What is the Best Vacuum for hosting an Airbnb?

Click here to be on your way to a 5-star review!

This vacuum is awesome! Cleanliness is above all the most important factor for hosting an Airbnb. The home I transformed into an Airbnb did not start from clean, comfortable beginnings. I worked long and hard to get this place in order not only for myself, but also to welcome strangers. To read more on what to clean and how to clean to ensure your guests are happy click here and to be on your way to receiving those 5 star reviews!

A little bit of background

My house had been vacant for well over 6 months. It’s 100 years old so it has many nooks and crannies that not only dust loves to get into. The previous residents that had been renting the home rented the place by room so there was no pride of ownership for the house as a whole, and it showed.

Random furniture was all over the place along with other miscellaneous items that could make a hoarder proud. In addition, a recent hurricane had swept through the city flooding the home and leaving the furniture on the lower level with water damage. Much, much to do!

Getting it together

I removed the furniture and wiped down all the walls. Unfortunately, the most difficult part remained. The 100-year old original gorgeous wood flooring held onto grit and dirt. This wood had successfully survived the flooding, but had little minute particles all over it. Continuous mopping and vacuuming could never quite get the floors to where they needed to be.

I am not joking when I say that for Airbnb home sharing, I strive to have my floors clean enough to eat off of. With these little strange specs, it was far from an edible surface. Being unfamiliar with wooden floors of this mature age, I was unsure of how to get clean smooth floors. No amount of wiping off the surface, even with a soft shimmy, would make these floors molecule free. There were always some sort of strange particles collecting on your shoes and socks. Not good for my home and unacceptable for Airbnb.

How to fix??

I asked around and most people seemed to think this was normal for mature hard wood flooring to hold on to particles. Normal? How? I pride myself in running a clean household and especially keeping a clean rental. I want those 5-star reviews and I want those extra points Airbnb allows for sparkling clean*. How in the world could I achieve such reviews if these weird specs kept coming off the wood?

I went to the local Home Depots and Lowe’s and asked around. I tried a vacuum that many claimed to be the best of the best. The first vacuum recommended to me was one from the Dyson family. Although this vacuum to be doing a much better job than my regular Hoover, I still couldn’t eat off of my floor. And yes, this was the goal!

Back to the Drawing Board

I discovered the reason that the Dyson wasn’t doing the job as expected was because it had one fatal design flaw. It prided itself on being an amazing fit for all surfaces. It had this strong suction type head that would trap a large surface area and suck everything in. This made sense for carpeting.

This suction type concept would also work for the majority of hard surfaces; however, this type of technology does not work on surfaces that are not perfectly smooth. Unless the floor is perfectly flat, the suction has air holes that are allowed in and this lessons the effect. Those little specs could outlast the highest recommended vacuum. There were so many nooks that added character to the overall look, but that also made it difficult to make the floor nice and smooth. Additionally, stone tile flooring in my bathrooms added further complication since those surfaces weren’t flat either. The Dyson did not take these matters into account!

To the Rescue!

I came across the Shark Duo Clean. What attracted me to this vacuum was the additional roller. Beyond the regular roller one finds on a standard vacuum cleaner, the Shark has an extra front roller similar to a pipe cleaner. These little bitty feelers on the front roller are a godsend. One instantly feels a difference as you glide the machine across the floor. No joke, but all those annoying, random, odd, unidentified particles were suddenly gone.

I had been slaving away and mopping and vacuuming my ENTIRE HOUSE after every single guest check-out to this point. This may not seem excessive, but when you are allowing 1 night stays and rent out by the room when you have multiple bedrooms, mopping and vacuuming the entire house on pretty much a daily basis can be exhausting. This vacuum takes away all the annoying particles and allows the mopping times to be dramatically reduced. (Now, I do realize that one should not be mopping hard wood floors on a constant basis. It is not good for the wood. However, cleanliness is king in the name of home sharing so sometimes you have to make some concessions.)

Additional Shark Vacuum Advantages

Besides that pipe cleaner action, this device is SO VERSATILE! This vacuum has the ability to be taken apart at virtually every component. You can remove the handle to create a short hose, remove it much lower down so that you have a long hose, “lift-away” the entire unit from the base so that you may vacuum things such as stairs without having to move the entire vacuum. Soon I will have to create a video just to show you how Shark really thought of everything. Until then, if you are interested in learning more click here.

The Airbnb Ride is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon. With that being said, this vacuum really is the best I have found!