Interior Design

How to Discover the Messes Hidden in Your Airbnb

Yikes! How long has that been there?

Sound Familiar?

Pesky Problem

Your next Airbnb guests found the gross mess before you did.

Bacon grease pooled at the bottom of the stove. Mold growing in the forgotten coffee grounds. Sticky dog urine caked on the rug between the coffee table and the couch.

These are all messes we’ve discovered in Airbnbs as guests. How did we discover them? We were just living in the space. Bacon grease: We started baking cookies for a movie night and suddenly the house was filled with smoke. Coffee mold: We went to make our morning coffee and found the last guest’s petri dish waiting for us. Sticky dog urine: I walked on the rug barefoot. Enough said.

And here’s the catch: these messes weren’t in gross Airbnbs. To the contrary! We discovered each of these messes in otherwise spotless accommodations. We’re confident that if any of these hosts knew we had bumped into these messes, they would have been absolutely mortified. That’s why they were so memorable: because they were completely unexpected. (And gross to clean up.) Each mess was hidden in a weird, tucked away place, and just wasn’t caught by the otherwise excellent cleaning routine.

Let's Try This

Bite-Size Solution

End every Airbnb cleaning routine with a final walk through.

The solution is to add one final walk through at the end of your cleaning routine. Take five minutes and go looking for unexpected messes. Open up what you know shouldn’t need to be cleaned this time, like stoves, microwaves, drawers, nightstands. Get tactile. Run your hands over surfaces and walk through the space barefoot, just like your guests will.

And most importantly, challenge yourself to take a slightly different route each time you do your final walk through. Carve a new path through your space and shine the spotlight of your attention on different places. This type of randomness can actually be the perfect complement to a rigid cleaning checklist (which, don’t get us wrong, is still totally necessary! Remember the dusty bed situation?) This type of spontaneous cleaning can illuminate blindspots otherwise missed by your rinse-and-repeat clearing routine.

5 Minutes

Here's Your First Step

Write down 5 places where you think messes might be hiding.

Now for the fun part. Before you actually do your first walk though hunting for hidden messes in your Airbnb, challenge yourself to think through where they might be. Any guesses? Anywhere you’re scared to look? Under furniture? Inside lamp shades? Inside the bottom of garbage cans? (Yep, guests see this each time they take out the trash.) Jotting down your ideas ahead of time will help you make the most of your first mess scavenger hunt.

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