In a perfect world, we would receive 5-star reviews all the time and all of our guests would be satisfied. But as the saying goes, “you can’t please everyone!” So what do you do when you get a bad cleaning review and the place isn’t up to the guest’s expectations?
I receive a majority of 5-star reviews from guests that are satisfied with my condos, but every once in a while there is somebody who doesn’t like what they see. I recently had one guest say she did not find the condo as clean as she wanted it to be. She ended up getting a different place so I gave her a full refund. After all, I want all of my guests to be satisfied with my condos.
Talk to your Cleaner
I was then tasked with the interesting situation of how to bring up the bad review to my cleaner. What would we do about it going forward? I wanted to bring it up as diplomatically as possible. Making sure my cleaner felt like we were on the same team was very important. I didn’t want to be against her because of one occasional bad cleaning review.
So I wrote her a text telling her what had happened. I made sure to include a lot of praise on how happy I was with her work. All of our good reviews were also mentioned. I then asked if she could meet me at the condo to go over some of the points the guest had stated.
This was all very well received by my cleaner. Addressing the situation with a positive light really helped. We did indeed meet at the condo to go over the things the guest had mentioned. On a list, we came up with some improvements that could be made with cleaning. We also listed some things that the handyman could do to improve certain aspects of the unit.
My cleaner wasn’t disgruntled at all and ended up cleaning the unit again at no extra charge. By making her feel like a member of my team, she was willing to correct the situation. Remaining on good terms with my cleaner felt great.
Create a Cleaning Checklist
I also recently discovered TurnoverBnB has some wonderful cleaning checklist templates. You are able to create your own under “My checklists.” I will be working with my cleaner to create two checklists for our condos, one for each of them, specific to each condo’s needs.
There are also some public checklists under “popular checklists.” These have been created by people who are experienced in condo management. They can be adjusted to your needs and you can add or subtract the tasks that aren’t pertinent.
