Laundry for Your Airbnb: What Mesa Hosts Get Wrong

Mistake one: running one set of linen

This is the big one, and fixing it changes everything else.

With a single set of linen per property, the turnover cannot finish until the wash finishes. Your cleaner is standing around waiting on a dryer, or making beds with sheets that are not quite dry, or you are driving a load somewhere at 2pm.

Run two complete sets per property. The clean set is already in the closet on turnover day. Your cleaner strips the used set, makes the beds immediately, and the dirty set leaves with us. The laundry now runs on a comfortable schedule instead of a deadline.

Three sets if you are doing back-to-back bookings through the winter season.

It is the cheapest operational upgrade available to a host and most people resist it because they are thinking of linen as a cost rather than as capacity.

Mistake two: letting the cleaner do the laundry

Very common, usually folded into the cleaning fee, and worth examining.

You are paying a cleaning rate for laundry time, during the most time-pressured part of the day. Take laundry out and your cleaner does the thing they are good at, faster.

There is also a visibility problem. If the linen is going home with someone, you do not know what machine it is in, what water, what detergent, or whether it is being washed with somebody else's laundry.

Mistake three: treating linen as permanent

Guest linen wears out, and in this region it wears out faster than hosts expect.

Mesa water is hard, and hard water loads towels with mineral until they feel scratchy, and gradually turns whites grey. The usual response is more bleach, which weakens the cotton and accelerates the whole thing. Read why your towels feel scratchy in Arizona for what actually works.

Budget for replacement on a cycle, and be ruthless. A towel you would not want in your own bathroom does not belong in a rental.

Mistake four: ignoring the season

The East Valley calendar is brutal on anyone who plans around an average.

October through April, Mesa, Apache Junction and Gold Canyon fill with winter visitors. Longer stays, higher occupancy, denser turnovers. Then April comes and it empties out.

A linen stock and a laundry arrangement built around July will fail in January, during the exact weeks that pay for your year. Plan around the peak.

Mistake five: underestimating pool towels

If your property has a pool, pool towels are a whole second linen category and they are heavier than everything else you own.

They come back soaked, in volume, and carrying sunscreen. Sunscreen oils and the mineral compounds in the physical formulations are genuinely difficult to wash out, and they are the reason pool towels go grey long before they wear out.

They need hot water and a machine with real capacity. Count them separately when you are working out how much linen you actually need.

Mistake six: no system for what leaves and what comes back

Once a property is running, the failures stop being about washing and start being about logistics.

A cleaner leaves the dirty set somewhere different each time. Clean linen gets put in the wrong closet. Two properties' towels get mixed. Somebody takes the bag home meaning to bring it back.

The fix takes five minutes at setup and then never needs thinking about again. One agreed spot where used linen goes. One agreed spot where clean linen is returned. One named person we contact. If you run several properties, labelled bags per property.

Hosts who skip this usually discover it in month two, on a Friday, with a guest arriving.

What guests actually notice

Nobody writes a review praising clean sheets. They absolutely write reviews about a stain on a pillowcase, a musty smell in the bedding, or towels that feel like sandpaper.

Linen is one of a very small number of things a guest is in physical contact with for eight hours, and it is the first thing they touch after a flight. It punches well above its weight in reviews, and reviews are the entire economics of a rental.

How we work with hosts

We collect from the property, usually on a lockbox or door code, so you do not need to be there. We keep each property's linen separate if you run several. We return it folded and ready to go straight into the closet.

Full detail on Airbnb and short-term rental laundry, and on pickup and delivery across Mesa, Apache Junction, Gilbert, Scottsdale, Tempe, Chandler, Queen Creek and Gold Canyon.

If you run one property with a couple of bookings a month, we will probably tell you a commercial account is not worth it and point you at per pound drop-off instead.

Keep reading

- Why your towels feel scratchy in Arizona - How much does wash and fold laundry cost in Mesa? - How to wash a comforter that will not fit your machine

Get started

Stop building turnovers around a dryer. Call (480) 531-3048 for a quote.