Cleaning
You’ve staged your space to welcome guests. You’ve taken nice photos. (Or had them taken.) You’ve set up a well-thought out pricing plan and calendar system and have reservations rolling in. Great!
Now you’ve got to host. This is when you really become a hotel. And the rules we're about to give you, while important for every single guest, are particularly important for the first few guests. Those first few guests will write the first reviews that get Airbnb to put you higher up in their search results. Get a good review, you’re on your way. Get a bad review, it can be tough to recover.
So fresh and so clean, clean
There’s a Febreeze commercial for air fresheners where a teenage boy leaves his room as his mother walks in to clean it. To the boy, the room is fine. To the mother, the room is overwhelmed by life-size gym socks and sheets that haven’t been washed in two months.
We all become nose-blind to our own spaces. We also become eye-blind. (Yes, we know how dumb that sounds.) You have to change the way you see your place to clean it properly. To put it simply, you want to clean EVERYTHING!
Some obvious points are to dust in the corners, wipe down the living room and bathroom countertops with a nice-smelling cleaning spray. Take out the trash and have a fresh trash bag ready. Have fresh-smelling sheets and towels ready. And hairs! Hairs will kill you. Scour the bathroom sink and tub and floor and pillows for any hairs. You should clean, you know, EVERYTHING!
Nice touches
A couple other nice touches to think about: Leave some space in your closet for your guests’ clothes, along with some empty hangers. Or maybe some space in your dresser. It tells them you prepared and were ready to have them in your home.
We also try to make a display of the bath towels, even if it’s simply rolling them tightly and making a little pyramid with them on the bed.
First impressions are everything, and even if things go wrong later, the first impressions have a better chance of mollifying any anger later in their stay.