Holiday rental cleaning checklist: team and guest

The essentials. A cleaning checklist for a holiday rental comes in two parts. The first is for the team: bathroom, kitchen, bedding, floors, consumables, technical checks, in that order, with a final look from the doorway. The second is for the guest, displayed in the property: washing-up, bins, thermostat, keys, departure time. Those five lines decide part of your turnaround time, and Airbnb sets out precisely what you are allowed to write in them.

Everything below is written to be copied straight across: the headings for the team checklist, then the exact wording for departure instructions, the wording that gets the job done without costing you a review.

What goes into the cleaning checklist between two stays?

The order matters as much as the content. A checklist that starts with the floors means hoovering again after cleaning the bathroom, and a checklist that ends with consumables means forgetting them when the next guest turns up at 3 pm.

The sequence that works: bathroom, kitchen, bedding and linen, floors, consumables, technical checks. From the dirtiest to the most visible, from the longest to the quickest.

The last item cleans nothing at all. You stand in the doorway, you walk in the way a guest does, and you look at what they see first. In almost every property, what they see first is not what you spent the longest cleaning.

Area	The step that gets skipped on a busy day	The review or phone call it prevents
Bathroom	Shower waste, grouting, underside of the toilet seat, tooth mug	“Clean at first glance”, the phrase that costs you a star
Kitchen	Inside of the oven, extractor filter, fridge seal, coffee machine drip tray	The guest who opens the oven on the first evening and takes a photo
Bedding and linen	Under the beds, mattress protector, a spare sheet left in the wardrobe	The 11 pm call after a glass is knocked over on a bed
Floors	Corners, under the furniture, door thresholds, terrace	Bare feet that carry sand straight into the review
Consumables	Toilet roll, bin bags, sponge, salt, capsules, spare bulb	The message that same evening, always on a Sunday
Checks	Wi-Fi tested on a phone, heating, remote controls, key safe closed again	“I’m outside and the key safe won’t open”

The right-hand column is the right way to sort a checklist. A line that prevents neither a call nor a comment can go, and an incident that happens twice is a line to add. It is the same principle as the welcome book template, section by section: you don’t judge it on the number of headings, you judge it on the questions it closes.

What you may ask of a guest, and what is off limits

This is the half of the subject nobody covers, and yet it is the half that is set down in writing.

Up to date as of 16 September 2026. In its host resource centre, Airbnb suggests building your departure instructions from five common tasks: gathering used towels, taking out the rubbish, turning off appliances, locking up and returning the keys. You can add requests specific to your property. The platform states that guests expect a simple departure, with no cleaning tasks.

The ground rules for guests go further, and in both directions. A guest must not leave the property in a state that requires excessive or deep cleaning. On the other side, the cleaning fee you set is only meant to cover standard cleaning between two bookings, and you are not allowed to charge a guest a fee for failing to complete a departure task. You do, however, keep the right to mention it in your review (ground rules for guests staying in a home).

There is a penalty on the other side too, and it bites harder than a review. After checking out, a guest can report “excessive checkout tasks”, and Airbnb states that listings that build up these reports may be removed from the platform. Asking someone who has paid a cleaning fee to do a full clean is therefore not just clumsy: it puts the listing at risk.

The departure checklist to display in the property

Five to seven lines, never more. Guests read them on the last morning, with a case open and a train to catch; anything below the fold on a phone screen goes unread.

Departure before 10 am. Please start the dishwasher before you go, we’ll empty it when we arrive. Rubbish goes in the store at the back of the courtyard: grey bag on the left, packaging in the yellow bin, food waste in the small brown bin. Leave the thermostat at 15 °C and close the windows. Keys go back in the key safe, code 3080. We’ll take care of the rest.

Every line has a reason to be there. The washing-up and the bins remove the two jobs that cost the team the most time, because they happen while you wait. The thermostat avoids the bill for heating at 22 °C over three empty days. The keys avoid an extra trip. And the last sentence, “we’ll take care of the rest”, does more for your rating than the other five put together.

Waste sorting deserves a note, because it is the instruction most often wrong in welcome books. Since 1 January 2024, under the 2020 French anti-waste law, separate collection of food waste at source has been extended to every household, with arrangements that vary from one local authority to the next. Write down the rule for your own commune, with the colour of the bin and the collection day. A guest who sorts wrongly costs you a bag to do again.

The wording that gets the job done without costing you a review

The content is easy enough to find. It is the tone that decides whether the instruction is followed.

Three rules, drawn from what we read in our hosts’ welcome books. Always give the reason: “the team arrives at 10.30 am to prepare for the next check-in” gets you an on-time departure, “departure at 10 am, no exceptions” gets you an argument. Say what you take care of before you say what you are asking for. And write in the present tense rather than the imperative: “keys go back in the key safe” lands better than “put the keys back in the key safe”, for exactly the same result.

What puts people’s backs up, on the other hand: capital letters, bold type on the prohibitions, penalty amounts, and the fourteen-point list taped to the fridge door. A guest who feels policed says so in their review, in a sentence nobody will take down for you.

The same text does double duty without being rewritten. Airbnb automatically sends a checkout reminder with your instructions, the day before at 5 pm in the property’s time zone, to guests who have the app and notifications switched on. So copy the same five lines into your Airbnb checkout instructions and into your welcome book: the evening before to prepare, the morning itself to act.

Where to write these instructions so they actually get read

A frame in the hallway, a message the day before, a page in the welcome book. All three, with the same text everywhere.

The laminated sheet has a well-known flaw: it is wrong the moment anything changes. The bin collection day moves, the key safe code is changed after a difficult departure, the team’s slot shifts from 10 am to 11 am in high season. A digital welcome book can be corrected in a minute for every upcoming stay, which is exactly the problem lamination cannot solve. Put all the cleaning information in the departure module, for instance. Your guests then only have to open that module to find the instructions you have given.

For the questions that remain, the assistant that answers guests from the content of the welcome book handles the ones you didn’t anticipate, provided the answer is written somewhere in the welcome book. If there is nothing about waste sorting, it doesn’t invent anything, and you are the one who gets the message.

How to organise the team on a turnaround day

A turnaround day hinges on three pieces of information: the actual time the property is vacated, the arrival time of the next guest, and the state the property has been left in. The first two come from your calendar. Nobody has the third before opening the door, unless the guest has flagged it.

Hence the value of closing the loop: a departure form in the welcome book, two questions, “are you on your way?” and “anything to report?”. A broken glass reported at 9.40 am costs five minutes. The same glass discovered at 2 pm costs you a delayed check-in. The check-in and check-out module and the condition report photos for a holiday rental are there for that first and foremost, long before they are there for a dispute.

Where the checklist lives	How the team uses it	What happens when an instruction changes in July
Laminated sheet in the cupboard	Read once, then never again	It stays wrong until the end of the season
Messaging group	Everyone hunts for the right message in the thread	The new instruction comes up, then sinks below the photos
Checklist in a shared tool	Ticked off property by property, with a timestamp	Corrected once, visible to everyone on the next turnaround

If you manage several properties, the checklist is never the problem: the problem is that it differs from one property to the next. Same team, same day, six key safes and six bin stores. The property management companies that cope have one checklist per unit, not a generic one, and they manage all their welcome books from a single account so that the version on display is always the right one.

A word on house rules while we’re here: departure instructions hold up better when they repeat what was already written at check-in, in the house rules for the property. A request that appears for the first time on the last morning is received like a surprise invoice.

Frequently asked questions

Can you ask a guest to hoover? No. Airbnb states that guests expect a departure with no cleaning tasks, and a report for excessive checkout tasks can, if it happens repeatedly, cost you the listing. Ask for the washing-up and the bins, and leave the hoovering to the team.

Can you charge extra if the departure instructions weren’t followed? Airbnb’s ground rules forbid it: no fee may be charged to a guest for not completing a departure task. A state requiring exceptional cleaning, or actual damage, is a different matter and can be the subject of a reimbursement request, with evidence.

Should you ask guests to strip the beds? Only if it genuinely helps you. When the team changes all the linen anyway, the request saves a few seconds and leaves a feeling of being put to work. It makes sense if you send the linen to a provider who counts the items, and in that case, say so plainly.

How long does cleaning between two stays take? No standard figure means anything here: it all depends on the size of the property, the linen and the distance. Time three turnarounds in your own property and you’ll have a usable figure, and you’ll finally know what an unstarted dishwasher costs you.

Where should the departure checklist go in the welcome book? In the last section, never on the home page. Guests reach it on the final morning; before then, it just gets in the way. The same lines copied into the platform’s checkout instructions are sent automatically the day before at 5 pm, which is enough to get the departure ready.

Do you need a different checklist for each property? Yes, from the second property onwards. The cleaning areas look alike, but the codes, the bin stores, the collection days and the departure times all differ. A generic checklist produces exactly the oversights it claims to prevent, and the team ends up phoning to check. Keep the same framework of areas, change the details property by property.