Resources
I rent several rooms in my house using Airbnb Rooms, and I’ve just run into a major issue. I am the cleaner and the maintenance person for my own house, and now I have to leave for a family emergency. I look for a last-minute cleaner using Turno (TurnoverBNB) to save my Airbnb listings and avoid the penalty of canceling my Airbnb reservations as a host. Follow along to see how this whole ordeal turns out.
This video covers the right way to hire cleaners for your short term rental business.
I visit my beach Airbnb property for the first time in 18 months to check on the property condition in this video.
I check in on a mid-term rental after a month-long stay checks out, and after I’m ghosted by cleaners in this video.
If you have any topics you’d like to see about the life on an Airbnb host, leave a comment on the video or reach out to me via DM on Instagram @persainvests
Transcript
So I have a pretty major flaw in my Airbnb business, and I really didn’t realize it until today. I have a family medical emergency and I have to leave the state to go help. Two of my listings on Airbnb are fine. They’re fully furnished, fully rented out houses that I can manage from anywhere in the world. I have cleaners for them with a schedule.
I have handymen I can contact and count on when things go wrong. The place I went wrong is also listing rooms in my own home on Airbnb rooms. See, the thing is that I self-manage all of my listings and a lot of people do. For people that set up systems around this, it’s usually not a problem, but the issue that I have is that I never thought about setting up systems for my own house.
With the way Airbnb rooms is set up, the room rates are actually quite low. So I had figured since I already live here, I could take care of the cleanings and do any maintenance that needs done because it’s my house anyway. One big oversight for me was thinking about emergencies. What would happen if I had a booking and I wasn’t here?
I never really thought this part through and I’m in a bit of a mess. I have five bookings coming up over the next several days and I have to leave. It’s possible that there’s more than five that might have to be canceled if I have to be gone for more than a week to deal with this issue. I read through the Airbnb host policy and I also reached out to other hosts in Facebook groups to tell them about my situation.
I’ve only kind of realized I’m in this mess for the last few hours, so I haven’t quite wrapped my head around how I’m going to fix this yet - I just realized that I have this big problem. Basically what reading the policy and asking the questions in those Facebook groups confirmed is that if I cancel these bookings, I would for sure lose my super host status - based on the number of bookings I booked per year across all my properties and the number of cancellations that I would have to do because my house tends to book out for one night stays.
And I’ve been fine with that for most of this time. Losing my super host status would actually impact the properties that I run as a business, and I never really realized the consequences of not setting up my rooms in my home more like a business than a hobby and having them all under the same listing account. So now that I have this little side hustle of renting out rooms in my house, it’s going to actually impact houses that I have mortgages on, that I rely on the income to cover the expenses in order to make those properties work as Airbnbs.
The other thing that’s probably going to happen, if I have to cancel all these bookings, is that my listings - my room listings in my house - would be suspended on Airbnb and potentially I might have all of my listings suspended. This is a huge consequence for an oversight that I didn’t anticipate. The folks in the Facebook groups had a few suggestions for me, and the first one was that I reach out to Airbnb support and let them know that these are extraneous circumstances.
However, I have dealt with Airbnb support before and I know that they’re more likely to stick to their policy than not. So no matter what, I probably would lose the super host status. Maybe by contacting support, I wouldn’t get my listings suspended, but I’m not sure I’m ready to go to that step yet. Another suggestion that people had was to start looking for cleaners on Turno and see if I can get somebody to do the turnovers while I’m gone.
If you’ve watched my other videos on hiring cleaners for your short term rental, you know that I like to have a system for hiring cleaners. This basically would be a Hail Mary approach - if I start looking for cleaners on Turno tonight and maybe doing a quick phone call interviews with them and crossing my fingers and hoping that it turns out okay while I’m gone with somebody that’s never been in this house before and and probably wouldn’t have good instructions unless I do like a quick video walkthrough before I leave in the morning.
The Turno approach wouldn’t be bad if I could sort it out. If it means I can’t inspect the quality of the cleaning while I’m gone and maybe six, seven, eight cleanings happen while I’m not here, I might get some bad reviews. I don’t know. I think overall getting a couple bad reviews on my Airbnb rooms in my house wouldn’t impact my overall Super Host status as badly as doing all these cancellations.
So I am going to start looking on Turno to start seeing if I can find a cleaner. And then the final suggestion I had from people in the Facebook groups was to try to reach out to other local Airbnb hosts and see if they could do me a favor and kind of help take care of my property while I’m gone.
I don’t have a lot of strong relationships with other Airbnb hosts in my area. I do know of a couple, but they run pretty large operations, so I’m not sure if they would step in and help me since I’m not really a big fish in this pond. But I guess if I can’t find anybody on Turno, I will reach out to the people that I do know and see if that can help me out.
But I’m basically on a quest to try to save my Super Host status, try to not have to cancel these bookings and hopefully still maintain an overall positive review on my place and see how this all happens while I’m gone. I wanted to make this video because I feel like I have made a lot of critical errors with this that I was blind to.
This is one big caveat about using the same Airbnb user for both your business and some things that are kind of your personal life. I guess this is a bit of a warning for anybody else who might be mixing up listings like this on their own Airbnb profile. I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing, but have a plan in place if you have an emergency because this caught me by surprise and it’s creating a little bit of tension for me because family comes first.
Even if a business is at stake. There is a potential that if I lose Super Host status and we’re already in a bit of a down market this year with vacation rentals, that losing that status could result in even fewer bookings for a property that is already struggling to maintain its revenue that it had last year. This is a bit stressful for me because life is at stake on the family side and business is at stake on the personal side.
Overall, I’ve heard from many people that in the long run decisions like this probably don’t matter. So I’m going to try to keep a cool head about it, try to find a way to solve this situation and still be able to leave and go take care of the family emergency and continue to be an Airbnb host when this is all said and done.
So let’s give this a try. I’ll sign up for Turno now and we’ll see if we can find somebody in a short period of time to make some magic happen. Okay, I’m a little stressed out and sorry, and I’m recording in a closet because normally I don’t record at night because I have Airbnb guests here. I record usually during the timeframe when people are checked out and the next set of people haven’t checked in.
So this is kind of unique. I haven’t recorded in a closet before. I’ll just take a quick little video here so that you guys can take a look at what silliness is going on. So there’s the camera, so close the door behind me, a bunch of junk and a light to make it brighter in here. So totally random.
But you do what you got to do. Even with recording. I think I’ll be able to log into Turno now and actually show you guys what I’m doing. TurnoverBNB has this setting that will allow me to create a checklist for my search. So I am going ahead and making that. Okay. I’m checking my SOP that I wrote that clearly nobody has ever used for this property except for me to see if it matches everything I wrote down in the TurnoverBNB checklist.
Okay, so I think I’ve got everything for these rooms. Let’s start a new request and attach this to it. I can’t have more than one search open for a property at a time, so I’m going to go close the old search and start a new one. This interface is a little bit confusing. Okay, So I finally got this set up the right way this time - I have my cleaning checklist, I have some specific notes about how this cleaning is going to be done. It looks like now I’m going to have to wait for bids. I don’t know if I could go on and search for existing cleaners. I’m going to see if that works. It’s Friday. Yesterday was the day I was putting together that Turno request.
I also reached out to a couple of friends that own a property management company. It turns out they don’t manage Airbnbs in this area, but they’ve interviewed people that happened to clean Airbnbs in the area as well. So I’ve got a lead on a phone number, but that’s the update from last night. This morning it’s about 7:50 in the morning,
I haven’t called them yet because it’s a little bit too early. 8 minutes ago, I got this notification from Turno that I have a new bid to clean these rooms. So I’m going to check that out with you here live and see what it is. All right. So here we are. We’ve got the bid let’s see what it is. Super cleaner. Lisa.
And she’s passed the background check. She can do $75 per project. I mean, that’ll work for this weird situation. I know for sure I have two different days I need cleaning this coming week. And the reason I never hired a cleaner for this property to begin with, besides the fact that it’s my own house, is that Airbnb rooms don’t really get a high price.
So clearly the economics of it doesn’t make sense, which is why I never really treated this house like an income stream that was a real business. It was more kind of something I did on the side, which is how I ended up in this situation to begin with. Now that I’ve got this emergency and I can’t be the cleaner and I’ve got these bookings, I think I would take 75.
I’ve never hired anybody on Turno before, so I’m going to see what the next steps of the process are and you guys are going to come along with me. So I don’t know what’s included in the bid - let’s see. She’s got 16 cleaning projects on Turno.
She’s been a member since last year. She does have a good review. So it looks like I do need to add a payment method and my booking calendar. I don’t want her cleaning all of these because I just explained what’s going to happen here. I wish there was a way for me to talk to this person. I think it’s chat, so it says once you accept the bid, they’ll be added to my team.
So I don’t fully want to accept it yet. I kind of want to have a conversation with her and at least try to go through my normal cleaning interview process or at least some form of it and explain the situation and how often I might be using her in the future. Okay, so this is cool. So if I connect to my calendar on Airbnb to Turno she doesn’t have to automatically get each cleaning, which is great, but I could save a step of me having to input all the details and getting it right and potentially messing something up.
I like the fact that I can make my projects visible to the cleaner manually because that’ll help me with this specific issue. I think I’m going to try this chat function and see if I can have a conversation with her. Okay, so it won’t let me chat with the cleaner without adding a payment method. I think this is smart of Turno, so I’m going to do that right now.
Interesting. Make sense. Again, no credit card transaction happens without processing fees and most platforms try to pass on those processing fees to their users. Sometimes it’s hidden in the way a monthly subscription works. But anyway, if I use a credit card to pay for these, I’ll get charged. Okay, So clearly I’m going to connect a bank account to this.
We’re getting somewhere. Got my verification code. Okay, So it’s requiring me to sync my calendar with it too, so I guess I’ll go ahead and do that now. Okay. I don’t know how I’m going to deal with the fact that there’s two rooms listed. I actually had no clue this existed - this calendar sync. Pretty cool. I was wondering about this like half a year ago - if I could get all my Airbnb bookings in like one calendar somewhere that I can share with people.
I’m an idiot. It’s right here. Okay, cool. So I’ve got both calendars linked. Let’s see if it’ll let me chat now. So I got the payment method in Turno and I’m still trying to make a chat with this cleaner. It’s been like 15 minutes since they put the bid in, so I don’t want to miss a chance to chat with them before they get started for their day.
Please let me chat, Turno. Would these fit your schedule? I know it is short notice. Okay, so I’m sending her a quick message to see if this kind of tight timeline that I’m dealing with would work for her. So fingers crossed. Let’s see. OK - I am going to come back and let you know when she replies. I need to run to the post office real quick.
Take care of some things. My flight is tonight, so I spoke to United last night. If all else fails, they told me I could cancel my flight, but that would be a really terrible decision for me to make because this is family and this is a serious situation. Canceling it because I can’t find somebody to clean my Airbnb rooms would be really stupid, but I have that option if I need to go to that route.
So for now I’m going to wait on Turno, grab some breakfast, run to the post office, and when I get back I’ll also make the phone call to the contact that my property manager friend told me about and see if they can help me out. I have two people I’ve already contacted, so that’s Lisa who gave me this bid and I’ve contacted a cleaner I’ve worked with before on another property.
I sent her an email last night, so there’s some options, I guess? We’ll see what happens and whether I can save myself from this situation. Nobody is going to clean for free and this would not be a sustainable solution if I couldn’t be here long term. If I couldn’t be here long term, I don’t know what I’ll do.
For now, I have blocked out my Airbnb calendar for these rooms for the rest of time because I have no clue when I’m going to be back and I don’t want to kind of continuously roll forward this extraneous cleaning circumstance. That’s where this is at. Okay, So it’s 10:49 a.m., and I had sent a message this morning to that bid on Turno that I got.
And around 10:15 I sent probably another message of desperation because I need to figure this out fast. I need to leave for the airport by 3:00 and I’ll get to the airport by 5:00. And if by 5:00 I don’t have a cleaner, I might have to decide whether or not I’m turning around. I see - like I have Turno open right now because I was about to start looking for more cleaners.
I see she keeps typing, so I’m like, anxiously awaiting - what is the message going to be? Oh! “Hi there. Yes, I am available both of those days. However, in the next week or so I will be leaving for approximately four or five days just an FYI.” I think this is good. I mean, if I’m trying to work out in my head, like, does that mean she might be leaving next week?
No clue. I am anxiously awaiting to see what she says next. “Sorry for the delay. I am on another Airbnb right now, so I’ve been busy.” I figured this this morning - I was like, if somebody is running a business on Turno, they probably don’t have like a VA doing the scheduling for them. They’re probably a one person show.
So I figured this is prime checkout time now for Airbnb’s, so I’m super glad she answered me and I think I’m just going to chat real quick, see if she’s solid on those two days and then we’ll work from there. Okay. She just said $75 per room. That’s re-donkulous. I’m not trying to lowball her but literally I make 60 bucks by renting out the room.
I’m already paying her more than that. I know I have an extraneous circumstance and I rent out the rooms for 60 bucks a night. I don’t want this cleaner to feel bad, that I’ve got a situation going on, so I don’t think I’m going to tell them that, like, I literally make $60 a night and paying them more to come clean.
Two bedrooms, 1.5 baths. Did you read my bid? Like it says two bedrooms? I’m literally just doing this to try to save my whole Airbnb business. If it costs me $200 to save my beach listing, my mid-term rental listings… like the cost of being unprepared. I have never used Turno. This… I hope I’m not getting scammed. Also got to try not to cry for being unprepared.
See the problem is she holds the power. I have no power in this negotiation. I need a cleaner. So this is interesting. You can’t work with a cleaner outside of Turno. I get that. And honestly, if they’re providing a platform where you can do your scheduling, like I’m not sure why you wouldn’t use them. Maybe people are trying to get around the fees and stuff.
I selected her as my cleaner. OK, so I actually just messed up. I think in my stress of trying to figure this out, I misread the Airbnb calendar and I thought that it was just Saturday and Tuesday that I needed cleaned, but way at the beginning of this video I remember saying five cleanings. And now that number makes way more sense because it’s two checkouts on Saturday, two checkouts on Sunday and the one on Tuesday.
So I’m hoping this Turno cleaner can deal with that. I’m asking her right now. So I really don’t think she read my project before bidding on my project because now she’s complaining about the laundry piece, which is clearly stated in my bid. So is the fact that there are two bedrooms and that they might both have to be cleaned the same day.
She’s like swindling me now to be paid more after we just agreed on the price and she knew I was already doing Saturday. So “I do a great job, so I’m told. So I think you’ll be happy”. Look, no one is happy to pay more to clean their Airbnb than their Airbnb is worth. I’m trying to think of a response that’s super professional and still doesn’t bring in the fact that I have some extraneous circumstances of my own.
It’s easy when I’m in a stressful situation like this to just like keep recirculating through the problem instead of finding solutions. And sometimes, like right now I’ve just been thinking about how ridiculous this is instead of trying to think through the situation. One she wants to make more. I don’t know about that - Two, she doesn’t want to sit around and wait for the laundry.
I have two sets of linens - to solve that problem, I can try to make sure everything I take off today gets washed. That way it’s ready to put on tomorrow. Then what she would do is take off tomorrow, stick it in the washer, come back and stick it in the dryer, and it should be ready for the next one and cycle through that again.
So I don’t think she’d have to sit around and wait for the washer. I’m regretting this already. Okay, so I’m starting to get a little frustrated with this Turno bid. It doesn’t even seem like she read my listing. Now I’m not even sure if she’s going to clean the bathrooms, which are clearly in my checklist and in the property description.
I’m starting to think that she just sends the same bid to everybody. And then once they start chatting, she starts like swindling them into other prices. Bad vibes, for sure. Got somebody else I can call, so I’m going to try that contact and see if I get anywhere. “Sounds great. Well, thank you so much.” “Thank you. Bye bye.” Okay.
That was a much better conversation. Way better conversation. 70 bucks. I’m canceling this Turno thing. So I just removed this cleaner from my team on Turno because I just. I just had a really great conversation with this referral that I had, and the Turno thing is not working out for me, so I’m just going to let her know in a very professional way that I don’t want to ask her to reduce her Saturday and Sunday rates for me and that it doesn’t seem to be a good fit for my project.
So I’ll just let her know gently, not accuse her of anything. And I didn’t leave her a review on Turno when I canceled this agreement. So no harm, no foul. What sucks is she got my full name and my address. So that part sucks after this whole conversation happened and got kind of weird, but whatever. Officially let my Turno cleaner go already.
That was fast. Now to work on putting together some information for the woman who answered the phone and to work with her. So let me do that real quick. I just sent the checkout days and checkout times via text message to the woman I talked to on the phone. And I’m going to go take a little tour video of the house on my phone and point out where she can find the linens and where she can find the cleaning supplies and what cleaning supplies I use for what. I know she’s a pro cleaner, but it probably will make her faster if she doesn’t have to do the guesswork of digging around through my cleaning bin
to figure out what’s going on. I’ll do that real quick and I’ll send that to her in a text message too. And then I need to start packing. So I’m grateful that someone in my network knew of a cleaner, had spoken to a cleaner before that does these. He had high recommendations for her. I did look at her Google profile and there were people that I knew that had commented on her Google profile.
So that gave her a more credibility for me than the person on Turno that started kind of changing the prices on me as we kept chatting. So I feel much more comfortable with where I landed. So I think what I’m going to do is since I’m leaving tonight and flying out, I’m going to go turn over these bedroom’s right now because I’ve checkins tonight. These people are going to leave,
she’ll come to the cleaning and I’ll give you an update tomorrow from my next location as to how my communication continued with this woman I found through my network and whether it turned out okay and whether I was able to sort this out in a short period of time, I guess diamonds form under pressure, they say.
So how did it all turn out? Was my last minute cleaning hire a bust? Was I price gouged for trying to turn over a couple of rooms and not a whole house? The way that the Turno cleaner was trying to make this job out? Were there any comments left on the cleaning job? I don’t know yet. So let’s find out together and see what the cost of doing this was and what our takeaways are.
Okay, so for the first guests, they didn’t really communicate with me very much or they didn’t say much while they were there or after they left. They did tell me when they were coming and when they left, which was nice. But really, I don’t know anything about this guest since I wasn’t there. So I’m just going to use a generic happy to host them again template.
The Cleaner did inform me that everything was fine with the house, so I’m sure that nothing really happened while these guests were there. It’s been my experience that when I host people in rooms, they’re generally very clean, very quiet, and don’t really present a lot of issues. So this is going to be interesting to see what this guest said about their stay while I wasn’t there and while somebody else was in the room next to them.
Detailed instructions for the kitchen. We appreciate that, since not every host does it. Your house is totally perfect. Five stars for check in. Five stars for cleanliness. That’s the cleaner, the cleanliness.
Accuracy. Communication, location, value. Perfect. So clearly, the cleaner did a good job. They got a five star for cleanliness. Sweet. Let’s review the other one that left us a review and see how the cleaner did on that one. Okay, so this second person I’m going to review has a history back and forth on the Airbnb app. They wanted to say back in May and then they canceled their trip and they’re coming back for a stay now that the weather has been nicer.
So not the typical type of guest for an Airbnb room, they’re clearly using this as a getaway, more so than passing through town. So slightly different. Their expectations might be different. Hopefully the place was in good enough shape for what they were hoping for. Okay, so simple review. Just taking care of the basics based on what I know from what we’ve chatted about in the past.
Really weird public review. Accuracy? Well, look, we got five for cleanliness. Yeah, the walls are thin. I guess this is way too okay, so it makes sense to just provide a little response to this so people can see it on the page. It’s important to keep this kind of feedback very professional and just indicate to future guests that you’re taking care of any problems that somebody might have with their stay.
Okay. So both reviews were positive on the cleaning front, but we had a little bit of an issue with one of the guests while we were gone, and it had nothing to do with the cleaning. So for the purposes of this video, I’m going to say it was a win. The cleaner did a good job. So now the next question to answer is how did it turn out financially to keep these bookings and hire a cleaner?
So let’s take a look at the invoice and the income from these stays while I had to be away and see if it was overall a net positive or a net negative and what I might do in the future. Okay. So these guests were the ones that happened last week and that I’ve received an invoice for from the cleaner.
So we had Airbnb pay out of $58.20 twice plus the $116.40 that was the payout for somebody who stayed multiple nights. Let’s take a look at the cleaning invoice. So the total income was $232.80. All right. And the total cleaning invoice was $200. So minus the $200 and made a total of $32.80. So clearly, it’s not a profitable venture.
And in fact, the way that the cleaning charges are, if I don’t have both rooms booked out for the same night, that the next day the cleaning is happening for I’m losing money, if only one room is booked out and I have to pay for a cleaning, that’s because although the Airbnb charges for a guest is that it’s $60 a night, the host payout is $58.20.
I actually have to pay a dollar and $0.80 over what I earn in order to get the place cleaned while I’m gone. Clearly, it’s not cheap, but also it’s not super expensive. So this is a small inconvenience for me while I’m gone. I have found a cleaner that’s willing to do these room cleanings to help me out during this time that I’m away due to a family emergency.
And I’m grateful that I found one that is willing to be reasonable about how much time it takes to clean these rooms and to keep this place ready for the next guest. I did close down my calendar because I knew this was not going to be a cost effective way to continue running these rooms. And also, like we saw in that last review, I think not being there maybe is causing a little bit more friction than normally happens when I’m in the house.
I feel like somebody would be more apt to tell me about issues they’re having with something like the air conditioner if I’m there. I feel like I lost some points in a review just because I wasn’t there and somebody maybe expected a little more help than they got by being there alone. If you’re going to rent out rooms using Airbnb rooms and you’re going to allow short term stays like these one or two night stays, I hope that this video inspires you to make a plan for what would happen in case of an emergency.
This is critical if you plan on using Airbnb rooms as a house hacking strategy. I learned that canceled bookings, even with unforeseen circumstances, can wreck your reputation on the Airbnb platform. And we narrowly dodged a bullet with this last minute emergency and finding a cleaner that’s been helping me out while I’ve been away. If you want to learn more about hiring a cleaner for your short term rental business the right way, please check out this next video where I explain how to do it correctly for a business as if you are a business owner.
I highly recommend this video if you are thinking about even using Airbnb rooms like I am, because it’s important to have this in place no matter what type of Airbnb listing you have on the platform, check it out right here.