Hosting my flat on Airbnb is a great holiday MoneySaver

It takes a little bit of groundwork to get it all up and running. You'll need to think about what you're happy with guests seeing and touching (leaving framed photos out felt weird to me, for example). Airbnb hosting is actually a great motivator to tidy and de-clutter your home regularly, and I always found my home felt lighter and more spacious after Airbnb bookings than before.

Remote possibilites

Every single one of my 60 or so bookings was managed remotely, so for me it was important to get things to ensure that I could oversee and control things without actually being there. Here are some of the things that made my journey to Airbnb Superhost a relatively painless one:

• A concealed lockbox

• A cleaner I could trust

• A smart heating system that meant I could turn the heating on and off between guests (while leaving them a clearly labelled old phone with the smart heating app on it, so they could also manage the heating themselves).

There's obviously a lot more to consider when Airbnb hosting, so see our Airbnb hosting guide for the full list of tips.

Other things, I learned as I want along. For example, during my earlier bookings I was getting too many messages from my cleaner about mismatching bedding, missing bedding, and locations of matching bedding (to which my answer was generally a frazzled 'I DON'T KNOW').

Something had to be done, so I bought eight (cotton, neutral-coloured) sets of bedding and put them in a dedicated box labelled ‘Airbnb bedding,’ usable only for Airbnb bookings and sequestered away from the multicoloured and omni-patterned chaos of my personal-use bedding.

Cleaning house

As for the cleaner, I absolutely couldn’t have done it without her. Yes, you can pay a dedicated Airbnb cleaning company to do this stuff, but this is more expensive than hiring someone local, and can also mean that the company sends different people to your house each time, which didn't sound all that appealing to me.

The cleaner I used has cleaned my house many times before, which means she’s familiar with the space and my personal quirks in how to present it. As with many things Airbnb, it's a bit of a trust exercise, and maybe not one that everyone's prepared to go through!

While we're on the topic of cleaning though, a little bonus with Airbnb hosting that I hadn’t considered was that when I’d get back from my holiday or travels, I'd come back to my home even cleaner than how I'd left it! The sheer amount of cleaning and scrubbing my home would get between bookings far outweighed any wear and tear from my wholly respectful guests, and when I'd return I felt like I was walking into the best possible version of my home, which made the pain of holidays being over that bit easier to handle.

My home as presented on Airbnb. If only it could look like this the other 99% of the time.

The important bit - how much did I make?

So those are some of my musings, but there's no point blogging MoneySaving without blogging the hard, objective numbers. My two-bed garden flat in Tottenham (not the most fashionable area, but conveniently close to the stadium), would generally go for £120-£130 a night, with weekly discounts making it about £750 for a week. For my longer trips, it would generate around £1,800 a month, which would comfortably pay off my mortgage and bills, and leave a little change (that would go a long way) for living in Thailand.

Of my 50+ Airbnb bookings, I'm yet to experience a single drama (well, of the guests’ making anyway). Maybe I got lucky, or maybe that speaks to Airbnb’s ID verification process, which is now mandatory and therefore more rigorous than it used to be, but the biggest complaint I had about any guests was that some wouldn't communicate when they'd checked in or out (that's to say, not a big complaint at all). As a nice bonus, I eventually earned Superhost status, which gives me $100 annually to spend on Airbnb bookings.

However, things can still go wrong and it be no one’s fault. And beware that when things do go wrong it can be very stressful, because you have a significant part of your guests' holiday in your hands and you feel limited in what you can do to help when you’re marooned thousands of miles away.

Naturally, the guests didn’t want to wait around poisoning themselves in my house, so I refunded them and they went to stay in a hotel, which really wasn’t the outcome anyone wanted. As it happened, the repair actually turned out to be a quick fix, but by that point it was too late to salvage the booking. The guests were left massively inconvenienced, and I picked up a few grey hairs through the ordeal.

The big takeaway from these scenarios (apart from ‘stuff happens’, to put it cleanly) is that you should always have your phone to hand in case guests call – which from experience they only will in emergencies – especially around check-in time. Both of the above situations were a massive pain, but I was on hand to resolve them quickly, which meant my wonderfully understanding guests accepted these issues as just rotten luck rather than my fault as a host, and didn’t give me negative reviews.

Building up to Superhost status on Airbnb status isn't that difficult. Communication (and a home that reflects the listing) is the key!

Worth the hassle... for some