Part 5: Redesigning vacation rental cleaning — rising rates and the cleanliness you actually need

BUSINESS SERIES ── Part 5

Last time we mapped the three-party profit structure of vacation rental operations. Notably, for cleaning vendors, "more cleanings / higher rates" is the revenue driver, which doesn't align with the owner's direction.

This time we get into how to design that cleaning from the owner's perspective. Not cost-cutting tactics — a conversation about "what kind of cleanliness does my property actually need?"

Rising cleaning rates and the absence of skilled labor

In the past few years, vacation rental cleaning rates have gone up dramatically.

Two reasons overlap. First, labor costs have risen due to a shortage of workers. This isn't unique to vacation rentals — it's a structural shift across service industries. Second, vacation rental and short-term rental supply has surged since COVID. The increase in supply on the demand side has turned into a tug-of-war over a limited pool of cleaning labor.

On top of that, skilled cleaning workers left the industry during COVID. Many were absorbed into hotels. The people currently handling vacation rental cleaning are largely less experienced. "Rates have gone up, but quality hasn't necessarily followed" — that's been the situation for the last few years.

Cleanliness is paramount. But "hotel standard" is overkill.

The importance of cleaning doesn't change. The first thing that drives reviews and repeat bookings is cleaning quality. We approach operations with a sense that hospitality isn't service work — it's cleaning work.

That said, "hotel-standard cleanliness" isn't the right answer for vacation rentals.

Hotels are built on the premise of daily deep cleaning, run by a fixed cleaning workforce sized to room count (we covered this in Part 3). Vacation rentals, by contrast, run on per-checkout outsourced cleaning. The cost structure and labor structure are both different. Applying the same standard balloons cost without realistically reaching hotel-equivalent quality.

The real lever is controlling where guest expectations are set. Aiming for perfect cleaning is a given. But if guests come to assume "not a single hair on the floor is normal," the operation can't sustain that. Treating each cleaning seriously inside a relationship where small things are accepted as "these things happen" — that balance keeps both the operator's stamina and guest satisfaction at workable levels.

It's worth knowing as a baseline that Japan's cleaning expectations are clearly higher than the global average. Traveling around the world via Airbnb, we feel that Japan's cleanliness is, on the whole, almost excessive. Japanese guests' expectations have been pulled up to that level too.

The right approach depends on your target. If you operate primarily for Japanese guests or brand the property as a hotel or villa, perfect cleaning is a clear value proposition. If you're aiming for an Airbnb-style experience for Western or digital-nomad guests, defining a "necessary and sufficient" line and aligning expectations to it is often the better optimization for both cost and satisfaction.

This is also part of the trickle-down design we've covered: revenue model → LOS → facility / experience design.

Division of cleaning in the Airbnb worldview

Worth understanding here: what Airbnb originally set out to provide isn't a polished accommodation service so much as a "place." Lending a slice of the host's life — sharing the home as place. That was the starting point of the sharing economy.

So not every guest expects a uniformly high cleaning standard. Looking across Airbnb listings, properties that don't offer any in-stay cleaning, plans without towels — without sheets, even — are common.

Airbnb's amenity list includes "cleaning supplies" as a standard category: vacuum cleaner, mop, detergent, sponges. These are positioned as equipment guests can use as needed during their stay.

Pay particular attention to the last row: where cleaning supplies live. This single thing reveals the designer's worldview at a glance.

A property that hides cleaning supplies in the back of a closet or on an unreachable shelf is designed in the hotel-extension mindset. A property designed in the Airbnb worldview keeps cleaning supplies in the same kind of accessible spot as amenities — somewhere a guest naturally reaches.

"Can a guest wipe up a spill immediately?" "Can they find the right tool to tidy the kitchen after cooking?" — these small considerations directly affect whether guests feel like they can "live in" the place.

Is linen supply really the best?

Alongside cleaning, linen is the other recurring debate. By "linen supply" we mean: renting sheets and towels from a linen vendor at a per-piece rate, returning them used and unwashed. For cleaning vendors, this is a rational option — quick to execute, easy to keep visually fresh every turn, and the cost passes through to the owner. The selling points "hygienic" and "fewer cleaning hours" are factually right.

That said, hotel-oriented linen supply is designed around appearance, maintainability, and durability — optimized, you could say, for short turnover. For long-stay properties, this isn't necessarily ideal. With long stays, factors that linen supply tends not to optimize for — texture, absorbency, how the fabric softens after washing — directly affect comfort.

"Hygiene," "comfort," "cost" — which one matters most depends on the property's concept and the experience you want to deliver. A short-turnover, hotel-style property fits linen supply well. A long-stay-focused property may deliver more experience value with owner-supplied linens plus a laundry vendor.

"Because the cleaning vendor recommends linen supply" isn't the place to start. Start from "what's optimal for my property."

Conclusion — those who can do it themselves end up strongest

The best way to keep cleaning costs down while preserving quality is simple.

The owner does it. Or asks a trusted neighbor.

We touched on this last time but it deserves repeating. If you can control your own expectations and have time to spend, doing it yourself produces the best result on both quality and cost.

Benefits stacked up:

• You can verify the property's state with your own eyes every turn — improvement decisions come faster. Staff training cost is zero.
• Check-out / check-in timing has flexibility, allowing you to accommodate guest requests.
• Seeing the post-checkout state with your own eyes lets you understand how guests use the space and what equipment-level issues exist.
• Your own experience builds the foundation for later hiring part-time staff and handing off cleanly.
• The biggest cash outflow in vacation rentals — cleaning — disappears, directly improving revenue.

Until pregnancy and childbirth made it physically impossible, we ran all our cleaning ourselves and with part-time helpers. It wasn't efficient. But because we kept doing it on the ground, we accumulated all of it inside ourselves: where the work piles up, what can be simplified, which review traces back to which step in the cleaning process. As we now shift to outsourcing, that accumulated experience holds up the precision of our operational decisions.

This is similar to opening a restaurant. Most restaurants run by the owner, family, and friends at first, accumulate know-how, scale up gradually, and add staff as needed. Vacation rental cleaning is the same. Establishing your own template before delegating tends to produce higher operating quality than handing it off blindly from day one.

At scale, transitioning to outsourcing is necessary. But during early launch or small-scale operation, we'd suggest doing the cleaning yourself at least once. The insights you pick up on the ground meaningfully raise the precision of every operational decision afterward.

Cleaning tends to be discussed only in cost terms, but the underlying topic is "what kind of stay experience do I want to deliver?" Not chasing hotel standard blindly, designing the cleanliness that's right for your property — that perspective is the starting point for optimizing both cost structure and guest experience.

Next time we cover guest communication and message handling — the operational counterpart to cleaning. We'll talk about the structural reason that the more you build out manuals and warning signs, the more "Airbnb-ness" disappears.