A same-day turnover gives you about four hours between a 10am check-out and a 4pm check-in, minus travel. Everyone knows this. What fewer hosts have done is work out which four hours' worth of tasks actually cause the failures, because it is not the cleaning.
In three years of running turnovers, the arrival-day complaints broke down like this:
- Missing consumables (loo roll, bin bags, coffee, dishwasher tablets) — by far the most common
- Something left on (heating cranked to 26°C, every light, a window)
- A previous guest's item found later — a charger in a drawer, hair in the shower drain
- The bed made with the wrong linen or a stained set that wasn't spotted
Notice that none of these is "the flat was dirty". Cleaners clean. What goes wrong is everything around the cleaning, and that is a checklist problem.
Structure the list by room, then by height
Cleaners move through space, not through categories. A checklist organised as "dusting / bathrooms / kitchen" forces mental re-sorting and gets skipped. A list organised room by room, in the order a person physically walks, gets followed.
Within each room, order top to bottom: light fittings and shelves, then surfaces, then floor. This is how cleaning works anyway, and the checklist that matches the real motion is the checklist that gets read.
Put the consumables on their own page
This is the single change that removed most of my arrival complaints. Consumables are an inventory job. They need counting, and counting is a different motion from cleaning, which is why it gets lost inside a cleaning list.
My list, with numbers, because "restock toilet paper" is not an instruction:
- Toilet roll: 2 on the holder, 4 in the cupboard, per bathroom
- Kitchen roll: 1 out, 1 spare
- Bin bags: 1 in each bin, 5 folded under the kitchen sink
- Dishwasher tablets: 6 in the jar
- Coffee: 1 unopened bag; 12 pods if the machine takes pods
- Tea: 10 bags
- Sugar, salt, pepper, oil: present and at least a third full
- Hand soap: at least a third full, in all three dispensers
- Shower gel and shampoo: at least a third, refilled from the 5L bottle in the cupboard
- Sponges: 1 new, old one binned every time
- Tea towels: 2 clean
Numbers convert judgement calls into yes/no checks. "At least a third full" is the important phrase — a bottle a cleaner judges as "fine" on Tuesday is empty by Thursday, and the guest who runs out of shampoo mid-shower remembers it.
The photo protocol
Ask for the same four photos on every single turnover, taken from the same spots:
- The made bed, from the doorway
- The kitchen worktop, from the same corner every time
- The bathroom, from the door
- The open fridge
Four photos, thirty seconds. They do three things. They give you a dated record if a guest claims the place was dirty on arrival. They let you spot a missing item before the guest does. And — the part nobody expects — they raise the standard on their own, because a bed that will be photographed gets made differently.
Standardising the angle matters more than the count. Photos from the same spot are comparable week to week, and you notice the lampshade that has been crooked for a month.
The eight-item exit walk
The last thing before the cleaner locks up, and the list that catches the expensive mistakes:
- Thermostat set back to 18°C (or your baseline)
- All windows shut and latched, including the bathroom
- Oven and hob off, dishwasher empty and door ajar
- Every light off except the hall lamp on its timer
- Bins emptied, including the bathroom bin
- Blinds and curtains set to the position you want guests to see
- Keys back in the lockbox, code scrambled
- Photos sent
That list takes ninety seconds and prevents a £40 heating bill, a burglary, a flood, and a lockout.
Lost property, decided in advance
Decide the policy once, write it into the cleaner's instructions, and never improvise:
Everything found goes into one labelled box with the date and the unit. Nothing is thrown away for 14 days, except food, opened toiletries, and underwear. Chargers, glasses, jewellery and documents get photographed and messaged to you the same day so you can contact the guest before they have left the country. After 14 days, unclaimed items are donated.
The reason to write this down is that improvised lost-property handling is where host-cleaner relationships go wrong — one bin-bagged designer scarf and the trust is gone.
Two spare sets of everything
Three sets of linen per bed, not two. Two shower curtains. A spare kettle in the cupboard. The economics are obvious once something fails at 11am on a Saturday: a £25 spare kettle sitting in a cupboard for two years is cheaper than one hour of your Saturday and a guest's first impression.
Give the cleaner the same document the guest gets
The thing I did last and should have done first: give the cleaner access to the property's guidebook. They know where the stopcock is, what the WiFi is, which bin goes out on Tuesday, and what the guest has been told. A cleaner who can answer a guest's question at the door — because they read the same page the guest did — has just saved you a phone call and made your property look coordinated.