How clean is clean enough for a Nairobi Airbnb?

Cleanliness is the review category most hosts think they are doing well in and most frequently are not. The gap is that hosts assess a room by standing in the doorway and looking at it, and guests assess it by touching eleven specific things. One of those eleven becomes the entire review.

Tidy and clean are different jobs

A tidy apartment has everything put away, the bed made and the surfaces clear. That is what most turnovers achieve and it photographs perfectly.

A clean apartment has no hair anywhere, no limescale, no smears, no dust on the skirting, nothing sticky, and no smell. Guests do not consciously audit this. They notice one thing, and then they look for more, and having started looking they find it.

A guest who finds one hair in the bathroom stops trusting the whole apartment. Then they check the mattress protector, and by then you have lost the review.

The eleven places guests actually check

1. The shower drain and the corners of the shower tray.Hair here is the single most damaging discovery in a short let
2. The toilet, including the base, the hinges and behind it.The bit that gets missed is exactly the bit that gets photographed
3. Under the pillows and inside the pillowcases. Guests check, and a stained pillow protector is a hygiene complaint rather than a laundry one
4. The mattress itself, under the sheet. Always use a mattress protector, always wash it, and replace it when it stains
5. The kettle interior. Scale reads as filth
6. The fridge, especially the seals and the salad drawer.Previous guests leave things behind and smells linger
7. The microwave interior. Never opened during a normal clean, always opened by a guest
8. Behind and under the sofa cushions. Crumbs, hair clips, coins, other people’s belongings
9. The bin. Empty is not the same as clean. Wash it and replace the liner
10. Window sills, skirting boards and the tops of door frames. Nairobi is dusty and this accumulates fast
11. The smell on opening the door. The first sensory impression, and the hardest to fix retrospectively. A closed apartment in Nairobi goes stale in a week

The Nairobi specific problems

• Dust. In the dry season it settles daily. A unit cleaned four days ago and left empty is dusty again. Wipe surfaces before every check in, even if nobody has stayed
• Hard water. Limescale on taps, shower screens and kettles builds visibly. Descaling is a routine job, not an occasional one
• Staleness in closed units. Air the apartment before arrival. Open everything for an hour
• Damp during the rains. Check for mildew in bathrooms and behind wardrobes on outside walls. A musty smell is read as a serious hygiene problem
• Insects. Even a clean unit gets the occasional visitor. Keep drains covered, food sealed, and treat the kitchen periodically

A checklist beats a good cleaner

The single most useful thing to understand about cleaning is that standards which depend on the person are not standards. Your excellent cleaner will one day be ill, and whoever covers has no idea what you expect.

• Write it room by room, in the order the work should be done, including the eleven items above explicitly
• Make it specific. “Clean bathroom” is not an instruction. “Check shower drain for hair, descale taps and screen, wipe behind toilet base” is
• Require photographs. Four after every clean: bed, bathroom, kitchen counter, living area. It takes 90 seconds and it changes behaviour permanently because it is checkable
• Include the resets, which are not cleaning and are always forgotten: water heater on, electricity topped up, air conditioning default, wifi router on, consumables restocked
• Pay properly and pay on time. The cheapest cleaner in Nairobi is the most expensive decision in short let hosting, because the review costs more than the saving many times over

Turnover clean and deep clean are not the same

A turnover clean happens between guests and takes a couple of hours. A deep clean happens monthly or quarterly and covers what turnovers never reach.

• Behind and under all furniture and appliances
• Inside the oven, the fridge seals, the extractor filter
• Curtains and soft furnishings washed or cleaned
• Mattress protectors and duvets laundered, not just the sheets
• Grout, silicone and shower screens descaled properly
• Windows inside and out where reachable
• Light fittings and shades, which collect dust and insects

Schedule these in the quiet months. April and May are the natural window in Nairobi, when the calendar is soft anyway. See occupancy month by month.

How Goldstay handles it

Every managed unit has a written room by room checklist including the resets, and every turnover produces photographs. Deep cleans are scheduled rather than requested. It is the least glamorous part of what we do and the part that most reliably protects a rating.

If you would rather not run any of this yourself, it is what our Airbnb management service in Nairobi exists to do.

Related reading: holding standards from abroad and how to get from 4.6 to 4.9.