How to coordinate your cleaning team on WhatsApp
Almost every cleaning team in Mexico already runs on WhatsApp, and honestly it works fine while there are only a few properties. Here we tell you how to set up the groups so they hold up longer, when they start to get messy, and how we do it with Cleo, inside those same chats. Cleo is Upbridge’s AI operations assistant, and she tells each person which property is theirs, checks the photos and keeps the inventory.
What works with groups
If you ask ChatGPT, it will tell you to use WhatsApp Business. That’s good advice to start with. It’s free, the cleaner doesn’t have to download anything new, and labels help you keep the team’s chats apart from the guests’.
What has helped us most is one group per property. In a single group for everything, the message about the beach house gets buried under twenty messages about the one downtown. With one group per property, everything about that place lives in one spot, and when someone stops working with you, you take them out of the groups and that’s it.
It also helps to send the notice for each checkout the same way every time, with the property, the checkout time and the time the next guest arrives. And to always ask for the same photos at the end, in the same order, so the cleaner already knows what you’ll ask for.
Where it starts to get messy
With five or six properties, the most common problem is knowing who had which one. The notice went out on Tuesday, someone answered with a thumbs-up, and by Saturday nobody remembers whether the thumbs-up meant “I’ll go”. You find out when the guest is already at the door.
Photos get lost too. They arrive between voice notes and stickers, WhatsApp compresses them, and the time you see is when they were sent. If the guest writes that the bathroom was dirty and Airbnb asks you to sort it out, finding that day’s photo can take a good while of scrolling up through the chat.
And nothing stays on record per property. To know how many times the upstairs shower had a problem this year, or when paper was last bought, you have to remember it yourself. The person coordinating carries all of that in their head, and when that person is on vacation, it shows.
How Cleo does it in your team’s WhatsApp
Cleo is our AI operations assistant. She joins the chats your team is already in and keeps the follow-up you keep today. Nobody installs anything, neither you nor the cleaner.
When there’s a checkout on the calendar, Cleo writes to the cleaner with the property, the time and that property’s checklist, room by room. There’s no thumbs-up left to interpret, because each cleaning has one person who got it in writing. If the pool pump breaks, she writes to maintenance.
Today you have Casa Palma, checkout is at 11:00
I’m missing the kitchen photos, can you send them when you’re done?
Sending them
Casa Palma was ready at 11:42. Here’s the report
The cleaner ticks the checklist on their phone and sends the photos right there. Cleo checks they’re all in and asks for the missing one. If she sees something wrong, like limescale on the tap or mold in the shower, she tells you. When the place is done you get the report, and that report is saved per property with photos, time and date. What each photo is for is in how to check a clean without going to the property.
Cleo also keeps count of the paper, shampoo, floor cleaner and bleach at each property and tells you how much to order before it runs out. Before placing an order or proposing something to the owner, she asks you and waits for your yes.
If you have two or three properties today
To be honest, with well set up groups you probably have enough. The list we use is in our room-by-room cleaning checklist, in case you want to copy it.
When you start asking more often who was going to which property, or digging for old photos in the chat, that’s when it’s worth talking.
Want the guide for one of your properties?
We build the guest guide for you, free, for as many properties as you want. You send us the link to your listing and we start from there. And if you want to see how a cleaning report arrives, the page is below.
Does the cleaner have to install anything?
No. The property reaches them on the WhatsApp they already use, and they send the photos back the same way. Maintenance works the same.
Does Cleo read all my chats?
She only sees the chats you add her to. In a chat she isn’t in, she doesn’t write.
What if Cleo gets something wrong?
You tell her on the same WhatsApp and she fixes it. And if something really goes wrong, you write to David or Daniel directly, on the same WhatsApp where you first talked to us.
He wrote and checked this page. Every source is public and linked above.