What can you reasonably ask guests to do before checkout?

Ask for five things: trash bagged, dirty dishes loaded into the dishwasher — started is even better — lights and stove off, doors locked, and a quick message about anything broken. That’s the whole list. If your listing charges a cleaning fee, everything past those five items is exactly what the fee is for.

It reads like an etiquette question, but it’s an operations question: some asks buy real minutes for the crew that walks in next, and some save nothing, annoy the guest, and get collected in the review. Let’s take it in order — starting with what the platform already decided for you.

The menu Airbnb hands you says most of it

You don’t have to answer this by taste — Airbnb answered it inside the product. Its checkout-instructions feature gives hosts a fixed menu of task categories — gather used towels, throw trash away, turn things off, lock up, return keys — plus one free-text field for anything else. Guests see those instructions before they book, not after, and Airbnb’s published guidance around the feature is consistent: keep the tasks reasonable, because a guest can flag a list that isn’t. The exact menu and its wording live in Airbnb’s own help centre and can change — read today’s version there, not anyone’s summary of it, this one included.

Look at what those categories have in common: every one is handoff logistics. Not one is cleaning. The platform’s own vocabulary treats the guest as someone closing up a house, not as unpaid staff — and the free-text field is where hosts talk themselves out of that.

The list that works, ask by ask

A Miami turnover is a tight machine: the published visit on our Airbnb turnover cleaning page is 1–2 hours with a 2-person team. Against that clock, each item on the short list earns its place:

• Trash bagged and by the door. In a building, the chute run is quick; loose trash scattered through the unit is the slow version of the same job — and the version that drips in the hallway.
• Dishes in the dishwasher, cycle started. The one chore that genuinely runs in parallel: the machine works while the crew works the rest of the unit. It costs the guest one button press and hands the turnover a machine-hour.
• Things off — except the AC. Lights, stove, curling irons: off. Not the air conditioning: in South Florida, a closed-up unit with the system off drifts fast toward musty air and humidity trouble. Have the instructions ask for a warm setting, never for “off.”
• Lock up the way the building means it. In a tower, “lock up” can mean the fob goes to the front desk, the garage remote goes in the drawer, the balcony slider gets latched from inside. Write it in your building’s words, not the generic ones.
• A two-line message about anything broken or stained. The crew documents condition before the reset; a heads-up from the guest gets the right thing photographed instead of discovered mid-clean.

The asks that cost you reviews

Now the other half, which is why this question gets searched at all. When a listing charges a cleaning fee, the guest reads the checkout list against that fee — and every task that looks like cleaning reads as paying twice for the same thing. Three asks come up constantly, and all three are worse than useless on a professional turnover:

• “Strip the beds.” The published 20-item reset starts exactly there — strip and remake every bed is a line on the list, so the guest saves the crew nothing. And a stripped bed erases information: if a stain or a burn is under that duvet, you want it photographed where it happened, before anything moved — the entire difference between a documented condition and a story, which is the subject of our guide to charging a guest who left the unit filthy.
• “Start a load of laundry on your way out.” Sounds efficient; it almost never is. If the crew arrives hours later, they find a wet load souring in the drum — and a machine occupied at exactly the moment the visit’s sequence needs it. Laundry has an owner — the crew or your linen service — and it runs on the turnover’s order of operations, not the guest’s.
• “Sweep the floors.” Quick-vacuum the floors is another line on the paid list, and in the beach corridors sand is the baseline condition every visit already assumes. A guest with a broom doesn’t change what the crew has to do anyway; it only changes the mood that guest writes the review in.

So are guests supposed to clean at all?

No — and it’s worth saying plainly, because half the people who land on this page are guests wondering the same thing. The division that works is this: the guest owes normal use — leave the place the way a reasonable person leaves a home, neither scrubbed nor trashed — and the fee buys the professional reset. On our side that reset is concrete: published Miami-Dade rates start at $179 per checkout on the turnover page, the visit works a 20-item guest-ready reset — beds, towels, kitchen, bathrooms, floors, restock, staging; the room-by-room version is in our Airbnb cleaning checklist guide — and every eligible completed turnover ends with the photo audit posted to your host dashboard within an hour of finishing.

The same page draws the far boundary in writing: “Turnover pricing assumes normal guest use.” A checkout that goes well beyond that — party aftermath, heavy stains — gets documented in photos and flagged for extra time or a deep clean. That is what protects you from the occasional bad checkout. The checkout list never was.

Two Miami notes for the instructions box

First: the best ask isn’t on any menu — leave on time. On a same-day turnover the crew’s entire window lives between checkout and the next check-in; we’ve written up how long it takes to clean an Airbnb between guests, and against that window a guest who leaves 30 minutes late costs you more than one who never bagged a thing.

Second: in the towers, the building’s rules are checkout instructions. Where the fob goes, whether valet needs the ticket back, which door works with luggage after a certain hour — all of that belongs on your list far more than any broom task does, because it’s the one thing the crew arriving afterward can’t solve for the guest.

“The short list gets done. The long list gets screenshotted and pasted into the review.”

FAQ

The short version

Ask for logistics, not cleaning: trash bagged, dishes in the dishwasher, everything off except the AC, the door handled the way the building requires, a note about anything broken — and an on-time departure. Leave out the beds, the laundry, and the broom: they duplicate a list you already paid for, erase the evidence a claim would need, and get collected in the review. The reset is bought labor — from $179 per checkout on the published rate — and that’s where it should stay.

This guide is part of the JAS operating playbook — written for the host editing the instructions box who doesn’t want to pay for the list in the reviews.