Airbnb Lights Left On Solution: Complete Guide for Hosts

The cost of leaving lights on, in actual dollars

Run the math once and the rest is obvious. A typical guest leaves three or four lamps on at checkout. Across a 30-day month with 18 booked nights and 12 vacant ones, you’re paying for roughly 200 hours of unnecessary lighting per lamp. With LED bulbs that’s not catastrophic, but if any of those fixtures still have incandescent or halogen — the porch fixture, the bathroom vanity — the number gets ugly fast. Hosts in higher-rate markets routinely report $20-$40/month savings just from a checkout routine.

The bigger win is HVAC. A Kasa or Tapo plug shutting off a space heater or window AC unit at checkout (paired with an Ecobee SmartThermostat Premium or Nest Learning Thermostat resetting the central system) is where the real money sits. Lights are the first easy win that proves the rest of the automation is worth doing.

The setup is also durable. Once you build a checkout Routine in Alexa that targets a single “All Lights” group, you never touch it again. Add a new lamp? Add the smart plug to the group. The routine still works.

The gear that makes a checkout shutdown possible

• TP-Link Kasa KP125 plugs: the right tool for any lamp you can unplug. Two minute Alexa setup, on-device schedules survive Wi-Fi blips, and they hold an Alexa group reliably. Buy these for every bedside lamp, table lamp, and floor lamp.
• TP-Link Tapo P115: Kasa’s budget sibling. Same Alexa integration, half the price when bought in 4-packs. Use these on lamps in secondary bedrooms or anywhere energy monitoring isn’t critical.
• Amazon Smart Plug: good for hosts already deep in Alexa, but no schedule on the plug itself — everything routes through Echo. Skip if you have more than three Echo Dots competing for trigger duty.
• Philips Hue White bulb in fixed fixtures: use in the porch, hallway sconces, ceiling cans. The Hue Bridge holds the schedule locally and the bulb dims to off rather than just clicking dark.
• Lutron Caseta dimmer: the right answer for the rooms with overhead lights and no easy plug option. The dimmer cuts power to whatever’s wired through it, including dumb $4 bulbs in chandeliers.
• Echo Dot 5th Gen: the trigger box. Sits on the kitchen counter, runs the 11am checkout Routine, no monthly fee.

The pattern: smart plug for lamps, smart bulb or Lutron Caseta for fixtures, and one Routine that targets a group called “All Lights” with everything in it.

The exact 11am checkout routine

1. In the Alexa app, go to Devices → plus → Add Group. Name it “All Lights”. Add every smart plug, Hue bulb, and Lutron Caseta dimmer in the property.
2. Routines → plus → name it “Checkout Shutdown”.
3. When this happens → Schedule → 11:00 AM → Daily.
4. Add Action → Smart Home → All Devices → “All Lights” group → Turn Off.
5. Optional: add a second action to set your Ecobee or Nest to a vacant temperature (78° in summer, 60° in winter). This is the bigger savings hidden inside the lighting routine.
6. From device: pick your kitchen Echo Dot 5th Gen. Save.

If you want this to fire only on actual checkout days (not every day), wire it to your Hospitable, Hostfully, or OwnerRez calendar via Zapier or Pipedream. The Zapier flow: Trigger = “calendar event ends today” → Action = webhook to Alexa via the Voice Monkey integration that fires the Routine. For most one-property hosts, the daily-at-11am version is good enough — lights coming on for arrivals via the welcome routine override it anyway.

Setup gotchas hosts hit on shutdown routines

• Group missing devices. The Routine fires but two lamps stay on. Open the All Lights group, confirm every plug and bulb is in there. New device added last week? Probably forgotten.
• Routine targeting a single device, not the group. Common mistake when the Alexa app suggests “a smart home device” and you pick one. Always target the group.
• Cleaner working past 11am. If your cleaner is mid-turnover when the routine fires, suddenly the lights die on them. Move the time to 10am or wire to a calendar trigger that fires only when no cleaning event is on.
• Same-day check-in conflict. Your sunset routine turns lights on at 7pm; your checkout routine kills them at 11am. That works if no one is checking in that day. If they are, your welcome routine should re-fire 30 minutes before check-in to catch up. Put the welcome routine on a calendar trigger.
• Hue bulb stuck on. If a guest pulled the lamp shade off and unscrewed a Hue bulb, the bulb has no power and won’t respond. The fix is a smart plug instead of a smart bulb in any lamp guests can reach.

Sub-guides in this section

• Airbnb Lights Left on Solution — the daily 11am Alexa Routine that ends the lights-left-on tax for good.
• Automatic Lights Off After Checkout — calendar-triggered shutdown via Hospitable + Zapier so it fires only on real checkout days.
• Smart Lights Energy Savings Airbnb — the actual dollar math, with LED vs incandescent and Kasa energy-monitoring data.
• Alexa Turn Off All Lights Routine — the Group + Routine pattern that scales to a 6-bedroom property.
• Airbnb Checkout Lights Off Automation — combining the lights routine with the Ecobee or Nest vacant-mode set point.
• Save Electricity with Smart Lights — bulb choices, dimmer choices, and which fixtures pay back fastest.
• Smart Plug Lamp Schedule Airbnb — daily, weekly, and check-in-day schedule patterns for Kasa and Tapo plugs.
• Guest Left Lights on Automation — the Aqara door sensor + Alexa Routine combo that reacts when the front door closes for the last time.
• Nightly Light Shutoff Routine — the 1am or 2am bedroom-light cutoff that doesn’t wake guests up.
• Airbnb Energy Saving Lighting Tips — the broader lighting + HVAC playbook with Ecobee and Nest pairings.

FAQ

How much can I actually save with a checkout shutdown?

The lighting alone is usually $5-$15/month in LED-equipped properties and $20-$40/month if you still have any incandescent or halogen fixtures. The bigger savings come from pairing the lights routine with an Ecobee SmartThermostat Premium or Nest Learning Thermostat that resets to a vacant set point at the same time — hosts commonly see $40-$80/month off the HVAC bill in summer or winter. The lighting payback alone covers a Kasa 4-pack in two months.

Should the routine fire daily or only on checkout days?

For one-property hosts, daily at 11am is fine — the welcome routine turns lights back on for incoming guests. For multi-property hosts using Hospitable, Hostfully, or OwnerRez, wire the trigger to the booking calendar via Zapier or Pipedream so it fires only when a guest actually checked out. That avoids the edge case where a 2-night booking has nobody arriving the day after, and the lights flicker on and off uselessly.

What about the porch light — should that also turn off?

No. Keep the porch light on its own sunset schedule independent of the checkout routine. A dark porch on a vacant property tells the wrong story to anyone walking by. Put the porch on a Hue Bridge sunset schedule or a Kasa schedule with sunset trigger, and exclude it from the All Lights group. Same goes for any exterior pathway lighting.

Will the cleaner trigger the lights back on?

Probably. Cleaners flip switches, plug things in, turn lamps on. The fix isn’t to lecture them, it’s to have a second routine fire when the cleaner is done — either a smart button (Aqara Wireless Mini Switch) the cleaner taps when leaving, or a Ring doorbell motion event that hasn’t fired in 30 minutes after they typically finish. For most hosts, a manual second routine bound to a button is the simplest answer.

Where this connects

The lighting checkout routine is the smaller half of energy savings. The thermostat side lives in vacancy savings for thermostats, and the calendar-trigger plumbing is in IFTTT and Zapier automations. For the welcome side that re-enables everything for the next guest, see welcome lighting.