I run a small short-term rental in Toronto and for the first year I cleaned every turnover myself to "save money." I want to walk through why I stopped, because the math was not what I assumed.
The trap is that turnover cleaning feels free when you do it yourself. It is not. Each turnover was roughly 2 to 3 hours of my time: strip and remake beds with hotel-standard corners, reset the kitchen, scrub the bathroom to review-proof standard, restock consumables, stage it, and photograph any damage. Multiply by the number of stays and I was quietly working a part-time job at an hourly rate I would never accept from an actual employer.
Then there is the failure mode. Miss one hair in the shower or one smudge on a glass and you eat it in the reviews, and in short-term rentals your review score is your pricing power. A single "not clean" review measurably drops what you can charge for months. So the "free" DIY clean is actually a high-variance bet against your own revenue.
When I finally priced it out, a professional turnover ran a flat fee per clean, and I could pass most or all of it through as a cleaning fee anyway, which guests expect. The service I use lists Airbnb turnover cleaning in Toronto at a flat per-turnover rate, so I can predict the cost per booking exactly and build it into my nightly math instead of guessing.
The reframe for anyone running a rental: your turnover is not a chore, it is a production step with a defect cost. Once you price the defect cost (lost reviews, lost pricing power, your own hours), outsourcing to someone who does it to a consistent standard usually wins, and it scales, which your own two hands do not.
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