A guest checks out at 11. The next one checks in at 4. Somewhere in those five hours, a house that just hosted a bachelorette weekend has to look like nobody has ever slept there.

That’s an Airbnb turnover clean. It’s a different job from cleaning your own house, and it shows up in your reviews faster than anything else you do as a host.

We clean short-term rentals around Austin, and we host our own. Here’s what a turnover should cover, including the parts most checklists skip.

It starts with a walk-through

Before anything gets wiped down, the cleaner should walk every room looking for damage, missing items and anything the last guest left behind. Photos go to the host right away.

Airbnb gives you 14 days after checkout to file a damage claim, and a timestamped photo from checkout day carries a lot more weight than “I’m pretty sure the lamp was fine on Tuesday.”

What every Airbnb turnover clean includes

At a minimum:

• Stripping every bed and putting on fresh linens, including the one that looks untouched (people nap on top of the covers, and you’d never know)
• Fresh bath towels, hand towels, bath mats and kitchen towels
• Bathrooms scrubbed top to bottom: toilet, tub, shower glass, sink, mirror and floor
• A kitchen reset: dishes washed and put away, counters and stovetop wiped, microwave cleaned inside, fridge emptied of leftovers
• Trash and recycling out, with new bags in
• Floors vacuumed and mopped
• Surfaces dusted, plus light switches, door handles and remotes wiped down

Nobody leaves a five-star review because the towels were clean. Plenty of people leave a three-star one because they weren’t.

What guests notice that hosts stop seeing

This is the list that decides most reviews. Guests walk in fresh and see things you stopped noticing months ago.

Hair. One hair in the shower or on a white pillowcase cancels out everything else you did. Check the drains, the base of the toilet and the pillowcases, preferably in daylight.

Under and behind. Guests drop things, and the next guest finds them. Look under every bed, behind the nightstands and between the couch cushions. Nobody wants to discover the last guest’s sock.

The coffee maker. Old grounds in the basket or a brown ring in the carafe. People see this at 7 a.m., before they’ve noticed anything else about the place.

Smell. A spotless house can still smell like the last guest’s takeout. Open the windows if the weather allows, run the HVAC fan, and get the trash all the way out. Skip the heavy air freshener. A clean house mostly smells like nothing.

Outside. Patio chairs, the grill, the front porch. Austin porches pick up a layer of oak pollen every spring and leaves every fall, and nobody wants to sit on a yellow chair with their morning coffee.

Restocking is part of the clean

The clean isn’t done until the supplies are. Toilet paper, paper towels, hand soap, shampoo, dish soap, dishwasher pods, coffee, trash bags. A guest who runs out of toilet paper on day two of a four-day stay will remember it when they write the review.

A good turnover team keeps track of what’s running low and tells you before it runs out, so you aren’t making a Target run between a checkout and a check-in.

Big Austin weekends are their own thing

A few weekends a year, it feels like every rental in town turns over at once: ACL, SXSW, the F1 race at COTA, a big UT home game. Same-day turns get tight, guests show up tired and early, and houses come back rougher than usual.

If you host here, book your cleaning for those dates when you book the guests. The good teams fill up first.

Why hosts hand it off

Lots of hosts clean their own place, especially with one property close to home. It works fine until the same-day turn lands on a workday, or you get sick, or you’re the one leaving town that weekend. Cleaning is the part of hosting with the least room for a bad day.

The other reason is the cleanliness score. Guests rate cleanliness separately from the stay overall, and when it slips, it drags everything else down with it.

The short version

A good Airbnb turnover clean is really three jobs in one visit: inspect, reset and restock. If your cleaner only does the middle one, you’ll end up learning about the broken blinds from a guest review.

If you host in Austin, Pflugerville, Round Rock or Cedar Park and want a team that handles all three, request a quote and tell us about your place. Ready to go? Book a clean.