6 Ways to Automate Airbnb Cleaning & Grow Your Business (2024)

Manually scheduling cleans and handling communications with housekeepers can consume a significant portion of your workday and increase the risk of costly errors.

The stress of ensuring everything is perfectly timed and coordinated, especially when dealing with back-to-back bookings, can lead to missed cleans and miscommunication, leaving you with little room to focus on growing your vacation rental portfolio.

By automating key tasks, though, including scheduling, quality control, and supply management, you can give yourself the space you need to grow your business. This enables you to creatively tackle challenges, like marketing your services to new homeowners, developing upsell opportunities, and studying the competition.

In this article, you’ll see:

• How to automate Airbnb cleaning and related processes, like managing maintenance, assigning tasks to contractors, and stocking units
• What tools to use and how they work
• How to make your business more efficient, scalable, and error-free

1. Sync your Airbnb account with your operations management system

Syncing your Airbnb account with an operations management system allows you to automate the transfer of key data directly from your booking system to your daily operations, including information on:

• Check-in and check-out times
• Occupancy
• Access codes
• Property details including amenities and maintenance information
  

This gives you a clear overview of your portfolio, so you can efficiently oversee and organize every activity related to each unit. For example, Breezeway synchronizes booking, property, and guest data from multiple property management systems (PMSs) and online travel agencies (OTAs), including Airbnb, an official Breezeway partner.

With this integration in place, you can use Breezeway’s operations management dashboard to easily sort your Airbnb data by reservation, property type, tags, and more, which simplifies all your task coordination and tracking.

By syncing your Airbnb account and/or PMS with Breezeway, you can manage all your units, housekeepers, and tasks.

Now you can start implementing automated processes that minimize your number of manual tasks and the risk of human error, which means you can operate more efficiently and accurately, plus grow your portfolio without adding to your management workload.

2. Auto-schedule cleaning tasks based on check-in and check-out times

Auto-scheduling cleaning tasks to align with guest check-in and check-out times not only saves you potentially hours of work each week, but it also allows you to be more responsive to last-minute booking changes. This helps you avoid costly mistakes like missed cleans or sending two cleaners to the same property.

Integrating your operations management platform is the first step to auto-scheduling turnovers—the next is to implement your customized rules for each reservation, property, and length of stay, like:

• Short stays (less than 3 nights): Trigger a standard cleaning protocol that focuses on high-touch areas and quick turnover necessities.
• Long stays (more than a week): Initiate a deep-cleaning turnover that includes extensive cleaning tasks such as under furniture and in appliances, along with restocking all consumables.
• Back-to-back bookings: Automatically prioritize cleaning immediately following check-out time to ensure the property is ready for the next guest's check-in on the same day.

For example, with Breezeway, instead of manually scheduling each turnover based on your latest booking information, tasks and notifications are promptly updated whenever there's a change in your Airbnb reservation calendar—including if that change occurs overnight. Then, the platform automatically shares these tasks within your cleaners’ mobile app.

Breezeway auto-schedules cleans, then auto-shares tasks using a mobile app.

And, because cleaner availability and how long tasks typically take can be factored into Breezeway’s automated scheduling, work can be auto-assigned to make sure each job goes to the ideal person.

This eliminates the need for back-and-forth communication and manual adjustments, keeps your cleaning schedules error-free, and ensures your housekeepers are always aligned with your business needs.

3. Schedule recurring tasks for deep cleans and maintenance checks

Implementing a system for regular deep cleans and maintenance checks is essential for the upkeep of your Airbnbs and guest satisfaction. An operations management platform lets you automate these tasks so facilities like pools, hot tubs, grills, and gardens are serviced on a consistent basis.

Whether these services are scheduled weekly, monthly, or quarterly, this helps you detect issues early on, supporting the longevity of your amenities and potentially saving you significant amounts on emergency repairs. And, by showing homeowners that you have a system in place to ensure regular maintenance is carried out, you can gain their trust while they’re still prospective clients.

With Breezeway, you can:

• Schedule recurring tasks like maintenance and deep cleans by set intervals or specific dates
• Assign tasks to outsourced teams
• Give service providers the option of accepting or declining each job

If someone declines a task, you’re immediately notified. Then, you can track task status in your manager’s dashboard, and you’ll receive a notification as soon as each task is completed.

Breezeway lets you automate the management of recurring tasks.

4. Create customized cleaning checklists for each property

Inconsistency in cleaning quality leads to guests noticing overlooked details, which brings about negative reviews—and all it takes is your housekeeper to forget to wipe down a kitchen counter or bathroom mirror. To combat this, you can create digital cleaning checklists, which are shared with cleaners alongside their cleaning schedules.

This ensures that every cleaning task is tailored to the specific needs and characteristics of each unit, elevating the consistency of your service and the quality of the guest experience.

Digital checklists should be fast to create and easy for cleaners to access in a mobile app.

Breezeway’s Airbnb cleaning checklists let you list individual tasks and add representative photos so your cleaning teams always have a clear example of your expectations to guide them. Also, you can create additional separate checklists, such as for homeowner stays.

This means cleaners will know to make any rearrangements to the furniture, use specific linens, or stock cabinets with personal items—all according to the homeowner’s preferences—so you can deliver the best possible hospitality experience and maintain strong client relationships.

As well as their extensive customization capability, Breezeway’s digital checklists include task timing within the app, so you can track how long turnovers take and see real-time progress in your manager’s dashboard.

5. Require photo uploads for remote inspections

You need to inspect your short-term rental properties (STRs) to ensure housekeepers are upholding your standards, but in-person inspections are a bottleneck that limit your efficiency.

They make it difficult for you to achieve fast turnovers, which are necessary for instant bookings and back-to-back reservations, and they make you less scalable as a business—at some point, you’ll struggle to add new units to your portfolio if you need to check each one in person before check-in.

To address these challenges, ask cleaners to upload photos of their completed work so you can remotely check that each unit is guest-ready.

Breezeway’s user-friendly app for cleaners makes it easy for them to share photos of their completed turnovers.

Breezeway has this feature built into the mobile app, so your in-the-field staff or cleaning company can provide you with the visibility you need to verify the condition of properties without having to be onsite—which means you can maintain a high turnover rate without compromising on quality.

Also, with photo uploads of each property, you’ll have evidence of their state before guests arrive, which can be useful in the case of a complaint or dispute.

6. Create supply sheets for linen packing and supply management

Without a simple way to track supplies, you may find yourself often running out of cleaning products, having to stock properties at the last minute before check-in, and failing to capture billables for homeowners. This causes operational delays and inconsistencies in service quality, ultimately impacting the guest experience.

You can manage supplies efficiently by using a digital system to monitor inventory, track costs, forecast expenses, and record billables. This ensures that:

• Units are properly replenished during each turnover
• Housekeepers always have the cleaning products, equipment, and linens they need
• You don’t have to foot the bill for supplies that should be covered by the homeowner
  

For example, Breezeway allows you to oversee your entire STR inventory from one consolidated dashboard. This includes a view of which items are running low, whether those are bathroom essentials, lightbulbs, or kitchen condiments.

Breezeway notifies you when supplies are low and helps you track billables.

This is a semi-automated solution—service providers can easily update supply counts as they go, and, because you can associate supplies with specific tasks, supply counts automatically update as turnovers or individual tasks are completed.

Meanwhile, thanks to its integration with Airbnb and/or your PMS, you can use Breezeway to automate linen reports for each stay. This lets everyone know exactly what linens to pack for cleaners to pick up at the start of their day or before a turnover.

Automating Airbnb ops for lower costs, less work & more scalability

Automating your Airbnb cleaning, maintenance, and management tasks is vital to reducing your operational costs and management workload.

You can do this by connecting a STR operations management solution like Breezeway with your Airbnb account. Then, you can implement customized, repeatable processes that not only minimize human error and make your business more scalable but also help you deliver a better service to your guests and homeowners. These include:

• Automated scheduling based on your latest Airbnb booking information, cleaner availability, and property attributes like location, size, and amenities
• Recurring maintenance tasks and deep cleans that you can easily oversee in a consolidated operations dashboard
• Auto-shared digital checklists for each unit and type of booking
• Remote inspections
• Automated supply counts and notifications
• Automated linen packing reports