Outsourcing vacation rental cleaning to a reliable third-party service provider can be a great shortcut to spotless vacation rental properties. But if you have your own in-house cleaning staff, developing a process that can help you reduce cleaning time will come in handy particularly in the case of back-to-back reservations. To help, we’ll use this article to share with you 5 tips on how to clean a vacation rental in less than 4 hours.
Tip #1: Create a Detailed Checklist
Creating an elaborate checklist of what needs to be cleaned between two bookings is the number one secret to cleaning a vacation rental quickly. Besides ensuring that your staff won’t overlook cleaning certain areas, a checklist will help you organize cleaning activities much better. The best way to create a comprehensive checklist is to go room to room and break down the tasks that need to be completed individually. For instance, you could start with the kitchen and write a list of all the chores that need to be done, from wiping down surfaces, organizing cabinets, washing dishes, and cleaning the oven to clearing out the fridge and pantry, mopping the floor, and taking out the trash. You can write down a similar checklist for each room in the vacation rentals that you manage.
However, an easier way to create cleaning checklists is to use dedicated software, which allows you to create custom checklists for different properties. In addition to allowing you to create various cleaning checklists, our software solution makes available a series of innovative tools that you can use to automate cleaning scheduling, customize property cleaning tasks based on property type, assign cleaning tasks according to staff and/or third-party service availability, if applicable, receive/send task notifications, connect with listing sites for the latest booking updates, communicate with guests, sync reservation and occupancy data in real-time, and schedule recurring deep-cleaning and maintenance tasks as well as inspections on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis for better property management.
Tip #2: Organize Tasks Strategically
After creating property-specific cleaning checklists, setting a time limit for each task can help you ensure a fast cleaning process. That’s because scheduling every single task down to the minute will help your staff keep better track of the time they’ll spend on each room. In addition to scheduling tasks, doing certain chores in a specific order could shorten cleaning time even more. For instance, if you don’t handle laundry off-site, a great idea would be to wash linens, towels, and dishes while cleaning the rooms. This can reduce the cleaning time considerably. As well, ensuring that your staff follows the same routine every time they clean a vacation rental will allow them to develop better methods that could speed up the entire cleaning process.
Tip #3: Start with the Most Difficult Room
Cleaning the most difficult room first is key to getting things done more efficiently. Cleaning is also more efficient when people complete the same task throughout the entire home. For instance, it’s much more efficient to mop the entire home rather than cleaning and mopping the kitchen and then cleaning and mopping each bathroom separately. Likewise, professional cleaners never circle a room more than once. For instance, once they take their place in front of the bathroom sink, they spray and wipe the mirror, scrub the sink, polish fixtures, and wipe down the counter before they move on. Using the same strategy in the other rooms, your staff could start from one corner of the room and work their way out from there to save extra steps. This can shorten the cleaning time considerably.
Tip #4: Invest in Cleaning Caddies
The greatest thing about buying cleaning caddies for the vacation rentals you manage is that these items can considerably speed up the entire cleaning process. That’s because your staff won’t waste time going back and forth in order to get the cleaning products they need for each area. Not only having all of the cleaning supplies in one portable caddy makes cleaning faster; it also makes it easier for your staff to move from room to room.
Tip #5: Inspect the Property
Once a vacation rental is clean and ready for guests, performing a final inspection will help you ensure that everything is in order and works properly. Why is that important? In a nutshell, even a single missed spot or faulty appliance can leave a guest with a bad impression of a vacation rental. This may result in negative reviews and fewer guests booking your vacation rentals.
A perfectly clean vacation rental is an important part of a memorable guest experience. Besides making guests happy, a clean and tidy vacation rental may persuade them to leave positive reviews on travel sites, which will bring you more guests. If you wish to improve the overall guest experience even more, a great idea would be to invest in an advanced lodging management software solution that not only will help you efficiently manage different business areas, streamline operations, boost occupancy rates, and save money, but it’s also flexible enough to scale up or down as market conditions and expectations change.