Does Airbnb Offer Cleaning Services for Hosts?

So you are interested in managing an Airbnb – and you want to know if they can help find a cleaning service?

Destin, Florida

Managing an Airbnb is an exciting venture! But what about one of the hardest parts of the business, finding a reliable vacation rental cleaning service?

So, why doesn’t Airbnb help you find a cleaning service?

More than just a space to crash for a night, your Airbnb will be for guests to create lifelong memories in a clean, comfortable space. That seems like a venture Airbnb would invest heavily in! Unfortunately, Airbnb does not directly help staff a vacation rental cleaning company.

Since Airbnb is not offering cleaning services, lets talk about the 3 top options to find reliable cleaning services in your area and use the following top 5 categories to evaluate each.

Options:

1. Referral
2. Google
3. Turno.com

Categories:

1. Reliability
   1. Believe it or not, there are many companies that will no show last minute the day of a clean! This is especially relevant for small cleaning companies or individual housekeepers. Having a software like ResortCleaning.com can be really helpful to monitor the cleaning status of your property and if they have arrived.
2. Quality
   1. The most important factor to a cleaning company is their quality! How do they monitor it, or do they even monitor it? Internally, we use Quality Driven Software and a spreadsheet to track Airbnb cleanliness ratings month to month to identify poor trends. Measure what matters, and inspect what you expect!
3. Communication
   1. What hours do they operate?
   2. What happens when they need off?
   3. Do they clean after hours?
   4. Are they on call 24-7?
4. Laundry & Policies
   1. Where is laundry performed?
   2. Who provide laundry?
   3. How many sets are needed?
   4. What’s the bedding process?
   5. Do they have an office or is everything operated out of a private home?
   6. What is the reclean policy?
   7. Do they require annual deep cleans?
   8. What is their floor protocol to prevent black feet and sandy floors?
5. Pricing
   1. What’s the value?

Option 1: Referral

Far and above any other option to find a reliable vacation rental cleaning service is to talk with other owners and ask them who they are using to clean their properties and if they are happy with them. Join facebook groups, talk to local real estate groups that sell vacation rentals and have preferred vendors (cleaning companies) in place already. A referral means there is proof they do a great job, consistently! That’s key.

Option 2: Google

A quick Google search will help find a number of cleaning services quickly. An example search in our market would look something like: “Airbnb cleaning service Destin fl”, or vacation rental cleaning services Destin fl. If those two searches don’t work, you could also try a more generec seach like “house cleaning services Destin fl.”There are a few factors to consider when identifying a vacation rental cleaning company on Google:

1. Reviews
   1. A reputable cleaning company should have at minimum 25 reviews on Google. Anything less than 25 shows they may be behind with technology or they have closed and opened multiple Google listings in the past due to poor reviews.
2. Time in business
   1. Is the company brand new or have they been around the block for a while. Anything less than a year, I would recommend passing.
3. Do they have a website?
   1. If they do not have a website, I would pass. This tells me they may not be technologically adept enough to use a CRM to auto schedule appointment directly from Airbnb and other platforms, or communicate in a timely manner.
4. Do they answer the phone when you call?
   1. This one should be obvious, but if you call a company and they don’t answer the phone or get back to you within a reasonable time, that’s a pass for any home service company.

Option 3: Turno

Turno.com remains a platform to find cleaners for your Airbnb. This is the least desirable method because the cleaning companies on the platform are tied to Turno. They must schedule and receive payments through this platform and bid against other companies for a new job, often leading to a race to the bottom. The close ties to the platform limits the cleaning companies ability to provide a service if it does not fall within the Turno ecosystem. For example, some of the capabilities to schedule are lacking on Turno and may cause the cleaning company to not schedule as proficiently as they could if they were on a different platform. I would be concerned with the quality of the relationship developed with the cleaning company because the cleaning bids often come in much lower than traditional bids. Some cleaning companies often utilize a platform like Turno to fill a gap in the schedule during the slow season but will drop the low bid properties first once the heavy season returns.

Although it is a tight platform, Turno does have its advantages and can be used to find reliable cleaning staff. For example, they rate cleaning companies and you can see how many jobs a company has done which gives you insight to both their reliability and quality. I also like the fact they make it easy to communicate with cleaning companies.

Conclusion:

Despite the fact Airbnb doesn’t offer cleaning services directly to hosts, there are very effective ways to find a vacation rental cleaning company for your Airbnb. Although we couldn’t go over how to evaluate each category for each method to find a reliable vacation rental cleaning service, you can see how important the 5 categories are when evaluating a cleaning company. I hope this article gives insight on methods to search for a cleaning service. If you have more questions, you can check out our article “Interviewing a Cleaning Company for your Vacation Rental – Ultimate Guide”.

Logan Campbell, Founder

The Dream Clean Team