Every short-term rental owner knows that guests judge one thing above all else. Cleanliness. You can have a great location, a beautifully furnished interior, and an attractive price, but any poorly prepared apartment can end in a negative review, a refund, or the loss of future bookings. The problem usually isn’t that the team cleans poorly. Far more often, it’s the work organization that fails. Discover the 9 most common mistakes that occur when organizing cleaning, and how to avoid them.
Planning cleanings in Excel or on paper
In the early days of the business, this approach is often enough. But as the number of bookings grows, mistakes become easy to make. You have to manually check the calendar, rewrite dates, and inform staff about every task and change. The more apartments you have, the greater the risk of error.
What should you do?
First and foremost, make sure the entire team works from a single source of information. A common mistake is running Excel, Google Calendar, and WhatsApp communication all at once. In that kind of setup, discrepancies happen very easily. If the work plan changes during the day, make sure the employee confirms receipt of the new task. Simply sending a message doesn’t guarantee it’s been seen. It’s a simple way to reduce misunderstandings and missed cleanings. As the number of apartments keeps growing, it’s worth considering automating this process. For example, integrating IdoBooking with Lula.Cleaning allows cleaning tasks to be created automatically based on bookings, so there’s no need to plan every cleaning manually. It also eliminates the need to manually copy every booking into the cleaning schedule.
Forgotten cleaning after checkout
This is one of the most costly mistakes. A guest arrives, and the apartment hasn’t been prepared.
The result?
- A negative review
- A complaint resulting in a refund = a lost booking
- Stress for the entire team
How to prevent it?
Introduce a simple rule: every checkout must have an assigned cleaning task. Even if the same person handles it every day, the task should exist and be marked as completed. Another good practice is a daily review of all scheduled checkouts. A few minutes each morning is enough to make sure no apartment has been overlooked. If bookings change frequently, automatically generating tasks based on the booking calendar significantly reduces the risk of mistakes. Lula.Cleaning automatically pulls booking information and creates cleaning tasks for your team based on it, preventing missed cleanings and their consequences.
Everyone cleans “their own way”
One person makes the bed differently. Another doesn’t check the coffee machine. A third forgets about the balcony. The guest only sees the end result.
Best practice
Every apartment should have a checklist. It can include, among other things:
- bedding,
- towels,
- coffee machine,
- refrigerator,
- air conditioning,
- toilet paper,
- balcony,
- restocking toiletries,
- and similar items.
Prepare a checklist for each type of apartment and make sure the entire team uses it. This helps new employees get up to speed faster, and ensures the cleaning standard stays the same regardless of who performs the task — so guests always arrive at a perfectly prepared unit. Revisit the checklist every few months and add items that come up most often in guest reviews.
No confirmation that work has been completed
Is the apartment ready yet? Is everything going according to plan, or has a problem come up? If answering these questions requires a phone call or a message every time, it means the process isn’t properly organized. With two or three apartments, this usually isn’t a major issue — but with a dozen or dozens of properties, this kind of back-and-forth can end up eating several hours a week.
Best practice
Every task should have a clearly defined status, visible to everyone involved in the process. For example:
- pending,
- in progress,
- completed.
It’s a simple change, but it significantly improves work organization. The manager doesn’t need to call every employee to ask whether they’ll finish before the next guest arrives. One glance at the system is enough to know which units are ready, which are being cleaned, and which still need attention. In Lula.Cleaning, the task status updates in real time as the cleaning progresses. Additionally, once the work is done, the team can add photos of the completed service, report any issues, or share additional notes about the apartment. This gives the manager not just confirmation that the cleaning is done, but a full picture of the situation before the next guest arrives. The biggest benefit, though, is time saved. The fewer calls, messages, and status check-ins, the more time you can spend on growing the business and taking care of guests, instead of on day-to-day team coordination.
No photo documentation
A guest reports a stained sofa. The cleaning was done the day before. How do you prove what condition the apartment was in and who’s responsible for the stain? Without photos, all you have are assumptions.
Best practice
After cleaning is finished, it’s worth taking photos of the most important rooms. This isn’t just protection against complaints — it’s also a way to control quality. On top of that, in Lula, photos uploaded to the photo gallery are automatically timestamped. They show the date and time the photo was taken and uploaded to the system. This makes it clear what condition the unit was handed over in and when — and it also prevents the same photo from being uploaded multiple times by cleaning staff.
FUN FACT! Did you know that one company using Lula uploads as many as 1,500 photos a day!
Issues reported by phone or messaging apps
“The lightbulb doesn’t work.” “The lock is jamming.” “The remote is missing.” The message lands on WhatsApp, SMS, or Messenger. A few days later, no one remembers it — the message gets buried among others, and the maintenance person has no idea what the problem is or where it was reported.
Best practice
Stop passing along maintenance issues through texts, messaging apps, or phone calls. Even if it feels faster, these kinds of reports are very easy to overlook. Every issue should be logged in one place, with a short description, a photo, and a priority level. It’s also good practice to immediately assign a responsible person and a deadline as soon as the issue comes in. That way nothing gets lost, and the team always knows exactly what needs fixing. Want visibility into your repair history? No problem! In Lula, you can download a report of completed repairs — and more!
Too many phone calls to the team
“Which apartment are you doing right now?” “What’s my schedule for today?” “I can’t find the entrance.” If you’re making and receiving a dozen calls like this every day, the problem isn’t your staff — it’s the organization.
Best practice
Every team member should have access to their current tasks, instructions, and addresses without needing to contact a coordinator. A clear, organized view of upcoming tasks for the next few days or weeks helps eliminate chaos, cuts down on repetitive questions, and ensures a high standard for every cleaning, completed on time. On top of that, all information related to a specific task is available in one place. For every cleaning, it’s worth including:
- the exact address,
- contact details, if needed,
- entry instructions for the apartment,
- key pickup information or lock codes,
- a checklist,
- photos showing the entrance or other key features of the unit.
This means staff don’t need to call with every question, and the manager doesn’t waste time repeating the same information over and over. In Lula.Cleaning, all of this information is automatically available directly within each task. The team can also use the built-in chat, send photos and voice messages with automatic transcription and translation. This keeps communication organized and always tied to a specific booking.
No plan for emergency situations
Someone on the team gets sick. A guest extends their stay. A booking changes. Without a plan in place, situations like these create chaos.
Best practice
First, make sure all the key information about each apartment is stored in one place and accessible to the whole team. A new person taking over a cleaning shouldn’t have to call and ask about the address, the starting time, how to get into the unit, or what’s expected of them. All of this information should be easy to share directly with the task.
Visibility into team availability is just as important. If you suddenly need to change the day’s plan, it helps to immediately know who has an open slot in their schedule and can take on an extra cleaning. That way, you make the decision in seconds instead of making a dozen phone calls. In Lula.Cleaning, the manager sees the entire team’s work schedule and each person’s availability. In case of a sudden change, one click is enough to reassign the task to another employee. That person immediately receives a notification on their phone with everything they need — the apartment address, cleaning start time, number of arriving guests, checklist, photos, entry instructions, and any notes related to the booking. This way, even in emergency situations, the team can quickly pick up the task, and the risk of delays and missed cleanings is significantly lower.
No automation
The biggest cost in managing a short-term rental business is often not the cleaning itself, but the time spent organizing the work.
- Manually creating tasks.
- Copying bookings by hand.
- Assigning staff.
- Sending messages.
- Checking whether everything was done.
Each of these tasks only takes a few minutes. But across dozens of apartments, that can add up to several hours of work a week.
Best practice
Don’t try to automate everything at once. The biggest gains come from starting with the most repetitive tasks. These are usually:
- automatically creating tasks after checkout,
- assigning the right people,
- automatic notifications for the team,
- checklists assigned to specific apartments,
- reporting maintenance issues,
- reporting completed work.
Once these processes are running smoothly, it’s worth moving on to the next stages of automation. Combining a PMS system like IdoBooking with an operations platform like Lula.Cleaning lets you automate most of the daily tasks involved in preparing an apartment. Bookings sync automatically, tasks are created without manual input, and the entire team works from a schedule that’s always up to date. The biggest benefit, though, isn’t the automation itself. It’s the peace of mind and confidence that even as the number of apartments grows, day-to-day operations stay organized — letting the manager focus on growing the business instead of constantly putting out fires.