Your cleanliness score does not measure cleanliness

Open your listing and look at the cleanliness score. Say it is 9.2. Now answer one question: when did somebody last clean the rubber seal on your washing machine door?

If you cannot remember, your 9.2 does not mean the place is clean. It means nobody has looked yet.

Guests do not write when it is clean

Reviews are asymmetric, and that changes everything. When an apartment is clean, guests write nothing about cleanliness, or a single word. When it is not, you get a sentence, sometimes two, and increasingly a photo as well.

Which means your score does not measure your standard. It measures how long you have been lucky.

The order in which guests inspect a place

From what owners tell us, complaints always come in the same order, and it is not the order you clean in.

Smell first. The nose works before the eyes. A guest knows what the apartment is like before the light is on.

Then the bathroom. It is the first room a guest walks into after dropping the bag, and the only one they inspect carefully.

Then the bedding. The first thing they touch with bare skin.

The kitchen last, and only on the surface. Unless they open the oven or the extractor filter. If they do, they write about it.

Ten places that never get cleaned between two guests

This is not a deep-clean list. These are the places a guest sees and a four-hour turnaround skips first:

• The rubber seal on the washing machine door
• The silicone in the tub and the bottom of the shower curtain
• Behind the toilet, where it meets the floor
• The extractor filter
• Inside the kettle and the coffee machine
• The fridge door seal
• Remotes, door handles and light switches
• The bottom of the wardrobe and shelves above eye level
• Under the bed and behind the bedside table
• The shower drain and the basin trap

None of those need special equipment or a special product. They need two minutes and somebody who knows they exist.

A test with your own photos

Open the photos on your listing and look at the bathroom. If not one of them shows the grout between the tiles, or where the floor meets the wall, that is not an accident. Somebody shot those photos from that angle for a reason.

Your guest will see those angles. They are standing in that bathroom, not photographing it.

How it actually enters the score

This deserves precision, because plenty of nonsense gets written about it. On Booking.com the guest gives one overall score from one to ten, and only that score goes into the average shown on your listing. Cleanliness is rated separately, as its own line, and that line does not feed the overall score.

Which does not make it less important. It means it hits you twice. A guest who found a dirty drain leaves a low cleanliness rating, and future guests read that line and decide by it. Then that same guest gives the same stay a low overall score, and that one does go into the average.

The average recovers, but slowly. Reviews from the last thirty-six months are shown, with newer ones given priority over older ones, so a single low score only disappears once enough new guests outvote it. In a four-month season that is next year's problem, not next week's.

In Mostar guests have too much choice to let it slide

According to ministry figures from August 2026, Mostar has 249 registered hospitality and accommodation properties.

So a guest looking for an apartment in Mostar is scrolling hundreds of listings on the same map, with very similar photos and very similar prices. The score is often the only visible difference. And the guest who scrolled past your listing never tells you why.

The difference between 8.7 and 9.4

It is not about who wipes better. That difference has three parts.

A list that is read, not remembered. Anything remembered is forgotten on a busy day.

The same team. People who have been in your apartment twenty times know which tiles show limescale and which door does not close properly. You cannot write that into a set of instructions.

Somebody checks. Not every time and not theatrically, but often enough that everyone knows checking happens.

To be straight with you

If all you want is the lowest price per visit, somebody cheaper than us will always turn up. What you get here is a written task list, the same people, one invoice and a number somebody answers on a Saturday. That has a price and we do not hide it.

But before you call anyone, go and check that washing machine seal. If you find it clean, your score is earned and you can forget everything above.