Housekeeping Troubleshooting for Airbnb | Managing Housekeepers & Feedback

welcome back to the show I'm glad you're here again we're talking again about housekeeping this is the third part of our three-part Series in the first part we talked about linen management that was episode 242 there's a lot that goes into our laundry the bigger our property the more laundry we have so we talked about how many Linens you might need towels pool towels all those things and when they might get damaged and what to do if they do get damaged and then we talked about

how to find and hire a house housekeeper that was episode 243 that's obviously a crucial piece to the puzzle right but unfortunately though the housekeepers or the housekeeping companies we find aren't always a good fit and so this week we're talking about what to do if you run into some trouble the first piece of trouble that you might run into is just negative feedback from your guests when it comes to cleanliness so what do we do in these circumstances well it all really goes into setting

those expect s up front so before you hired your housekeeper before you hired the housekeeping company did you do a walk through with them at your property and did you discuss the the way that you wanted the property cleaned and maybe little things that they need to keep an eye out for well if you didn't that's the first step it's just setting the right expectations right what I'm going to talk about today it it's not necessarily rocket science right I mean when it comes to knowing

whether our housekeepers are doing a good job it's pretty clear but it's it's not always that easy to relay the message over to them so we've got some tips for you on that today as well so it all starts with setting the right expectations we use an application specifically for managing our housekeeping turnovers and if you're new to the show my team and I have managed probably 40,000 guests now in nearly 20 cities so we've learned a lot about housekeeping and ensuring quality so we use

an application called Breezeway we've talked about that before but it's specifically for house keeping and maintenance and it allows us to create a checklist for each one of our properties where our housekeepers can know exactly what they need to do in those properties we can take a picture of the way we want our towels folded uh we can take a picture or leave a special note on things that might get forgotten like changing the coffee grounds or changing the filter in our coffee machine for example

so I think that's really the first piece is just having those expectations and having a list for your housekeeper to go through there's a reason why Pilots still use checklist right there's a lot of things they have to do we want to make sure we don't miss a step same goes with our properties and of course the bigger the property the more things that we need to double check now you don't have to go out and pay for an application like Breezeway there are others like

turno uh or properly those are two other companies their software is paid but you could just create a Google form right for free and you can do it in a matter of minutes whatever you decide to do though whether it's a paid option uh or you go with the free option make sure that you have a checklist it's really really helpful and if you have a really long checklist when you start you don't have to keep it that way right so make sure you have a

checklist we don't want those dust bunnies showing up underneath the bed we want to make sure all of those boxes are checked right so that's the first piece the second piece is just being transparent so we're transparent with all of our housekeepers with all of the reviews that we get and so if we get a negative review when it comes to housekeeping you better believe that we're sending it to our housekeeper and now it's not to say like hey look you did a really bad job

here we know that sometimes guests have different expectations sometimes guests are much pickier than others but either way we want to make sure we're transparent with reviews including the good ones right so we don't want to just send the bad reviews over to our housekeepers we want to share all the good side of the story as well so that's the second piece be transparent with all the reviews and you can really let your guest speak on behalf of your housekeeper now of course we don't want

negative feedback showing up in our reviews time and time again so we really got to set a limit for that and I'm going to get to that in just one second before we do that the next big issue that comes up with housekeeping is reliability so if our housekeepers are not showing up or they miss a clean that is a big big fail right we know if a guess shows up to a property they're excited for their vacation they want to kick off their shoes and

lay down on the couch and the couch is dirty or the rug's dirty or in the worst case scenario your housekeeper never actually showed up that is a massive fail and we want to make sure that doesn't happen so again this goes back to when we're hiring our housekeeper verifying that they have reliable transportation we know that generally speaking housekeeping wages aren't the highest wages right they're not the highest source of income and car payments car problems those can be expensive and so we've definitely had

people or housekeepers and housekeeping companies that we've worked with where one of their employees or one of the housekeepers had car trouble and they couldn't show up right of course we need to make sure we have backups for this we'll get to that in just one second but reliability is a big thing not just with the car but ensuring that they're going to be there when you need them and so we need our housekeepers to be there for us on the weekends we need them to

be there for us on the holidays these are days when a lot of people enjoy that time off but we can't do that in the short-term Rental World right this is we're catering to people celebrating their vacations they often do that in a short-term rental so again comes back to expectations we have to be really clear on this that hey we need you on these days and these holidays and if you are not available for some reason well we need lots of notice we have all

these terms in our housekeeping agreement that that all of the housekeepers with my personal portfolio sign uh and we'd be happy to provide a copy for that in fact you can grab it in the show notes for free copy it change it however you want uh it sets some good expectations and again the holidays and the weekends are just one of those so how do we solve this issue or challenge of reliability well it really does fall on us on the host to make sure that

we have someone there to clean the property and so we need to confirm with our housekeeper or confirm with our housekeeping team that they in fact have it on their schedule and we've double triple checked we don't want to wait till the last minute the last second because it might be too late right so this is one of the things we love about using an application like Breezeway or turno or properly is because it notifies the housekeepers for us you can have it send them a

text message we can have it send them email reminders but if they're not responding it we need to make sure that we're there to double check hey we haven't heard from you we've got a checkout on Thursday we just want to triple check that you're going to be there and you got on your schedule again whatever process you're using if you're using an application if you're using your own form if you're using a property management software that can notify your housekeeping team make sure that you've

got a fail safe step there to where if they weren't looking at their notifications or whatever happens that you've confirmed and you know that someone's going to be there so I'd say those are really the two biggest challenges right one is just in a nutshell cleanliness stuff is getting missed we're getting potentially negative guest feedback and the second piece comes down to reliability knowing that they're going to be there for us so after working with a housekeeper for a while this becomes an amazing relationship right

and one that we can trust and a lot of these strict sort of formalities I guess become a little less strict right but we know our housekeepers and our and the housekeeping companies that we're working with have personal lives of their own right they have emergencies they might get sick they might have a family member that got hurt or passed away unfortunately and they need time to deal with it so we have to remember that that they have personal lives of their own and things are

going to happen and so to make sure that we always have someone with our short-term rals we have to have a backup and that's really our fail safe for all of this right we have to have a backup now sometimes your housekeeper might have their own backup that they can schedule if they're not available again you want to confirm with their backup that they're there right uh but if they don't you want to make sure that you have another backup that you can call at last

minute notice and I would even go as far as having a third backup maybe it's a housekeeping company that has lots of people on staff and that you're probably going to pay more for but at least you have someone there to show up to make sure that you don't have a guest checking into property that's dirty or perhaps they can't check it on time because cuz you guys are there late trying to scramble to get things clean so backup Backup backup so yes we need backup

we've got to make sure we're transparent with reviews we've got to make sure the housekeeper working with is reliable but how do we know when it's just enough is enough and we've got to find someone else well our team what we do is again we're transparent with those reviews if we get any sort of negative feedback in those reviews we set a limit to it so you might say hey if we get two reviews out of the next 10 that mention anything about negative cleanliness well

then we're going to have to find someone else it's hard to say again how much our reviews affect our overall Revenue but we know that they do a lot right and so you want to make sure that you set that expectation with your housekeeper uh and just say you know we hope it never comes to this but this is how we're going to deal with it if it does in the next 5 10 or whatever reservations you want to put on it set your tolerance for

what's too much with that housekeeper so that's first piece we want to have a tolerance for the reviews and the ratings coming back and the second piece is when it comes to reliability so again you want to set some sort of Tolerance here maybe yours is hey if they didn't show up and they didn't notify you in time that's it you're going to find someone else hopefully you had a backup and that didn't leave you in a really bad situation but I would say if you

have someone that hasn't showed up maybe once or twice or they're giving you really late feedback and it's leaving you in a bind well that's when we got to take really seriously right and the reality is is that if this is happening more than once it's going to keep happening right we can't let history predict the future but from all the guests we've managed and all the housekeepers we've worked with I know it's hard to hard to have to go out there and find someone else

sometimes but if these problems keep popping up well then it's time to move on and believe me you're going to be much happier with working with that new housekeeper for a long long time uh weight lifted off your shoulders so we could talk about housekeeping a lot more than this right um I really just want to get the point across is that you need to set some sort of Tolerance with with your housekeepers or the company you're working with so that this doesn't become something you're

dealing with for a long long period of time or Worse affecting our guest experience right so we've talked about it a lot in the past remember you can go to our website strr riches there you will find all of our past episodes 242 we talked about linen management 243 we talked about the places where you can go to find housekeepers and how to set those right expectations we've got another episode just on laundry options that's 185 and so we've talked about all these things before I

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until next time I hope you have a fabulous week want to get on the fast track to Financial Freedom through short-term rentals what all starts with the properties you acquire but you want to make sure that you acquire the right properties I want to give you my book that will show you how to do just that there is no charge it's my gift to you for being one of our subscribers