Running a Rental Business

How to Share Your Airbnb Calendar With Your Cleaner

Finding the most efficient way to schedule your cleaner may be easier than you think. We’ve compared the options to best share your Airbnb calendar, helping you determine the most efficient way to share your property’s bookings and streamline communication with your cleaner. This also applies to sharing your Booking.com and Vrbo calendars.

By Nicolette Borlaug Masiya

Last updated: November 20, 2023

Can I Just Share My iCal or Google Calendar?

Yes, you can share your Apple or Google calendars with your cleaner — but we do not recommend it. While this may seem like an easy solution for your scheduling needs, there are some major considerations you need to keep in mind before you click that share button.

Simply sharing your bookings by syncing your iCal or Google calendar with your cleaner will not only limit your usability. It can also lead to some potentially awkward situations down the road.

Before we go over some of the problems with this method of calendar sharing, remember why you are wanting to share your calendar in the first place.

Your goal is to find the best way to tell your cleaner when you would like them to clean your property, right? By directly sharing your calendar, you are actually only telling them when the property is occupied. Let’s get into the potential problems that may arise by going this route.

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1. Unable to Specify Cleaning Dates and Times

You’re only able to share the date range your property is occupied. This means you do not have a way to tell your cleaner when you would like them to clean.

You may need your property cleaned prior to the guest’s stay or right after checkout. Perhaps you’ve added extra COVID-19 precautions and have added a safety buffer between Airbnb cleanings. If you simply share your general calendars, your cleaner is not able to know these details.

hand holding phone with calendar pulled on the screen while sitting in front of opened laptop and notebook

2. Disorganization

Sharing your calendar does not allow you to assign cleaners to specific tasks.

Additionally, you may use more than one booking source from Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com, private bookings, or other sites. In this case, you will need to separately share your booking calendar with your cleaner for each platform. This means multiple calendars and an organizational nightmare.

3. Awkward Exchanges

Once you share your calendar, you cannot un-share. It’s no surprise this may create an awkward conversation with your cleaner.

Down the road, you may want to add more cleaners to your team or replace your existing cleaner altogether. If they have access to your calendar, now your cleaner knows they are no longer exclusive to you.

4. Back-and-Forth Communication

Even after your cleaner has your calendar, you will still need to regularly follow up to ensure confirmation of any booking updates.

Did my cleaner see the new booking added? Did I tell my cleaner when I want the actual cleaning to occur? The conversation continues for any necessary booking changes and so on.

5. Cleaners Know the Schedule, so They May Use It for Themselves

By allowing full calendar access, you are also showing any gap dates between bookings. This allows the opportunity for cleaners to take advantage of an unoccupied property and stay there themselves.

This method of calendar sharing just doesn’t make sense, causing issues both in the short and long term. Most importantly, it does not reach your goal: to find the best way to tell your cleaner when you would like them to clean your property.

Should I Make My Cleaner a Co-Host Instead?

You already have an excellent relationship with your cleaner and trust them to care for your properties with the utmost attention to detail. After all, they help you create a home-away-from-home experience for your guests.

You know you need to share your booking details with them anyway, so why not add them as a co-host to see bookings first-hand? Once you make someone a co-host, you need to understand the problems that may arise due to the increased access your cleaner will now have. Learn more about these potential issues below.

1. Access to Confidential Information

Your earnings, guest data, and other private information from your Airbnb account will now be accessible to your cleaner.

2. More Awkward Exchanges

Just like sharing your iCal or Google calendar, once you add your cleaner as a co-host it is difficult to un-share that information.

Your cleaner will now know when you have stopped using them exclusively, which may cause friction to your relationship. If you decide to work with multiple cleaners, your co-host will now be able to view everyone’s workload and compare it to their own.

3. Continuous Communication Is Needed

Adding a co-host will not solve the communication process to streamline correspondence from booking confirmation to completion of the project, relying on constant follow-up along the way.

At this point you are likely asking yourself: If I can’t share my iCal or Google calendar with my cleaner or make them a co-host, what can I do?

Schedule ahead with Turno and always impress your guests.

Don’t Just Share Your Calendar, Create an Automated Cleaning System

You look for opportunities to make your life easier every day. That’s why finding a solution to help you efficiently manage your schedule is likely one of your top priorities.

The days of manually checking off jobs are behind us. There are now automated solutions to fit your business needs.

Things to consider for an automated cleaning system:

  • Works with multiple cleaners, calendars, and properties
  • Automated confirmations and reminder notifications
  • Cleaning checklists and damage photo documentation
  • Automated payment processing
  • Ability to hide or show calendar details (such as property availability)
  • Recordkeeping for tax purposes
  • Available in a desktop and mobile app

Once you determine the features most important to you, it’s time to find the best option to help you automate your process and ultimately save you time.

Scheduling next clean

Put Your Vacation Rental on Autopilot

What you want is a way to tell your cleaners when to clean your property. You also want to simplify the communication process from booking to project completion, minimizing opportunities for awkward exchanges along the way.

Now is the time to start streamlining your vacation rental operation while keeping productivity in top consideration.

Turno offers hosts a solution to automatically schedule their cleanings based on bookings through a desktop and mobile app. Hosts can manage existing cleaners or find local cleaners who are already part of the Turno marketplace network.

Cleaners use their own app to receive notifications, use cleaning checklists, and send messages and project updates.

How it works:

  • Centralized communication and management for all of your projects
  • Pull your guest calendar from Airbnb, Vrbo, Homeaway, or other major booking platforms and channel managers into one central location
  • Work and communicate with your existing cleaners or find a new cleaner on Turno’s marketplace
  • Schedule cleanings with automatic assignments, delegation, and acceptance
  • Create and upload cleaning checklists
  • Promptly pay your cleaners using autopay

From guest booking to confirmed cleaning with zero-touch. No more waiting to see if your property will be ready for your next guest. Turno helps ease the operational burden by communicating and coordinating with your cleaners to create a more efficient, shared calendar experience.

Request a free demo to learn more about our automation solutions.

Nicolette Borlaug Masiya Avatar
Nicolette Borlaug Masiya , Nicolette Borlaug Masiya is the Director of Marketing at Turno.