Dog smell. Yes that caught my attention!
We have three dogs. We were very badly dinged on cleanliness by our first ever booking, the clown expressed surprise that we had dogs at all, which shows he hadn't read the listing very well, if at all.
OK so now we have added an air purifier in the common area room that guests have their breakfast in.
Since the hammering we took from this gentleman we have made a big point of having dogs on the premises.
What really annoys me is that the entire ground floor of our house is tiled in R12 rated non slip anti-bacterial tiles, you could literally eat your dinner off it, and it's steam cleaned every other day, and the dogs don't go upstairs.
I think it was a "cultural" difference, although we are very inclusive, I think we had a guest who wasn't as far as dogs are concerned.
Since giving the pooches more prominence on the listing and in the photos we've found that the first question half the guests ask is "where are the puppies!"
We moved last year to a small modern-ish (70s) house in the country from a large rambling edwardian town house, and I look back on the constant maintenance involved and I really feel your pain. You can work your tripe out to keep on top of older properties but there is always something waiting to be done.