Our business model is designed to minimise costs for you wherever we can, so that the cost we charge to rent your home can be affordable for families and thus generate more bookings for us all. Adding costs in (such as linen) would force us to pass on those expenses to guests, raising the cost to rent your home, but not generating any additional profit for you.
Why we offer Optional Linen
The reasons we use this approach for linen are:
The cleaner will prepare your home
for all bookings with fixed linen. If guests would like the optional
linen, they pay an additional fee of $30 per bed which is added to the
gross rental of your booking, and more than offsets the cleaner’s
linen-related charges (which is $20 - $25 per bed).
Washing Linen
No charge
Cleaners may wash & dry tea
towels, hand towels and bathmats at your home (and sometimes but not
typically doona covers) to reduce the instances that linen is removed
from your property or take them home/to a laundromat. There is no charge
for this service when done at the home.
Owner to pay
To
reduce costs for owners, we don’t ask cleaners to wash doona covers
& mattress protectors after every stay, but ONLY if required.
Generally, they prefer NOT to wash them, as it's a lot of work and they
don't make appealing money off the service. It's difficult to determine a
'formula' for how often the cleaners should wash the doona
covers/mattress protectors as it depends on how they appear. We could
ask the cleaners to wash them less often but of course then we run the
risk of guests complaining about dirty doona covers, negative reviews,
etc.
These costs should be expected,
will appear on your statement on a regular basis (as ‘Wash Doona
covers/Mattress Protectors etc.’ charged at $20 - $25 per item, sometimes +
GST), and form part of the expected running costs for having a holiday
home (see Expected Running Costs for
more details). If you wash Doona covers / Mattress Protectors during an
Owner Booking, let us know (and which ones) so we can let the cleaner
know they don’t need to do those beds for a while.
Guest to pay
After
a booking where the guest has arranged optional linen, the cleaners
will take the linen home (or to a laundromat) to launder it after their stay. This cost of
$20 - $25 per bed (sometimes + GST) to wash the linen that was ‘rented’ by a
guest, will appear on your statement as ‘Laundry’ and has been (more
than) paid for by the Linen charge paid by the Guest. The linen will
then be returned on their next planned visit to your home. You may
therefore find on occasions that not all your linen is at the home.
There can also be cases where
guests mark/stain linen and they are charged for it – you won’t see this
on your statements nor have visibility of it, as it is charged to
guests, rather than to you.
"Why don't guests pay for cleaning?"
Guests do pay for cleaning, it's just how that is presented that may be different to your own previous experiences (if you've booked accommodation and paid a separate cleaning fee). When Owners join our group, we explain that cleaning costs (after a Guest stay) form part of the
Expected Running Costs for Holiday rental, and make up part of 30-35% of Direct & Indirect Costs (see
Understanding Booking Earnings for more detail).
| Base Rent | Cleaning | Total Rent |
What you may have seen | $800 | $100 | $900 |
How we structure it | $900 |
| $900 |
- This approach is preferred by guests (Airbnb did a lot of research on guest preferences some years ago, and overwhelmingly it was that 'add on' fees are not viewed positively).
- Some websites don't facilitate add-on fees (so if we were to charge them separately, you run the risk of not having them apply at all in certain circumstances)
- When guests see a separate cleaning fee, they can be overly critical of cleaning standards if they view the cost as being high
- If guests comment on cleaning issues and we have them as a separate add-on, websites (such as Airbnb, Booking.com and Stayz/VRBO) can occasionally insist that we refund the guest those fees (ie deduct them from the payout for that booking).
- Websites (such as Airbnb, Booking.com and Stayz/VRBO) rank listings higher if they don't have add-ons. Therefore our listings are 'ranked' higher in search results when people are looking for options
Lost Linen
We
will 100% follow up all cases where this is reported, but unfortunately we are not able to offer a gaurantee that your linen won't be attritioned. If relevant, we
contact guests and check if they've accidently taken linen home - our
Melbourne office is a rotating door of linen being returned to homes. 🙂
The limitations on this should be
noted: if we're not told that linen is missing (or find out some time
after the fact), then we can ask guests re linen, but we may not be able
to insist on them covering costs. Also, to some degree, you should
expect a certain degree of attrition
with linen - the cleaners do their best to keep track of it, but we
encourage owners to think of their linen profit (ie the difference
between what the guest pays per bed and what the cleaner charges per bed
to arrange that) as replacement costs for linen over time where it is either misplaced, or tired/marked.
Setting up your Linen
When first setting up your home
with linen, there are a few considerations and processes that you can
follow to decrease the likelihood of your linen going missing and make
it easier for your cleaner to keep your linen looking good for longer.
Quantities
When you join our group, we will
send you a list of Required Linen to help you ensure there is enough
linen at your home. The quantities required, are based on the ‘perfect
storm’ of a guest ‘renting’ the linen at your home for all beds, and the
next group of guests also ‘renting’ linen for all beds. The document we
send you lists the Required Linen and provides pricing on an
item-by-item basis in case you want us to order some/all the linen from a
wholesale linen supplier. The supplier we use and recommend is:
Linen Cupboard
Make sure all the
required linen is at your home in a locked cupboard and that you label
the shelves with bedding sizes to help the cleaner keep the area
organised. The more space you can provide the cleaner for the linen (and
consumables) the better – they will be better able to manage your
stock, notice if linen is missing, etc. In most cases, it is preferable
NOT to provide tubs for linen as this won't allow the cleaner to
effectively manage your linen (it’s not obvious if something is missing
and it will take longer to sort through/find linen when required,
leading to potential mistakes).
Labelling your linen
Label every piece of linen with
the acronym of your home name (eg The Haven = "TH"). Add a size notation
(K, Q, D, LS, KS, S, etc) for flat sheets, fitted sheets, mattress
protectors & doona covers to assist the cleaner in organising and
tracking your linen (e.g. TH-Q, TH-D, etc). The best way to label your
linen is with a fine tip permanent marker on the hem or tag of EVERY
piece of linen for your home. If you don’t have time to do this when
starting with us, we can arrange the cleaner to do that for you.
Colours & Quality
Some owners have preferences for designs & colours for doona covers, and that’s absolutely
fine. For sheets, the cleaners have found that white is the best colour
(it enables them to use bleach if required) and for towels, hand towels
and bathmats, cleaners have recommended that owners go with muted
colours to help disguise the inevitable makeup marks, etc. The colour
we’ve had some success with over the years is a latte-toned colour.
Please be aware that the quality of linen
should be ‘middle of the road’ - guests don’t want to sleep under pure
polyester sheets/doona covers but also you should NOT leave 3,000
thread-count Egyptian cotton linen out and expect that guests will treat
it the same way you do.