"In an Airbnb, what are the most important things to clean on a regular basis?"
Those are great questions and we're going to talk about that today.
Hi there, I'm Angela Brown, and this is Ask A House Cleaner.
This is a show where you get to ask a house cleaning question
and I get to help you find an answer.
Today's show is brought to us by MyCleaningConnection.com
which has a bunch of resources, free articles,
blogs, podcasts, uniforms, products, a bunch of stuff for cleaning.
So, if you own an Airbnb this is a great place for you to go and find some resources that
will help you with your information about cleaning and keeping a tidy place so that
customers will come and they will just love being there and they will leave you some great
ratings and reviews.
Okay, on to today's question, which is from a new Airbnb owner.
They want to know, "What cleaning tasks or chores should I do on an everyday basis in
order to keep my place up to par in a competitive marketplace?"
That's an excellent question and the answer is, when a customer first arrives at your
Airbnb, what is it that they're going to see?
They're going to see the outside of your house.
So even before we talk about house cleaning, we want to talk about the curb appeal of your place.
The first image, or the first impression that they have, is probably going to affect their
rating and review for you.
So if ratings and reviews are what drive your business, and in fact it is, you want to make
sure that you are not only priced correctly, and that you have a good location and that
people love their stay there, and they're comfortable,
but also that you have great curb appeal.
So very first and foremost, what does the outside of your place look like?
Is it clean, is it tidy, is it well landscaped, have you done mowing, have you pulled weeds
out of the natural areas or the flower beds, or things like that.
That would be the very first place that I'd start.
The next thing that I want to talk about are clean windows.
We don't clean windows as house cleaning companies for the most part, we hire that out to house
cleaners, but the clean windows of your house are incredibly important, both from the outside
and the inside.
When you can look all the way through a house and the windows sparkle, it makes everything
look a little bit cleaner.
So you want to make sure the outside of the property looks spectacular.
You want to make sure the windows are clean.
As a person enters your house, what do they see?
It's the entryway of your home.
And so when people come into the entryway if it's cluttered with shoes and coats and
hats, and things that are in the entryway, that also leaves an impression.
You want to create an inviting space that is the entryway of your home.
If you don't wear shoes inside your home this is a great chance for you to encourage your
guests to take off their shoes.
What you may want to do is have a little area that has a fancy little bench and a little
place for shoes and a little mat.
Make it cozy so that you want to enter that space, and then take off your shoes and get
settled and get comfortable.
That's the inviting entryway into the home.
Then what do they have access to?
Do they go straight up a flight of stairs and they go to a room?
Or do they have access to the living area and maybe the refrigerator or the kitchen?
If they have access to the kitchen of your home you want to make sure that no matter
what happens, your kitchen is clean.
As long as you have guests you want the kitchen to be clean.
Because they will be coming inside the kitchen and they will be getting stuff out of the
fridge or putting stuff in the fridge, if that is part of the offer that you have.
So your kitchen needs to be tidy.
You don't want extra mail left on the countertops, you don't want shopping bags and stuff that
you've brought in from outside, you don't want toys and stuff that may have drifted
in from outside in the backyard or whatever in the kitchen.
You want all that stuff cleared out.
So that when the guest comes into the kitchen they feel like, "Ahhh, what a relaxing event."
Because, when people come stay at Airbnb's, it's not because they want to come clean house.
They're there because they want to relax and they want an enjoyable experience.
So as you walk into your kitchen, is it an enjoyable experience?
You might want to jazz it up a little bit with some candles, or maybe some fun little
decorative ornaments, or something that's just, "Welcome to our space."
There are a bunch of little signs that say, "Live, Laugh, Love", "Welcome", "Happiness",
stuff like that.
Those are fun, make you feel good kind of things.
And you can get all kinds of ideas from Pinterest on how to decorate that inviting space.
Clean, clean, clean, clean is super important.
It's little things like the toaster, you don't want crumbs coming out of the toaster and
all over the counter.
You don't want stuff stuck on the insides of the microwave.
And if the guests have access to the refrigerator you want to make sure that when they open
the refrigerator there's not stuff stuck inside the doors and inside the little shelves in the doors.
You want to make sure everything is wiped down and tidy and that you maintain that literally
on a daily basis.
Wipe down anything that may have spilled or leaked, because if they come to this inviting
space and they open up the fridge and there's stuff leaking down the side of your fridge,
it changes how they feel about that inviting space.
All right, another thing that's super important, before we get to the bedrooms, are the bathrooms.
The bathrooms are really important because they're going to be getting dressed every
day in there.
When they plug their curling iron into the outlet, you want to make sure that the outlet
is working.
You want to make sure that all of the electrical outlets are working.
And you want to make sure that the tub is scrubbed out every single day.
You don't want yesterdays or last week's residue at the bottom of the tub.
If you have glass shower doors you want to wipe those down, literally with a squeegee
and then you want to wipe the corners where the squeegee doesn't get.
You want to make sure that everything is just spic and span, because how they feel about
your bathroom shows up in your ratings and reviews.
That's where they're going to spend a lot of their time, you want to make sure that is perfection.
All right now, the living space, whether it's a living room or a sitting room, you want
to make sure that that's always tidy.
You can make it comfortable but tidy.
The bedroom itself, you want to make sure that you change the linens every day.
Unless you have a stay over, which is two or three or four day stay and they've agreed
that the linens are okay for you to just wash them when they arrive and then when you leave.
But if you have new guests coming in every day you want to wash all of the linens every day.
That's the towels and the bedsheets, and that's just for sanitary reasons.
Here's a secret, if you'll grab either some kind of a dust mop and you will clean underneath
the beds, that also contributes a lot because you're not going to have hair and dust mites
and things like that from other guests that have fallen below the bed that are just left there.
So you want to make sure you really clean that out.
So beyond a top to bottom just sweep of the whole house every day, once the house is tidy
and it's really immaculate, you want to go over the areas where the guests will be every single day.
I say that because even if there are spots inside the bathroom sink, even if water just
dried there, when they walk in that's the first impression.
They're going to see that and go, "Oh, they didn't clean up since the last person."
"Yeah we did, we came in and we wiped it out."
It's not hard if you do it every day.
Literally, you're going to spray maybe one paper towel or get a damp microfiber cloth
and you can wipe all the vanity and the sinks and the edges of everything down so that it
looks really nice and shiny.
How the customer feels when they come into your Airbnb is what makes all the difference
in the ratings and reviews.
Give that some serious thought from the outside of the place, all the way into where they
will be spending their most amount of time at your place, because that is what they turn
around and tell all of their friends and tell the world on places like Yelp and Trip Advisor.
Alrighty, that's my two cents for today.
And until we meet again,
leave the world a cleaner place than when you found it.
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