How to Guarantee 5-Star Reviews for Your Airbnb

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Quality Control: The Secret Sauce to 5-Star Reviews

🎵 “He’s making a list, he’s checking it twice…” 🎵 might sound like a December exclusive, but in the cleaning business, it’s a year-round anthem. Double-checking your work is the difference between “This place is amazing!” and “This place should be shut down.”

Yeah, it’s that serious.

Let’s be real: Guest reviews tend to swing between “absolutely perfect” and “utter disaster.” But with quality control inspections (QCs), you’re stacking the deck in favor of those shiny 5-star cleanliness ratings.

So, what’s the deal with QCs?

Our company swears by them. We use QCs to make sure our cleaners left each home in ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ condition. Plus, we tie cleaner bonuses to QC scores, so our crew is always bringing their A-game.

Here’s how we make it work:

Scheduling: We aim to schedule each departure clean and QC inspection two weeks in advance. This gives everyone—from cleaners to inspectors—plenty of time to plan their week. And yes, we know those last-minute cleaning requests pop up randomly, so we factor those in too.

Timing: Best practice is to tackle the turnover on the same day guests check out. Why? So the host can snag those last-minute bookings. Typically, our cleaners are wrapping up between 3 PM and 4 PM. When they’re almost done, we ping our QC inspector to give the green light. Usually, the inspector is nearby, having just finished another job.

The Inspection: A typical QC takes 15-20 minutes. But if the inspector walks into a mess, they flag it and we have the cleaner return to finish the job. After each inspection, the cleaner gets a rating from 1 to 5.

• 1: Did the cleaner even show up?

• 5: This place has never looked better. Bonus time!

Cleaners with an average QC score of 4.3 or higher over two weeks score a sweet 5% bonus on each inspected clean. Not a bad payday for the best in the biz.

The Process: Inspectors have a checklist just like the cleaner and they upload pictures of the good, the bad, and the ugly. Though thankfully, it’s typically way more good than bad.

Cost of QCs: It’s about 3% of our top-line revenue—a small price to pay for near-guaranteed 5-star reviews. If a cleaner misses something, our QC inspector will catch it. And we definitely don’t QC 100% of our cleans. Our goal is 75% if you’re taking notes.

Call to action: Ready to roll out QCs for your crew? The first step is setting a clear cleanliness standard. At Same Day Turn, we’ve made it easy with our 60+ item departure checklist. You can grab a copy here!

Until next time,

Logan

In the News

• Airbnb is growing and cracking down - in August the company announced it now has over 8 million active listings and removed 200K listings that consistently missed the mark

• Some cities are starting to set stricter limits on Airbnb / VRBO properties as housing prices continue to rise. Barcelona just straight up said “no” to any STRs

Short-term rental companies for sale

• Lake Tahoe cleaning company for sale (Price: $600K, Cash Flow: $200K). Seller-financing an option with this one too.

• STR property for sale in La Pine, OR (Price: $925K, 5bd, 5ba, 3.8k sq ft)

Get the goods 🧼 

Want more knowledge to build your cleaning empire? The below are some of the best pieces of information to grow your business, perfect your clean, and become an expert in the field.

• Departure cleaning checklist

• Airbnb cleaning business course