Laundry Nightmare

We all know the Short Term Rental market is busy.The biggest feat most cleaners run into is their laundry situations. What happens when there isn’t enough? The guest damages an item? There is no back up and check in is at 3PM?! If you work on turn overs for Airbnb you know this is a nightmare.

Here’s some tips and tricks to avoid situations like this and to help keep your team and yourself smooth sailing:

Once arriving to your rental property, check to make sure the linens used were not damaged from last guests. Go ahead and make sure you have what you need clean so you can worry about the rest of the property. If you are short linens you will want to notify the property manager or Airbnb cleaner right away.

When you work a high volume of turns like myself, you will find it handy to have towels, hand towels, and extra queen and king size white sheets. If you choose white or a tan/light color it will most likely match enough to suffice until the management team can replace the property with new linens. I choose to frequent local thrift stores on their 50% mark down days where practically the whole store is 50% off. This will help you find items you need for next to nothing, literally pennies! Then you can keep these in a bin in your car for if you ever run into a pickle and are short laundry.

The next step to insure your laundry never turns into a nightmare is to ask for the management team to have a separate locked closet for you to use for storage of linens and cleaning supplies. You may also use this closet for consumables, products that guests use. My company comes in and organizes each closet upon starting the new property. Labeling all sizes, towels, kitchen towels, and any laundry you may be using on the property is key to organization. This helps the team stay focused and grab what they need quickly. Therefore they aren’t sorting through a plethora of sheet sizes. There are even properties we will color code and leave small notes with a label maker. This ensures the right color schemes are placed throughout the house.

The last but not least is to remember the magic number, 3. You should request from your client they always have 3 sets of everything. The number 3 works well. You will always be able to take a set of laundry off site to wash with you if need be. Just remember to make sure it returns to the right property!

Happy Airbnb Cleaning!

Check out the published version of this blog here!