Holiday season policies.
Response on your holidays and/or cleaning slot short notice cancellation
I’m sorry about the length of this blog article on the important topic of holiday cancellation of cleaning slots. But these cancellations raise a number of issues for us and you.
its now nearly the end of June and soon we'll be in the peak holiday season. Some of our clients understandably may be away for a week or more and may wish to consider canceling cleaning for a week or more. This article explains the situation with regard to our Ts & Cs and we how we plan to handle this going forward.
If you contact us to cancel, your potential cancellation is actually against our policies that you accepted on our original quote. The situation in brief is you cannot just cancel a regular slot, unless you're on our premium 'one-off' and deep clean rates. But, we can re-arrange the slot within reason, given sufficient notice. If you do cancel or miss a slot, without the relevant notice, you still need to pay, irrespective of whether a cleaning service was provided. if you don't re-arrange correctly you will probably lose your slot and your rate will move to a new higher base rates, from the next time we may be able to agree to a new slot.
This may seem a bit harsh or draconian. We do understand that any client may be on holiday one or more weeks in a year and may potentially want to pause their cleaning slot/subscription for a week or even two. However, you need to understand our business a bit as to why this causes us (and then you) some major problems. There are a few things to consider.
Key Access - the best option
Firstly, many of our clients recognize the nature of our business and when they are away, we have key safe (or similar) access to the property and still carry out the clean. This is our preferred option. The property still gets dirty to some extent and usually we do extra rooms or deeper cleans in kitchens and bathrooms or add in fridges and oven cleans (special rates apply).
Our staff are tracked so we know when they are at your property and they are trustworthy. We are covered by employers' liability and public liability insurances.
Accepted Ts & Cs
Our standard Ts & Cs state, and all clients accepted them when our initial estimate was approved:
Attendance & Cancellation
With regular cleaning you are effectively allocated a regular slot that you pay for, normally weekly, and we provide that service every week, except on public holidays – this commitment from you is rewarded with our best hourly rate, your preferred slot and consistent staffing.
We will make reasonable endeavours to attend within plus/minus 10 minutes of scheduled time.
For regular bookings, scheduled times cannot be cancelled but can be varied within 2 working days either side, subject to availability and our agreement, given a minimum of 5 days' notice.
If clients are away and for any reason the property inaccessible, then access needs to be provided. If we have had no communication and cannot access the property within 5 minutes of scheduled start time, we will leave the site, however, the booking and cleaning fee will be forfeit if paid and if not already paid, the fee is still due. If you are running late then please let us know and we can hang on and start the job late, if time permits. However, we will finish at the original agreed time.
This agreement may be terminated by either party with 14 days' written notice or by email. If either party breaches any terms of this understanding, the other party may terminate immediately. We can enter into a formal contract agreement, should you desire. We normally do this for any commercial work.
So we allow changes in a slot given reasonable notice, but no cancellation. Why is this?
Quality of staff
A key factor for us in running a successful business is our cleaning staff and our/their quality and reliability - values that we adhere to as far as possible. In order for us to achieve this high quality and reliability we pay our people a lot more than minimum wage (minimum wage being standard amongst cleaning staff). By paying quite high rates, typically £4+ above minimum and living wage, we hope we can achieve longevity, loyalty, quality and reliability from our staff, which in turn we pass on to you. We introduced this policy and approach in April 2025 to upgrade our staff and service significantly.
See our related blog article on our new pay and staffing policy and how this impacts prices here.
Our Costs
Our relatively high paid staff are employees, not contractors. Our employees usually have a guaranteed minimum number of hours of work per week and we additionally pay them pension contributions, employers national insurance and holiday pay, amongst other things, such as onboarding time and training.
So, if we don’t give them a pre-booked slot we still have to pay them their wages anyway or at short notice try and find them a new job, which is tricky. A wage rate of £16 per hour equates to nearly £21 per hour with all the additional costs taken into account!
If you assume that best case, we make £5 per hour gross profit per hour (ignoring holiday/NI/Pensions), and you paid £22 per hour for a 3 hour job we pay our cleaners £16*3 = £48, our gross profit is £15 (less chemicals). If this is cancelled, and we just lost the profit, it would take minimum 3 weeks to get back into break-even let alone profit. However, as we are committed to paying our staff, irrespective of whether they do the job, then, for a 3 hour job we not only lose the £15 profit, we pay out £48 in wages, irrespective of the revenue. So our true loss maybe as much as £15 + £48 = £63.
Assuming we did 50 regular weeks of 3 hours for you this equals 150 hours of work in a year. If we spread the £63 loss over that 50 weeks, this is equivalent to a £0.42 increase in hourly rate, just to cover our losses. In other words to allow a customer to cancel ONE slot at short notice we need to charge about 50p per hour extra, over our standard rates! If we do not cover these costs we cannot operate. For two slots it would be £1 extra.
Slots
Our basic rule is we allocate you a slot ie 10am -1pm every Friday. We then aim to supply the same cleaner, every week, at the same time. Most clients appreciate this. To get our best rates you need to commit to a weekly visit with a minimum 3 hours. We offer slightly higher hourly rates for bi-weekly and then monthly and one-off jobs. Once you book a slot, we use our reasonable endeavours to turn up at that time every week, apart from bank holidays.
If you are away for a slot then give we normally expect that you give us access to the property and we keep the basics clean and use our time productively for deeper dive cleaning, such as the fridge, an oven or carpets (special rates), skirting boards, inside cupboards, rooms not often frequented or cleaned, silverware etc…effectively we can do a deeper or spring clean on additional elements. Most houses can use the additional treatment, especially if it’s early in our relationship, and we’re getting the property up to scratch.
Of course we can be flexible, a client can call us in on an ad-hoc basis, no problem. But in these circumstances we charge a minimum of £25 per hour and we often respond to short notice urgent cleans where we charge £30-£40. Deep clean rates are usually £25-£30. Our current best rate for a 3 or 4 hour, regular weekly clean with auto payments is £22. Note our 2024 rate of £20 was uplifted to £22 from 1st April for new clients and from August onwards for existing clients, subject to giving you the appropriate notice i.e. 30 days.
Our business operates with our basic cleaning service, almost as a loss leader but, it has to run on a mostly automated basis…. hence we ask our clients to stick to the plan - a regular job/slot to attract the best rates. We use the base cleaning service, hopefully to sell added value higher margin services like oven cleans and carpet cleaning. We’ve also recently added in gardening, patios, drives, gutters, windows and car detailing services. See article on additional services here.
So, if you cancel, you effectively may need lose your slot and usually a higher rate will be applied, and your preferred slot MAY not be available.
Options - flexibility - one cancellation
However, if a client would give us 4 weeks notice of a break/holiday, once a year, could we allow this?? Yes.
So, going forward we will allow one cancellation/break per year, with the appropriate 4 week's notice, as a standard policy. We learn all the time and our policies and Terms and Conditions grow to handle all the situations we experience and still allow us to operate with at least some gross profit.
Summary
In the future we’ll make it clear the best rates are for 51 weeks service with 1 break allowed with 4 week’s given notice. The hourly rate will rise by at least 50p for every additional expected break/holiday slot you want to cancel and be applied to subsequent visits.
i.e. 1 week’s no-service with 4 week’s notice = no rate hike
but 2 weeks break with notice means a 50p hike in hourly rate
If a client cancels anyway, without said notice, we will likely only restart work at the current ad-hoc rate - £25 per hour.
Some of our existing clients may find these conditions too restrictive or harsh, if they are not prepared to pay for the quality and reliability we are trying to proved, and we recognise we may lose them as client. As we develop as a business, we wish to work with those clients who at least sympathize with the very real challenges of running what seems a simple business! In order to provide our services, there are certain conditions and terms we need to apply. If you want to go for the “little old lady in the village”, or go to a large agency that farms out cleaners on spec, then that is your choice. We are confident that the service will not be the same.
As far as possible, having upgraded our staff significantly over the last few months and paying them commensurately, we aim to stick to our values purely so we can provide you with a regular quality, reliable, professional and friendly service. In return, we need to raise our rates slightly and impose some controls on cancellations and changes. We hope you will understand.
Julian & Anna
