As STR hosts, we know that cleaning is one of the most important parts of our business. One aspect that many hosts struggle with, is scheduling and managing the cleaning crews/individual cleaners and making sure cleaning is being done well in a timely manner.
Some of the things to keep in mind when you are looking at ways to keep track of your calendar. Those things include Automation, checklists, communication, scaling, and invoicing.
This is why I have listed out a few ways that you can manage the calendar and help yourself keep on track with your cleanings.
How to Share AirBNB Calendar with Cleaner
- Manual Calendar tracking
The most basic option of tracking your calendar is to do it yourself, and manually send each cleaning to your cleaner to put on their schedule.
This does not accomplish any of the factors above that we are trying to. You can certainly do it this way if you want more control over the process, but over time you will find that it is very tedious and that you are also prone to human error. - Ical Links
The second option to keep track of your calendar and let cleaners know when to clean, is using the platforms Ical links and providing them to your cleaning crew. This will allow them to add it to their calendar app on their phone or computer and keep track of when guests are at your property.
Out of the factors we are considering when it comes to what method we use, this only partially covers the automation factor. I say partially because while, yes, it does automate the calendar being sent to the cleaner, you do not have any way of automating confirmation they are cleaning that day and have received the booking info in order to do so. - Property Management Software
If you are to use your property management software like Guesty or OwnerRez, they will most likely have options for you to schedule cleaners and send them the jobs through their system. The things that will be accomplished with this are Automation, Checklists, and scaling.
These softwares make it much easier to automate the cleanings by having each job sent directly to your cleaners, and in some cases, allow the cleaner to accept the job so that you can get alerted they have accepted it. You can also create checklists for your cleaners to follow, and you can set multiple cleaners up per property in the system.
The things you would be missing are that you still have to manually pay your cleaners, and there is not much option for communication through the platform with your cleaners. Due to this, I would also say that scaling can get a bit more difficult with this as well. - STR Cleaning Software
To most people, this is going to be the best method for helping manage their calendar and keep things on track. The most efficient software we have found for this so far, is TurnoverBNB. This software will accomplish every goal set above and does it masterfully.
For Automation, the software is linked to your listing accounts and knows immediately when a new booking comes through and to send out the job to your cleaning crew. When the cleaning crew accepts it, you will receive a notification that the job has been accepted. It also allows you to alert cleaners of early checkout so they can start early or early check-in/late checkout requests by the guest. You can also create extensive checklists that the cleaners have to mark each item off when they complete it before they can do the job.
Communication is great because your cleaning crew can mark issues in the job that will alert you what is wrong (like a chair being broken, or light bulbs are out) and you will also get an alert as soon as the job is completed. Scaling is one of the best things that TurnoverBNB allows for, because you can assign multiple cleaners to one property, you can set a primary one and secondary ones, as well as you can assign different rates to each cleaner and property.
If your primary cleaner doesn’t accept the job in a specified amount of time, then it is sent to the secondary cleaners as first come first serve. Lastly, with the automatic payments feature on TurnoverBNB, you are able to have your cleaners automatically paid after each job, so that you do not have to worry about receiving invoices from them and sending out the payments all the time.
We have reached 25 properties currently, meaning we have around 125 cleanings per month with around 15 different cleaners. That would be a lot of time spent just paying them each week if we did not have it automated.
I hope this helps some of you hosts out there with tracking and handling your cleaning process better and avoiding some of that human error that costs us bad reviews, and even worse, refunds. Best of luck to you all!