Episode 060 - Don't Give Your Guests a Cleaning Checklist: That's Your Job

Why, oh, why do some hosts continue to leave their guests a L O N G list of things to do and items to clean?  We just don't get it!  These are your guests.  Treat them like guests and not your kids.

Transcript of this Episode:

Hi, this is Michelle, the master of money mindset, and you are listening to BNB dash boss podcast.

And in today's podcast, we are going to be talking about. Your guests and these stupid, stupid cleaning checklist who is out there right now, leaving your guests, guest, mind you, what is the word guests to be our guest, right? I want you to go watch the Disney beauty in the peace pill and watch what happens when bell comes down to dinner and the plates and luminaire and all those guys get together and they do this whole big, wonderful thing.

Be our guest, be our guest. Put our service to the test. Right. And they do everything for her because why? Because she is their guest and worn more in our groups and everything. People are talking about these crazy lists of things. We're going to have people strip the beds and we're going to have them take out the garbage and we're going to have them, you know, do this, load the dishwasher and do this.

Look, those are your guys. And although you want them to keep your place clean, you don't want to give them a big, huge checklist of things that they have to do. And that's not their responsibility to clean your place between stays. They are your guests. Now, when it comes to dishes and things like that. We tell our guests, we give them a thing that says, look, please treat our place the way you would a favorite aunts or your grandmothers, somebody that you like though, it has to be somebody that you like.

Right. But treat it like that. A dear friend's house. Would you trash their house? Would you leave it trashed? We don't give them a list of things to do. We just say, look, just leave our place as you would a dear friend. The night before checkout comes, they get a little message from us. It says, all you have to do is make sure that you pack everything.

Don't forget your phone charger and. You know, that's it. Then just check through the house rules. Everything else should be fine. Just be out by this time or whatever their checkout time we don't say be out by that time. But we say, you know, your checkout time is this time and the cleaners will arrive then.

So they know that somebody is coming and they should get a move on. That's all we do. This is been so crazy. Listening to people, go back and forth with this whole thing, because there are people who are. Yeah, no. We want them to strip the beds, take all the sheets, put them in the washer, wash the towels, do this, do that.

And I'm just like absolutely positively. No, no, no, no. And no again, because. I don't trust anybody, first of all, to clean our sheets or our towels, because we have white everything. So they have to be cleaned in a specific way so that they're super nice and bright and they're very clean and we fold them in a specific way.

And I know they're not going to fold them. They know that they would probably just put them in the washer or something, but Nope, we take those out because how are you going to turn that property anyway? You should have three sets of sheets, at least minimum for each of your properties. One that is on the bed.

One that is in the ready and one that is in the cleaners. And so whenever you come in and the, or the girls come in and they're going to clean the pool, the ones that are on the beds off those now go to the cleaners, the ones that were at the cleaners come in, they go into the club. To be the next, the ones that were next that were in the closet are the ones going on the bed and you rotate your sheets like that.

Those three sets always like that. So you will never, ever be without sheets and you take them off site. You don't wash stuff on site. I don't care if you're way out in the boonies, then you bring the new, fresh stuff with you in a big old garbage bag. Actually, every one of our properties has a big old bag, has a big see-through plastic bag with all the new, fresh towels, all the new soaps and stuff.

Everything is in it. And it's set up at the beginning of the day in the morning, when the girls go in, they set it all up and each location gets the whole news. What do you do with that bag? When they open that bag, that bag is now getting all the dirty stuff. Right? So it's ridiculous that people would leave their guests, you know, this whole list of something to do.

They're your guests, their job is not to clean your place. Now. Hopefully they didn't trash it because they treated it like they would a favorite aunts. Right? So you wouldn't trash. It's ridiculous for anyone to expect guests to read through these things. I, I see people are like super mad. Well, they didn't, they didn't follow the house rules.

They didn't read through this and here's the whole checklist of all the shit I wanted them to do. And they didn't do it. I don't read through all the house rules on people. I really don't. If I'm going to stay there, I just act like a guest would, right. I don't trash the place, but I'm not going to read and see all the crap that they want me to do.

That's ridiculous. That is ridiculous. And it's ridiculous for you to think that, especially when you have a whole list of rules that somebody is going to read through there, why did people need to look at rules? Why do people usually read them? People usually read rules because they're looking for something.

When you, uh, have a question about something, you go through the terms of agreement. You don't read those when you first do it, you just check it off and go, right. But let's say, oh, you know, I got it at the dog, sitters canceling. Let me go look on their rules and see if they allow dogs. That's why he looked right.

Oh, uh, Joe's bringing his car. Let me see if they allow two car parking. The only reason they're looking is to do something. Let me see if they allow parties, right. Then people are reading through their, let's see if they charge for smoking. Yeah. Because people will look when they need to. Only when it's necessary.

If they know they're not going to be doing something that's out of the ordinary, then they don't check on it. They're not going to, and you shouldn't expect that they do. And not everybody's phone is a smartphone and not everybody's phone is charged all the time. You don't know what they're there for.

They might have a funeral that they're attending. They don't want to sit and read those things. When they've got, you know, friends and family that they have to visit and a visitation for the person who has passed away, or if they're there for business, maybe they're really busy. Or if they're, or they're on vacation, maybe their butt is getting a bunch of kids up every morning and getting ready.

Going out to the amusement park and pushing kids, strollers and carrying all this and cleaning everything up and then getting the kids all wash and put in bed and then collapsing on a freaking couch before they even get to bed. No idea what those people are doing, but yet people are still sitting there telling us here's the list of stuff you didn't do.

You didn't read my house rules. It's freaking ridiculous. Shame on you, shame on you for trying to pass off your work on someone else. That's not their job, that's not their job and they don't expect it. And when that happens. Oh, expect, you know, the people are like, well, I've been doing it for years and no one's ever left a bad review.

Well, that's probably because they're way nicer than me because I would have left you a shit review and I would have, I would've left you a shit review. I would have said the place was nice if, you know, if it was, if it was clean or whatever, but the list of things to do was ridiculous. And that's what I would have.

So I'm going to go over here with you, what we put in our cleaning house rules that nobody is going to read. Okay. So we have a paragraph in our house rules that says excessive cleaning fee, and it has the following verbiage. Our guests pay a minimal cleaning fee per stay, which covers what we call. And then it was quote unquote normal amount of cleaning.

Our guests are asked to treat our home like they would a favorite aunt or grandmother's home. You wouldn't leave trash around your grandmother's home or dishes in her sink for her to do, nor should you here. If the home is left extremely dirty after checkout beyond what a Crius guests would normally leave a home, you will be charged extra for cleaning.

Examples of this might be leaving excessive, dirty dishes, garbage, not in trash containers, stains on the sheets or towels food left out or in the oven. Spills cigarette burns, moved furniture, scratch floors, broken items, stains on carpet liquid on floors, dirty walls, anything in the hot tub that does not belong in a hot tub or things along these same lines.

Our cleaning crew allocates a normal clean in an normal amount of time between guests, anything above and beyond that will be charged to us. And that fee will be passed on to you. This fee may be as little as $25 or as much as it takes to replace repair or clean in order to get the property back to good condition in a timely manner before our next check-in.

So we do expect people to have the dishes done. If they're just in the dishwasher, I don't care, but like excessive amounts when the sinks are left, like crazy dirty, then I dunno. I think it just matters what the girls want to charge because I leave it up to the cleaning crew. We ask them to be good guests.

That's all. And whether or not they, you know, leave stuff or don't is completely up to them. And whether or not the cleaning company charges me is completely up to them. And if they charge me, they take pictures all the time. So they would send me pictures before they clean and said, look, this, this, and this is what, you know, made us late or write us behind or why we're charging you this extra.

And that picture is the picture that I would send Airbnb. And I have done that. So we've only one time had to charge somebody and we charged them $25 and they had left an excessive mess in the kitchen. And the stove, the inside of the oven was absolutely crazy. And it was a brand new oven, which really pissed me off because I'm like, come on, it's a brand new oven.

The thing is we don't leave them this whole list of things to do, because we know they're probably not going to read all that and they're not going to read even that whole paragraph. Right. But if they did the first thing they would see is just leave it as you would your grandma's house. And we use that in a few paragraphs that we're sending, you know, just we ask that you treat our home, like you would a dear family member.

That's all. So we don't, we don't even go beyond that. In most communication. We don't go through any of that stuff. We just leave it up to them to do what they will do. It's crazy that you would get so detailed and leave them a whole list of stuff to do. That's your cleaning crews job. You know, we don't even ask them to clean out the fridge.

So almost every time when our cleaning crew gets there, they know that there's going to be stuff in the fridge, but the. They kind of liked that because I remember one time we had a gentlemen up from Canada and they think he was like a professor or something and he had salmon and all kinds of stuff.

It's still in the wrapper. Uh, you know, in the fridge and he had all kinds of frozen stuff. So I tell the girls whatever they find, they can keep, you know, if there's food in there, it's, it's yours. I mean, obviously they're in a cake, eat somebody who's leftovers or something, but if they're a sealed food, they're allowed to keep it.

The only thing we keep in there is stuff that we know. Is safe for our guests. So that's going to be the snacks and the breakfast stuff. And you know, the whole thing that we leave them, we don't leave them anything else because we don't want to be responsible for any of that stuff. You know, who knows, who knows what the heck is put in to things.

So you want to clean that out and get that. But the girls kind of liked that. Obviously, if they get something that somebody left behind, they'll take a picture of it and show it to me. But let's, we're talking right now here about these cleaning, these excessive cleaning lists. So I really want to hear what you think about these, because I know that there's a lot of you that disagree and you have your reasons.

So I'm really interested in your reason. Because I would think that most of the time, if somebody had a really good reason, they would say, well, I'm out in the boonies. It's just me. I'm the only one doing the cleaning. And to that, I say, leave yourself a whole day between your guests then, because if you don't have enough time to get it done in between, it doesn't mean be a bad host or an ungracious host, uh, because you don't have a lot of time on your hands, just because you don't have enough time to clean between your guests.

It doesn't mean that you should treat your guests in a bad manner and not like a guest, right? Not like they're special because we like to treat our guests like they're special. We want them to come back over and over again. I mean, and we've had people stay over and over again and every time they do.

They leave the place so nice. Sometimes they even do stuff in our place, even fix things that, you know, little things that need fixing. And so I think we've, we've talked about that before, but people who come and stay all the time, I mean, they really treat your property really, really well. So I know this one is not going to be long, but I wanted to remind you too, that we have a cleaning checklist.

That's available for you for free when you go to the website. So go to BNB bosses, B N B B O S S E s.com or bnb-boss.com. And you can pick up our cleaning list and everything that we have inside of our maids club. Is on that list as well. So that's there for you to pick up any time? I think we still have messages on there and our favorite insurance companies too.

So you can get all that information. So, perfect. Thanks for listening today. I know it was a shorter episode last week. It was a longer episode. Um, my, um, my dog is, can you hear him back there? I wonder if you can hear him. He wants to go for a walk. And so I'm like, come on, you said we're going to go for a w a L K.

So I'm going to go take that one for a w a L K. You have a great day. God bless you. Uh, oh, send me your reasons to [email protected]. And I want to see what your reasons is because maybe you have a really good reason that is not the fact that you think you need to clean between guests. Leave yourself enough.

And you can get it done. She's got a bone out, so is laying down kind of, you know, just getting ready to sleep and the other one's just being loud as can be. So have a great day today. God bless you. Stay safe. Go and grow.