Housekeepers share their tips and tricks for making any home look hotel-clean

There’s something oh-so-satisfying about walking into a freshly cleaned hotel room for the first time. It’s a feeling of pristine sterility that’s equal parts aesthetically pleasing. The countertops are sparkly, the blankets are tucked and folded just right, and there’s not a speck of hair or dust to be found. 

Your home doesn’t have a full-time cleaning staff, but with a little extra elbow grease, dedication and advice from a few cleaning experts, it’s entirely possible to get your home deep cleaned and looking “hotel-clean” in no time. Here are nine tips from the professionals.

1. Wash your shower liner often

The shower liner can easily become one of the nastiest items in your bathroom if you let it. Ideally, you either replace it or toss it in the washing machine at least once a month. Don’t be like me and wait until the liner is visibly grimy before taking action. 

Ryan Knoll, owner of Tidy Casa, an Arizona-based home cleaning company, says that removing the shower liner from the rings is often time-consuming and quite frankly, a pain, so it often gets overlooked. But doing so, he stresses, “makes the bathroom feel 10 times cleaner,” he says.

2. Check your drains

Notice any funky lingering odors in the bathroom? It’s probably coming from either the sink or shower drain. According to Knoll, “90% of the time a bathroom smells funny, it’s hair and muck in the drain.” Attack those nasty odors, he says, “with a drain weasel.”

I’m pretty bad about keeping hair out of the drain, so I usually snake mine every two months or so. It helps pull out all the hair and muck in one fell swoop. Or you can be more proactive and use a drain catcher to help prevent these issues in the first place. 

3. Get the aesthetics right

One of the biggest reasons hotel rooms feel so clean is that they don’t have visual clutter. When you walk in the room, the tables are empty, beds are made and everything typically follows a distinct color pattern.  

“The trick is being super considerate of what goes in each room based on the 60-30-10 rule,” Knoll says. “This rule helps maintain visual cohesion and makes the space feel clean and clutter-free.”

This design rule dictates that 60% of the color in a given space should be your dominant shade, 30% should be a complementary, secondary hue, and the final 10% an accent color that works with the others. The concept is meant to be applied to an entire room, but for the sake of example, you could start with a blue area rug (60%), a black lamp (30%) and a small plant in a white pot (10%), then work in other pieces around those.

4. Use microfiber cleaning cloths

Don’t clean with any old rag, says Isabella Flores, a cleaning expert and professional organizer with Sparkly Maid San Diego. “High-quality microfiber cloths remove bacteria and fine particles mechanically, as opposed to relying solely on chemicals to sanitize,” she says.

Another pro tip? Don’t use the same one or two cloths to clean everything in your kitchen or bathroom. To avoid cross-contamination (and icky toilet-seat germs all over the kitchen counter), Flores recommends using a color-coding system similar to what actual housekeepers do. For instance, use “one color for bathroom surfaces, a different color for kitchen surfaces, and yet another color for glass and mirrors,” she says.

5. Keep the bed made

Not surprisingly, a freshly made bed is a must in a “hotel-clean” room. Operations manager Adriana Aziz of Maid for You says that the company’s clients “can forgive leftover pet hair in some places or a missed mark on a kitchen benchtop, but if the beds aren’t made like that of a hotel, they’re sure to complain and assume the whole house is dirty.”

Aziz says using neutral-colored sheets, or at least matching colors for your pillowcases and comforter, goes a long way toward giving your bed that hotel feel. You should also aim to keep things as wrinkle-free as possible, and tuck in the edges of your bedspread for maximum tidiness. 

6. Embrace a minimalist approach 

While hotel rooms do get cleaned regularly, more than the spiffing up comes into play here, says Aziz. “It’s not so much the cleaning that necessitates a hotel look and feel, but it’s the organizing,” she notes.

If you’re truly dedicated to giving your home that “hotel-clean” vibe, you’ll need to embrace minimalism. This means every item has a designated place and purpose within your home, and clutter is kept to, well, a minimum. Aziz says the easiest place to start organizing is in the bathroom. “The main thing we do is remove empty shampoo bottles, and then put other commonly used items in a storage compartment to make the space feel as minimalist as possible,” she says. “We then place area mats at the base of the vanity to make the bathroom feel as clean as can be.”

7. Clean appliance exteriors regularly 

All right, let’s be real for a second. How many of us clean the exteriors of our refrigerators and stovetops as often as we should? “The gap between surface cleanliness and real cleanliness is typically at its largest in kitchens,” Flores says. This is typically due to grease and residue buildup, which can often go nearly unnoticed until a large enough quantity accumulates. 

To keep kitchens looking hotel fabulous, Flores recommends cleaning every appliance exterior, cabinet face and countertop surface at the end of each cooking session. “Grease removed in a timely manner using a damp microfiber cloth with minimal amounts of dish soap may easily be removed, whereas grease accumulated over several days that has undergone multiple cycles of heating and cooling on a surface requires degreaser and more effort,” she says.

Another important tip? Let sprayed surfaces sit for a bit. Flores says you’re not doing yourself any favors by wiping down dirty surfaces immediately after spraying them. Bathroom surfaces, in particular, become a lot easier to scrub if you spray cleaner, then let it sit for five to 10 minutes.  “It’s here that you gain a significant advantage through extended application time,” Flores says. If you let the chemicals sit and absorb the grime, the breakdown process “requires little if any manual scrubbing,” she adds. For daily touch-ups, Lysol wipes should work well on most bathroom surfaces.

9. Ditch dryer sheets for wool dryer balls

Still using dryer sheets? It’s time to switch. “Professional housekeepers in the hospitality industry have replaced dryer sheets with wool dryer balls since they separate fiber during the drying process,” Flores says. This separation “creates that plush texture in fluffy hotel towels without coating cotton with residue,” she adds.

Not convinced. They also help dry clothes faster, saving you money on electricity, and they can be used over and over again!