Airbnb can be a fantastic way to make some extra cash. If you have extra room in your home you can become an airbnb host. This means offering your home or part of your home out to on a short term rental and airbnb manage the listing and transfer of money. This experience offers the airbnb guests and yourselves some peace of mind.
A common goal for hosts, is to provide a quality guest experience, this helps you get good reviews and improve the visibility and profitability of your airbnb listing. Depending on your goal; earning a bit of extra cash or setting up a full-time airbnb business, you need to make sure your home is ready.
In this article we’re going to look at some tricks and tips that you can do to your home to make it Airbnb ready and provide your guests a high quality experience.
Clean
Having a clean property goes without saying when you’re renting it out short term. Most reviews will mention the cleanliness of an apartment so making sure that it’s clean will help you get a great review.
Airbnb will let you add a cleaning fee to your property. This is particularly helpful if you have to hire in a cleaner due to lack of time or not being near the property.
When you are cleaning, make sure you pay attention to rooms that often carry the most bacteria, such as the kitchen and bathrooms. Guests will pay particular attention to the cleanliness of these rooms, and they are often the muckiest room due to the nature of them.
Make sure your windows and mirrors are clean and sparkling. If you have an impressive view from your airbnb then make sure this isn’t obstructed by streaks and fingerprints over the window. The same applies to any mirrors you may have throughout the property.
Bedroom
The bedroom is arguably the most important room in an Airbnb. Guests staying over expect a certain standard in the bedroom and achieving this standard will help you get better reviews and more guests.
Make sure that every time you have a new guest that the bed linen is changed. It should be obvious that you have new bedding on and that it’s spotlessly clean. If you have bedding that’s stained, it’s important that you throw that away and get some fresh ones.
Depending on how long a guest stays for, you may want to have some spare bed linen available. Having extra pillows available means that the guest can treat themselves to an extra comfy bed if they want.
Make sure that all of the bedroom is thoroughly cleaned and dusted down before your guest arrives. This means vacuuming behind wardrobes, underneath the bed and dusting any window sills (there’s nothing worse than sleeping in a dusty room).
Make sure that you have an empty space to hang clothes for your guests. It’s quite common that hosts will forget to provide any wardrobe space for guests. Having wardrobes installed in the bedroom will offer optional storage spaces for clothing that should be hung up.
Offering an iron and ironing board means that your guests won’t have creased clothing, which is often the case when travelling with clothes.
There are lots of different ways that you can make a guest room feel welcoming, such as adding the right lighting to make sure it feels cosy and comfortable. Adding bedside table lamps will help your guest feel settled in. When they’re ready to go to sleep they won’t need to get out of bed to turn off the lights.
Clutter Free
It’s important that your home is clutter-free for when your guest arrives. Having clutter around will feel like it’s not be cleaned or tidied. Of course remove or lock away important documents, passwords and expensive jewellery etc.
Keep certain personal items such as photographs of you and your family and your own personal interior design touches in. These personal touches can help your guest feel more at home and get to know who you are better.
Our range of sliding wardrobe doors are all custom designed and built to create a seamless fitted wardrobe effect. We have a wide range of colours and finishes available to help fit your wardrobes in with your existing decor.
Little Touches
The little touches in an airbnb is what separates the hosts from the airbnb superhosts! Having easy to access contact details such as a phone number for general queries is a great idea, especially if you have a property manager looking after it. A lot of your potential guests will be looking for places with wifi, so making sure that the wifi is accessible and the password is clearly labelled can help improve the guest experience.
Making sure that all the amenities are replenished before your guests arrive is important. It’s also important that they’re easily accessible and on show so that your guest knows where to go for replacements. Here’s a list of amenities that should be replenished before guests arrive
- Coffee
- Milk (or milk alternatives)
- Tea
- Sugar
- Sweeteners
- Shower gel
- Shampoo
- Conditioner
- Soap
- Toilet paper
- Towels
- Travel Toothbrushes
- Toothpaste
You may want to invest in some extra bits that your guests won’t be travelling with to help make their stay a little bit more comfortable.
- Bottle opener
- Books
- Board games
- First aid kit
Interior Design
If you’re preparing your property specifically for holiday, short-term or airbnb lets, then you may want to do some interior design to make it more attractive and more functional.
Keep the design as neutral as possible and not garish. Using a colour pallette often found in a design trend such as hygge will help keep the rooms calm and neutral.
Encourage as much storage space as possible. Because you’ll be replenishing amenities and changing the bed linens more often than you would at home, then you’ll be requiring some extra storage. You can utilise some chimney breasts and alcoves with some of our made to measure sliding doors to create a functional and good looking storage unit.
Replacing your flooring or carpets can help massively with the overall look and feel of your apartment. Because your airbnb guests are less likely to look after your carpets as well as you would, you might want to opt for darker colour carpets as they stain less.
There are lots of different ways to make sure that your home is ready for short-term or airbnb lets, hopefully you’ve picked up some tips and tricks from this article.
