includes assessing the property for damage, taking inventory, and performing regular appliance checks to ensure they are in excellent working order.

Adhering to high standards will allow you to provide your guests with spotlessly clean and well-maintained rental space and get more 5-star reviews that can help you win more bookings and become a successful host.

Managing short-term rentals is rather time-consuming, so savvy hosts use vacation rental software like Hospitable to automate repetitive daily tasks and improve operational efficiency. This way, you'll have more time to focus on tasks that require a personal touch, such as marketing your vacation rental on social media.

Vacation Rental Housekeeping: Best Practices

Whether you decide to do the work yourself or hire a service to handle it, you must ensure you seamlessly manage all housekeeping tasks. Here are some effective strategies that can help you streamline your operations, reduce costs, and increase guest satisfaction.

Use a cleaning checklist

Creating a well-structured vacation rental cleaning checklist is essential for maintaining consistency. It will help ensure that no task is overlooked and that the level of cleanliness and hygiene meets high standards.

You can share this checklist with your cleaners to ensure they follow the same process during each turnover. Remember that it's important to clearly outline tasks to be completed in each area of your home, including living spaces, bedrooms, bathrooms, the kitchen, the laundry, and your property's outdoor area.

You should also specify cleaning tasks such as dusting, mopping, vacuuming, sanitizing surfaces, changing linens, and checking for damages. Include a section for inventory checks to ensure that such essential supplies as toiletries, linens, and kitchen amenities are fully stocked.

You may download our professional vacation rental cleaning checklist if you're unsure what steps to include in your checklist. Use it as a template and make the necessary changes depending on the specifics of your STR property.

Create a maintenance checklist

Creating a maintenance checklist is another effective strategy that can help keep your vacation rental in good shape. It should cover all the areas and items that need regular inspection, repair, or replacement.

Consider including such common items as  HVAC, plumbing, lighting, locks, fire extinguishers, smoke detectors, doors, windows, walls, floors, and landscaping. A comprehensive maintenance checklist can help you prevent potential issues and avoid guest complaints.

Running basic maintenance checks before each new check-in lets you ensure the property is in perfect condition for your next guest. Such preventative measures can help extend the lifespan of your furniture and appliances and reduce overall maintenance costs.

When preparing your vacation rental property to welcome guests, it's always a good idea to invest in durable flooring, furniture, décor, and other items that are easy to clean and maintain. Download our guide on preparing your home for short-term rental and reducing operational costs.

Hire a professional cleaning service

Many hosts choose to clean their vacation rentals themselves to save money. But DIY cleaning only makes sense if you live locally close to your property and can afford to treat your vacation rental as a full-time job.

So, even if you enjoy cleaning and want to clean your rental, ask yourself an honest question: Do you have enough time to deep-clean the entire property between guests on an ever-changing schedule more than once a week? Maybe it's better to spend your time on other things. Besides, in high season, you may have to work with tight turnarounds, which can be very stressful.

Keeping up with housekeeping and maintenance tasks can be challenging, so seasoned hosts rely on paid professionals trained to do the job quickly and thoroughly. Professional vacation rental cleaners can handle all the aspects of preparing your property for the next guest, saving you time and effort.

Managing your cleaning crew won't be a problem if you opt for vacation rental software like Hospitable. You just need to set your own rules, and our system will assign tasks to your cleaners automatically based on your booking calendar.

Use vacation rental housekeeping apps

Since vacation rental housekeeping differs from residential housekeeping, looking for professionals with experience in cleaning short-term rentals like yours is important. Luckily, some apps can help you quickly find experienced housekeeping pros for your STR property.

Here, we list four housekeeping apps for vacation rentals with Hospitable integrations. They can help you find local housekeepers, assign tasks to specific providers, track the progress of housekeeping jobs, and pay for them. These apps also support uploading checklists and will share them with your contractors.

Turno gives vacation rental property owners and managers access to their online marketplace, where you can find vacation rental cleaners. Hosts can also automatically schedule turnovers, track records of completed jobs, and manage payments. Hospitable users can now get Turno's cleaning and turnover management software for free.

Cleanster.com allows US, UK, and Canadian hosts to easily book top-rated professional cleaners for their short-term rentals and pay for their services. Integrating your Hospitable account with Cleanster allows you to use this app for free. After you connect your Hospitable properties with Cleanster, the app will sync property and reservation data to automate scheduling cleanings upon checkouts.

ResortCleaning.com makes it easy to track your housekeeping team's progress as they complete the cleaning tasks and review them after they finish their jobs. If you connect your account on ResortCleaning.com to Hospitable, ResortCleaning will sync property and reservation data to automate scheduling cleanings upon checkout.

Breezeway allows vacation rental hosts to automate the heavy workload of scheduling property tasks, including cleaning, maintenance, inspection, and more, to ensure that each turnover is completed on time. Hospitable hosts can integrate their accounts with Breezeway to coordinate and communicate cleaning and maintenance at their properties and manage all tasks from one dashboard.

Final Thought

Taking care of your STR property involves a lot of work, but hiring reliable vacation rental housekeepers will allow you to achieve the level of cleanliness that can inspire guests to leave you great reviews and book again. And if you automate your housekeeping routine using Hospitable and vacation rental cleaning software, you can streamline your management processes and reduce your workload.