How to Boost Your Vacation Rental Cleaning and Guest Experience

The cleanliness of a B&B is one of the most important parts that guests care about, and cleaning is a particularly tricky part of vacation rental management – you have to notify the cleaners in time to ensure that the cleaning is completed before new guests check in; you also have to check the completion of the cleaning tasks to avoid bad reviews by the guests for incomplete cleaning; you will also need to keep all cleaning records in order to regularly bill your cleaning staff for their work.

When you run several listings at the same time, you must be well aware of how much effort and time this task requires.

That’s why truly efficient vacation rental hosts automate their work as much as possible.

5 benefits of automating your vacation rental cleaning tasks

Automating cleaner management brings major benefits to you as a short-term rental host. One of our users called it a “no-brainer,” and another said it was “invaluable” for running her business remotely. 

But exactly how does it help? Here are five major ways:

1. Save time and effort

A major benefit to automating short-term rental cleaning is the significant time, stress, and effort you’ll save on what would otherwise be a manual, anxiety-ridden process. 

Whether you’re managing short-term rental cleaning via text, email, or hard-to-read spreadsheets, trying to coordinate everything manually is a recipe for disaster. 

Without automation, you’re forced to stay glued to your phone or laptop to check for any last-minute issues or bookings, verify when guests have checked out, and follow up to see if the cleaning has been done as planned. 

Instead, using an automation app means cleaning updates are sent automatically and scheduled and timed to bookings without any stress. No more typing out messages hoping your cleaner will see them in time, panicking in the event of last-minute bookings, or manual follow-ups. 

As one of our users, Koa Kalamau, a host in Honolulu, said: “You don’t know how much time you’re wasting until you stop wasting it.”

2. Avoid mistakes

Automation not only saves time: automatically sending alerts and scheduling cleans practically eliminates the risk of human error overnight—and lets you breathe a sigh of relief, too.

Automation times everything to your booking calendar and sends cleaners real-time alerts, and you can easily check that cleans have been done via the app.

All this means there’s very little risk of messages being missed, no late turnarounds, and no guests accidentally turning up to a dirty space (the fastest way to get a terrible review!).

3. Manage your rental better, remotely

Automating cleaning coordination makes it far easier to run your vacation rental remotely. 

With everything set up to run automatically and according to schedule, there’s no risk of you missing a message due to being in a different time zone or out of state or country. 

Connecting your rentals to smart lock keyless access also means that cleaners and guests can come and go without you needing to be there to welcome them or collect and hand over keys. That keeps your rentals secure while also alleviating worries about people getting locked out or losing keys.

Automated management also contacts cleaners automatically, so even if you’re managing your business from a distance or as a side hustle, you can relax knowing that everything is running smoothly in the background without you.

4. Improve team coordination and communication

Because automation makes sure that cleaners receive consistent, predictable, and timely messages, it vastly improves staff communication and coordination. This gives team members ample time to check their schedules and removes the panic of last-minute bookings as much as possible.

Clear time communication also helps cleaners better manage their time and reduces their stress, so they’re likely to be happier, respect you more, want to stick around in the long term, and do a better job overall. 

When staff knows that cleaning requests come in automatically through an app, they’ll feel confident they aren’t missing anything, leaving them free to do a good job whenever they’re needed. 

5. Scale your business without extra work

Automating your short-term rental cleaning not only makes quick turnovers possible with one short-term rental—but also enables you to roll out the same system across multiple units without taking up more hours of your time.

Without automation, more rentals mean more stress and more complexity in coordinating increased check-ins and check-outs, especially if you’re managing everything manually. 

Instead, with automation, you can set up the same system for each of your rentals as your business expands (whether you’re growing to two rentals, 20, or more!). 

Long story short: with automation, more properties to clean don’t have to mean more work for you.

How to automate your vacation rental cleaning?

With an automated management platform like Hostex, you no longer need to manually track each guest’s check-in and -out, the automated scheduling features will automatically notify the housekeeper to clean the assigned room while a guest leaving, and the housekeeper will send you photos via hostex after completing the task as specified, and the system will automatically record each cleaning task, so you can see it at a glance when billing.

Let’s look at how to do it. Hostex.io makes the process straightforward.

Step 1. Give your cleaners access to your calendar

Give your cleaners access to your calendar so they can see the bookings schedule and get notified in case any changes happen. That means cleaning team members can take charge of their own schedules, aren’t waiting on you to communicate every change as it comes up, and can plan their work in advance.

1. Go to the Tasks section in the Dashboard.
2. Click the ≡ button in the upper right corner and select Members.
3. Click the + button to add a New Cleaner.
4. Fill in the cleaner’s info and select the properties he/she is responsible for.

Note: The cleaner does not need to accept an invitation to join the team.

Step 2. Schedule your cleaning tasks automatically

The cleanings will be scheduled automatically whenever a guest is due to check out or a new one is set to check-in.

1. Click on Automatically Assign Tasks in the Dashboard.
2. Click the + button in the upper right corner to create a new task rule.
3. Select the timing you want to trigger the task.
4. Fill in the rule details and click Save.
5. The system will automatically send the cleaning tasks to the cleaners’ Emails according to your settings.

You can also assign cleaning tasks for your cleaners using manual or automatic methods via Hostex.

1. Go to the Tasks section in the Dashboard.
2. Click the + button in the upper right corner to create a new task.
3. Fill in the task details and click Save.
4. The cleaners will receive the cleaning task via email.

How Can I Check the Report of Cleaning Tasks?

All cleaning tasks are displayed in the Tasks list. Here you can see the tasks scheduled for each day and their statuses.

You can also check the statistics for cleaning tasks and cleaning fees.

Conclusion

Automated Cleaning is a great way to streamline short-term rental management and keep your guests happy.

Hostex offers many other automated features such as an automatic check-in guide, automatic reviews, automatic messaging, and automatic price changes, and we’re constantly exploring more possibilities in this area to make short-term rental management a real piece of cake!