Managing Airbnb remotely gives you the freedom to lead a digital nomad lifestyle and work online wherever on earth you are. However, being physically away from your property has many complications.
As an Airbnb host, ensuring the cleanliness and hygiene of your property is of utmost importance. Cleanliness not only contributes to guest satisfaction but also plays a crucial role in maintaining a positive reputation and receiving glowing reviews.
In today’s digital age, remote monitoring has become a valuable tool for hosts to maintain a spotless property and provide guests with a safe and enjoyable experience. In this blog, we will explore how you can remotely monitor your Airbnb’s cleanliness and hygiene effectively.
Opting for a property manager may seem like the simplest solution to alleviate the burden of cleaning management. However, numerous vacation rental managers opt for the do-it-yourself (DIY) approach, aiming to maximise their profits.
Fortunately, the expansion of the vacation rental market has ushered in a plethora of solutions that empower rental managers to effectively oversee their Airbnb’s cleanliness from a distance. These tools not only enable managers to meet but also surpass their guests’ cleanliness expectations and hygiene standards.
Table of Contents
1. Contract a Professional Vacation Rental Cleaning Service
The first and foremost important step to manage your vacation rental’s cleanliness remotely is finding the right cleaners close to your property. Hiring a top-tier local cleaner is pivotal to maintaining consistent cleanliness levels for every guest.
As you work and gradually build a relationship with the same reliable person, their dedication to you and their role assures that your property is in capable hands. Moreover, when you’re managing your rentals from afar, having a professional on-site to handle routine turnovers and assist with any guest issues is essential for a seamless vacation rental experience.
However, collaborating with local housekeepers does bring about several concerns. These cleaners may not always be available when required, and securing a substitute cleaner can prove challenging. Furthermore, identifying a reliable, skilled cleaner from afar can be a daunting task. While you can access a list of local vacation rental cleaners in your area, making the right choice can be perplexing.
Working with the wrong person will end in revenue loss and severe damages to your property’s image. Therefore, vacation rental managers should rather work with professional housekeeping services who can meet vacation rental standards better than individual cleaners. Read our post 9 reasons why every host needs a professional housekeeping service for further details.
MaidThis, Handy, Airtasker, Doinn, and GuestPrep are among the many vacation rental cleaning services for vacation rentals you can look into in your area.
Double-Check Your Vacation Rental Cleaners’ Work Remotely
As you won’t be present to observe your housekeepers’ work, you must devise a system to motivate your cleaners to maintain your high cleaning standards.
- Find a way to reward your cleaning staff. For instance, you can pay your staff a base fee for each clean of property and pay them a bonus for the five-star cleanliness reviews that you receive.
- Share your guest reviews with your cleaners. Reading negative and positive reviews will keep your cleaners engaged and encourage them to keep your property immaculate.
- Use a cleaning checklist to make your housekeeping service follow your procedure. Ask your cleaners to follow your cleaning checklist and send you pictures to show you their work status to ensure nothing is missed.
Check out our Ultimate Vacation Rental Cleaning Checklist for a perfect and hassle-free cleaning routine.
2. Use Cleaning Apps for Vacation Rentals
In addition to hiring a professional cleaning service, it’s vital to automate and streamline your cleaning processes, especially when managing multiple turnovers remotely. Manual handling is time-consuming and prone to errors. Therefore, investing in tailored automation tools for the vacation rental industry is essential to efficiently manage consistent cleanings, track housekeeping tasks, and schedule rapid turnovers.
Cleaning apps and digital checklists offer powerful tools to streamline the cleaning process for your vacation rental, particularly when managing it remotely. These versatile tools empower you to create comprehensive cleaning checklists for your cleaning staff, allowing them to mark completed tasks, upload photos, and promptly report any maintenance issues directly through the app.
The beauty of these apps is that you can access reports remotely, ensuring that each cleaning task aligns with your exacting standards. Additionally, vacation rental cleaning apps are invaluable in overseeing short-term rental cleans from a distance. They facilitate efficient scheduling of cleaning tasks, enable you to verify the quality of turnovers, and help you discover local cleaning companies available for hire.
Properly
Renowned for its photo integration, Properly assists in remote cleaning inspections. You can capture photos and add notes to highlight specific areas that need attention or re-cleaning. Properly serves as a comprehensive quality management solution and offers a global network of service providers for property owners and small managers.
Turno
A helpful tool for finding Airbnb vacation rental cleaners and cleaning services, Turno integrates with major OTAs and syncs booking calendars from various platforms into a central hub. This Airbnb cleaning app automates cleaning scheduling, assignment delegation, and acceptance. It also simplifies payment processing for cleaning companies while centralising all your cleaning management communications.
Operto
Operto offers real-time tracking of your vacation rental’s cleaning processes and enables seamless coordination for your cleaning team, especially when guests check in or check out at irregular hours. This vacation rental automation solution allows you to schedule housekeeping tasks, monitor their completion, and streamline guest communications and team interactions.
3. Adopt Smart Cleaning Devices
One of the most innovative ways to remotely monitor your Airbnb’s cleanliness is by utilising smart cleaning devices. These devices are equipped with sensors and Wi-Fi connectivity, allowing you to track their usage and performance through a dedicated app on your smartphone. Some popular options include:
Robot Vacuums
Robotic vacuum cleaners can autonomously clean your property and report their cleaning progress. You can schedule cleanings, receive notifications when they encounter obstacles, and ensure that all areas are covered.
Air Purifiers
Air quality is essential for guest comfort. Smart air purifiers can monitor air quality and filter out impurities, sending real-time updates to your phone. This helps maintain a fresh and clean environment.
Smart Dishwashers
Smart dishwashers offer features like remote start and stop, cycle monitoring, and notifications when a cycle is complete, making kitchen cleanup more convenient.
4. Adopt Comprehensive Property Management Solutions (PMS)
Selecting the right vacation rental cleaning app can facilitate remote monitoring of your Airbnb’s cleanliness. However, opting for an all-in-one solution like a comprehensive Property Management System (PMS) instead of multiple separate applications can lead to more efficient management.
Integrated cleaning solutions within a PMS simplify your workflow, automatically linking cleaning management with guest vetting, communication, bookings, and accounting. This integration reduces the challenges associated with using multiple systems and enhances overall efficiency.
Besides housekeeping, vacation rental managers can automate more areas of their vacation rental operations management, including maintenance, check-in/outs, guest vetting, and security deposit management. As a result, using a PMS frees you to focus on the more critical aspects of vacation rental management, like growing your STR business.
Zeevou is a Property Management System and Channel Manager that automates almost all areas of your short-term rental business, including housekeeping and cleaning management.
How Can Zeevou Help Property Managers Automate Their Cleaning and Housekeeping Operations?
Zeevou’s short-term rental cleaning management solution makes everything run like clockwork. Moreover, it offers a housekeeping app for the cleaners to access the list of their cleans on the go and communicate with their team more efficiently.
Housekeeping tasks are automatically generated in Zeevou and allocated to the housekeepers. You only need to specify the time required for each task. Then, the system takes into account the travel time between properties – if the staff have to follow a cleaning itinerary in a day. It also records the cleaners’ GPS when the task is in progress.
The cleaners should upload photos of each room for the quality check of their work. They can also report other maintenance issues through their mobile apps. In this way, Zeevou enables you to manage housekeeping tasks remotely by leveraging your housekeepers’ presence to address any issues your vacation rental property might have encountered.
Concluding Remarks
Cleaning management is an integral part of every property manager’s job. Guests are looking for a homely and welcoming experience, and it is very easy to receive negative reviews due to minor issues like a barely visible hair on a pillowcase. As a result, holiday rental managers who live far from their properties must find proper ways to remotely monitor Airbnb’s cleanliness.
For a comprehensive guide, don’t forget to explore our Ultimate Vacation Rental Cleaning Checklist to effectively and remotely monitor your Airbnb’s cleanliness and ensure it meets the highest standards of hygiene and cleanliness.
