Airbnb cleaning supplies in peak season: reorder points that follow your bookings

Peak season turnovers run back to back. Guests check out at 10am, the next lot arrive at 3pm, and somewhere in that five-hour gap your cleaner sends a message: no toilet roll, half a bottle of washing-up liquid, and one laundry pod left under the sink.

So you drive to the nearest big Tesco, the cleaner stands around waiting, and the window before check-in gets tighter. Not a disaster. But do it twice a week across a handful of properties in July and August and it wears you down, and it costs more than it should because every emergency top-up is bought at full retail price.

Buying more stuff isn't the fix. Knowing when to order, before you're already out, is.

Why the cupboard is full in January and empty in August

The pattern repeats every year. In January occupancy is low, nothing runs out, and you think: I should stock up while it's quiet. You bulk-order. The boxes sit in the cupboard for months, and by April you're sure you're covered.

Then May arrives. Occupancy climbs, stays get longer, and a family of five gets through supplies at a very different rate to a couple on a city break. By July you're restocking every week, reactively, from whichever shop is closest. By August you miss one order and you're back to the 10am message.

The root cause is simple. Your reorder decision is based on what's in the cupboard today, not on the bookings you've got coming. A glance at the shelf can't tell you that the next fortnight has twelve guests in it, using supplies at three or four times the January rate.

Par level and reorder point: two numbers, not one

Most hosts use "par level" to mean one thing. It's cleaner to keep two numbers per item, per property:

• Par level is the stock you want on the shelf after a restock. It's what you order up to.
• Reorder point is the level that triggers the next order. Drop to it and you order, whatever else is going on.

The reorder point is the one that stops the 10am message. It has to cover everything you'll use between placing an order and the delivery actually turning up, plus a buffer for the booking that runs long or the guest who showers three times a day.

I went through the basic formula in the par levels guide. This post is about what happens to those numbers when occupancy changes, because that's where most systems fall over.

The maths, with occupancy in it

Here's the version that accounts for bookings:

Daily usage = (guest-nights in the period × use per guest-night) ÷ days in the period

Reorder point = daily usage × supplier lead time in days + buffer

Take toilet roll in a two-bed flat. Say a guest gets through roughly one roll every three nights. Your own number will differ, so track it for a month.

• January: 12 booked nights, average of two guests, so 24 guest-nights. That's about 8 rolls for the month, or 0.26 a day. With a three-day lead time and a four-day buffer, the reorder point is around 2 rolls.
• August: 27 booked nights, average of four guests, so 108 guest-nights. That's 36 rolls for the month, or 1.2 a day. Same lead time, same buffer, and the reorder point is now around 8 or 9 rolls.

Same flat, same item, a reorder point four times higher. If you set the number in January and never touch it, August catches you out. Every time.

Not every item scales with guests, though. Laundry pods and dishwasher tablets track turnovers and washes rather than heads, so work those out per clean instead. I keep a rough per-turnover list in cleaning product quantities per turnover if you want a starting point.

Lead time is the bit everyone forgets

Next-day delivery makes lead time feel like zero. It isn't. Order on a Friday evening and "next day" can mean Monday. A rural cottage outside the next-day delivery areas can add two or three days on top, which I've moaned about before in the rural logistics post.

And if you're tied to one specific product, say a refill shower gel that matches your dispensers or a pod that fits your machine, the supplier's lead time is the only one that counts. Build it into the reorder point for that item, not a generic three days.

The items that run out first in August

Not everything needs this treatment. Bin bags and spare light bulbs can sit on a fixed number all year. The items that catch hosts out in peak season are the ones that scale with guests or with washes:

• Toilet roll and kitchen roll. Straight guest-night maths. Families and groups go through far more than couples.
• Laundry detergent and fabric conditioner. More turnovers means more washes, and peak season often means beach towels too.
• Dishwasher tablets and washing-up liquid. Longer summer stays mean more cooking in, which means more of both.
• Bin liners. Cheap and easy to forget, right up until the cleaner has a full kitchen bin and nothing to replace it with.
• Bathroom cleaner and antibacterial spray. Usage tracks cleans rather than guests, so it jumps when stays get shorter.

Start with those five groups. Set occupancy-based reorder points for them first and leave everything else on a fixed number until you've got the habit going.

One store or one per property?

If your properties are close together, a central store in a garage or storage unit means you can buy in bulk once and top up each flat from it. The catch is that you now have two sets of counts to keep: the store and each property. If the properties are spread out, keep a full set of stock at each one and give each its own reorder points. Driving supplies across a city mid-turnover is exactly what you're trying to avoid.

Spreadsheet or something built for it?

A spreadsheet works fine for one property and fifteen or twenty items. List the items, note the current count, add a par level and a reorder point, and use conditional formatting to turn a cell red when the count drops below the line. About ten minutes a week if you're disciplined about it.

The weak spot is that a spreadsheet has no idea what's in your booking calendar. It can't see that next week has three back-to-back stays and that you'll burn through stock faster than usual. You're still doing the occupancy maths in your head, and you'll get it wrong on the busy weeks, which are the only weeks it matters.

With several properties it gets messy faster. Which flat is low? Did the cleaner update the count before Saturday's checkout or after? Is that the Brighton tab or the Edinburgh one? I wrote about where that breaks down in running five Airbnbs without spreadsheets.

Order before the alarm, not after it

The whole point of a reorder point is that you order on a rule, not in a panic. Set it once, something like "when laundry pods drop to 12, order 24", and you hear about it before the cleaner does.

That covers steady weeks. Short-term lets also need a look ahead. If next week is fully booked and today's stock won't last until a delivery could land, you need to order now, not when the count hits the line. Two habits help here:

• Re-set reorder points twice a year. Once before peak season (late April or early May for most UK lets) and once after it ends in September. Use last year's booked nights for each period, not a guess.
• Check the calendar on Monday. Look at the coming fortnight. Any run of short stays, school holidays or a bank holiday weekend gets a top-up order regardless of what the shelf says. My fuller list of signals is in the reorder triggers post.

And get counts from whoever is actually in the property. A quick photo of the supply cupboard after each turnover beats a count you did yourself a week ago. The pre-arrival supply check covers the last line of defence, the day before a guest arrives.

Where HostStock fits

HostStock keeps stock counts for every property in one place, with a par level and reorder point on each item. When an item drops to its reorder point you get an alert by email, in the app, or on Telegram if you've connected it. Every Monday it sends a reorder list showing what's low across all your properties, so the calendar check above takes a couple of minutes instead of a tour of every cupboard.

It also pulls your bookings in from Airbnb, Booking.com and Vrbo through iCal, so the calendar and the stock counts sit side by side. With the AI Intelligence add-on, the daily insights put the two together and flag a property that has bookings in the next seven days and items already running low.

Lead time is still your call. HostStock doesn't know how long your supplier takes, so set reorder points with that in mind, using the formula above.

If you run more than a couple of properties and cleaning supplies are the thing that keeps catching you out, that's the problem it was built for. The trial is 30 days and doesn't need a card.

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