Best Airbnb Sheets and Towels: Linen Tips
Why Having The Best Airbnb Sheets And Towels Is So Important
Having the best Airbnb sheets and towels has a huge affect on your guests’ perception. The guests’ perception is everything, and poor quality, or even worse dirty or stained linens, can very easily steer the guests’ perception in the wrong direction, leading to a bad review.
And on the flip side, white fluffy, clean sheets and towels will absolutely play a key roll in you getting a glowing 5 star review. ⭐
It goes without saying that keeping your Airbnb clean is VITAL to the success of your short term vacation rental. A bad review that says your Airbnb was dirty and it will impact future bookings.
While you of course need to keep the entire place is clean, nothing grosses out someone more than dirty sheets or dirty towels. Your sheets and towels need to look, feel and smell clean. Anything less and you open yourself up to a bad review.
In this post I’ll list all the linen tips I could think of – from how we store linesn, to which ones to use, to how many to have available to guests, to how many to have as backups… everything I could think of.
If I miss anything please leave a comment and I’ll make sure to add it to the list. 😉
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What color towels and sheets for Airbnb?
Lets start with an easy one. What color should your Airbnb sheets and towels be? All your sheets and towels should be White.
I can see why someone would think non-white linens would hide stains more. Although that’s technically true, a non-white linens don’t give a clean first impression… even if they are brand new towels!
If I imagine myself walking into the bathroom of an Airbnb I rented, and see a set of dark brown towels hanging on the towel rack.
My initial reaction WILL NOT be oh good, since I can’t SEE the stains these towels must be clean.
Instead I’d be thinking OMG, what on earth are they trying to hide on these towels!
When it comes to the color of towels and sheets, copy the hotels.
Think about it, every hotel out there uses white sheets and towels. They’ve been providing guests linens for a looong time and do all types of studies to see what works the best and what doesn’t.
If they provide white linens, then you should probably do the same.
How many towels should you leave for Airbnb guests?
Bathroom Towels
We leave a complete towel set out for each guest. A set includes a bath towel, hand towel, and a wash cloth.
We also leave a small black makeup towel in each bathroom.
Keeping in mind that our Airbnb has a washer and a dryer, and we provide laundry pods making it easy for our guests to wash towels as often as they want during their stay.
If you don’t have a washer and dryer, you may need to provide extra towels to make sure your guests are happy.
Tip: To keep your towels from getting makeup stains either provide small black makeup towels or provide makeup wipes.
Check out 7 Tips For Keeping Vacation Rental Linens Beautiful for more vacation rental linen tips!
Pool Towels
With pool towels we leave out 1 per bedroom. Initially we provided a pool towel per max guest but that was an insane amount of towels (20) to wash after each stay.
Our cleaners suggested leaving out 1 per bedroom since, most of the time not everyone goes into the pool and even if they do they can share a pool towel. The rules for pool towels aren’t the same as a bath towel.
It made sense to us, so we tried it out and we’ve been doing that for about 2 years now without a single person saying anything about the towels, and a steady stream of 5 star reviews. ⭐😁
The Best Towels To Get For An Airbnb
Bed Sheets
The bed sheets that we LOVE are from Kirkland. They are the Kirkland Signature 680 Thread Count Sheet Set. In our opinion, they are the best sheets for Airbnb.
Unfortunately, it seems Costco is phasing out their bed sheets so we’ll be looking for a new brand once our backups run out. 🙁
As far as towels go, below are the best towels for Airbnb.
Bath Towels
You want a good sized bath towel that is soft, fluffy and of course white. This is the bath towel we use.
Hand Towels
Hand towels are the middle towels, smaller than the bath towel and larger than a wash cloth. This is the hand towel we use
Wash Clothes
Wash clothes are the smallest towels. This is the wash cloth we use.
Makeup Towels
I’d definitely recommend having either makeup towels or makeup wipes, otherwise your sheets and white towels will get frequent makeup stains.
We’ve use makeup towels initially, then tried providing make-up wipes and now we’re back to using makeup towels.
Here are links to the makeup towels we use as well as the makeup wipes we used to use.
We switched back to makeup towels because it seemed we were going through makeup wipes way too fast, it was more cost than it was worth. Makeup towels work just as well, and don’t disappear. 😉
Bath Mats
Probably techniquely not in the linens category, but hey, bath mats do kinda sorta look like thick towels. 🙂
We now use these bath mats instead of bathroom rugs. The bathroom rugs were always a problem.
They were a pain to throw in the wash because they took forever to dry.
They were also bleach magnets for some reason. We were replacing them pretty frequently because of bleach marks.
We have the cleaners roll them up and place them either inside the shower stall, in front of the front door or for a bath at then end of the bath tub.
How many sets of sheets per bed for Airbnb?
We don’t leave out any spare sheets for the guests to use, only the sheets on the beds are available to the guests.
We do keep spares sheets in the linen closets. We have a second spare set of sheets for every bed plus a few extra.
That way if something happens where the washing machine breaks down, or the cleaners are late and don’t have time to wash all the sheets during a turn over they can take the dirty ones with them to clean off-site and swap out the sheets with the spares.
I’ve seen some posts suggest keeping 2 -3 spares for each bed. Personally, I think that’s too much, just because of the amount of space you’ll need to store them.
In the 8 bedroom there are 6 kings, 4 twins and 2 fulls. If we has 3 spares for each bed that would be 36 spares!
We have a very large linen closet, but even with a large linen closet 36 spares would take a huge amount of space. Stick to a spare per bed and a few extra, and replenish when the cleaners tell you they used a spare and you’ll be fine.
What is the best way to organize sheets?
We have a whole post on this topic, 5 Tips for Organizing Your Vacation Rental Linens. It really depends how much space you have available to you. Convert a hallway or bathroom closet into a linen closet by adding a lock on the door, the guests don’t use those closets anyway. 😉
The article has more details on this, but wherever you keep your spare linens should be systemized in some way. Bins and labels are super helpful. The more systemized your linens are the easier it will be for your cleaners to do what they have to do.
How often should you replace sheets on Airbnb?
This is a pretty open ended question. There are a ton of factors involved but the quality of your sheets (and the quality of your guests) have a huge impact on your sheets’ longevity.
We use high-end sheets in our vacation rentals, and I’d say they last at least a couple of years. Of course once and a while you get a stain on a sheet that just does not come out and that cuts the sheets’ lifespan short, but barring stubborn stains they can last a couple of years.
The quality of the short term rental linen you provide will have a direct impact on how frequently have have to replace them.
How do I arrange my towels on Airbnb?
Great question!
First, we always have towels on all the towel racks, Walking into a bathroom with empty towel racks feels a little bare, and unfinished.
When the towel racks have towels on them it’s just more inviting and cozy…. at least that’s how we look at it.
How To Fold Towels For Airbnb
The cleaners make these nice designs using a set of bathroom towels, the bath, towel, hand towel and a wash cloth.
If your cleaner can’t make the designs, simply layering them one on top of the other looks nice too. At least we think it looks better than an empty towel rack.
Since we don’t have enough towel racks for all the towels we need to add the remainder of the towels somewhere.
That somewhere has changed for us over the years.
How We Used To Do It
When we first started, we placed a folded set of towels on the foot of each bed per person. We did that for a long time, basically until we started renting out an 8 bedroom a couple of years ago- that’s when we simplified even more.
In the 8 bedroom a towel set per person and the towels on all the towel racks was about 26 sets of bathroom towels and a pool towel per person was another 20 pool towels! That was waaaay too many towels for the cleaners to handle on top of the sheets during a turn over.
The way we currently do our towels was an idea from our cleaners.
How We Do Pool Towels Now
The cleaners suggested that we reduce the number of pool towels from 20 to 8 (1 per bedroom). Usually not every person in a group uses the pool, and even if they do, sharing a pool towel isn’t the same as sharing a bath towel, it’s more acceptable.
We place the pool towels rolled up in a couple of baskets by the sliding door that leads to the pool area,
How We Do Bath Towels Now
For the bath towels we still keep the sets on the towel racks, and no longer place towel sets on the beds. We have a towel set per person (20), but instead of having them on the beds we place the sets in one bathroom closet and added a sign indicating where the additional towels can be found.
That reduced the amount of wash cycles tremendously. We went from 20 pool towels to 8 pool towels and from 26 sets of bathroom towels to 20 sets of bathroom towels.
An added bonus to keeping the bathroom towels in a closet is there is less chance of them using the towels unless they really need to.
If there are only 10 people staying at the house then they will most likely only use 10 sets of towels.
When we left them out on the beds pretty much all of them got used regardless of how many people were at the house.
How We Do Bath Mats Now
We have the cleaners roll them up and place them either inside the shower stall, in front of the front door or for a bath at then end of the bath tub.
How often should you replace sheets on Airbnb?
This is a pretty open ended question. There are a ton of factors involved but the quality of your sheets (and the quality of your guests) have a huge impact on your sheets’ longevity.
We use high-end sheets and I’d say they last a couple of years. Of course once and a while you get a stain on a sheet that just does not come out and that cuts the sheets’ lifespan short, but barring stubborn stains, a couple of years is the typical lifespan.
What Do You Do With Stained Airbnb Sheets and Towels?
We keep a red laundry bag in the linen closet where the cleaners place the towels or sheets that are stained or ripped.
It’s a great way to keep track of your linens and you can have someone take a look at the linens to see if any can be saved.
Should I Throw Out The Stained Airbnb Sheets and Towels?
It really bugged us throwing out so many towels, sometimes because there was a super tiny stubborn makeup stain.
We thought of donating them to the local Salvation Army, but they can sometimes be picky about what they accept.
So what do we do with out old Airbnb bed sheets and towels?
Sandy came up with the idea of donating them to the local pet shelter.
The animal shelter can really use them and they don’t care that they are short term rental linens, or if there they are torn or have a makeup stain on them.
Was that helpful? Did you have a question I didn’t cover?
Did I miss something in this post? Was there something you want to know about Airbnb Sheets and Towels that I didn’t go over?
Let me know in the comments and I’ll make sure to answer it. 🙂
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