Operations software for serviced apartments and long-stay properties

How serviced apartments differ

Serviced apartments sit between a hotel and a residential building. Guests stay for weeks or months, cook in their own kitchen, run the washing machine and work from the dining table. They expect the service of a hotel and the reliability of a home.

That changes the work. There are fewer requests for extra pillows and more for things that break in homes: a dishwasher that will not drain, a hob that keeps tripping, weak Wi-Fi in the bedroom, a stuck balcony door. Cleans are not daily; they happen mid-stay, once or twice a week, at a time that suits the guest. And in many buildings the apartments are owned by individual investors and managed by the operator, so every repair is also something you may have to explain to an owner.

The team is lean: an operations or property manager, a small guest relations team, housekeepers and one or two maintenance technicians, plus outside firms for appliances and air conditioning. TaskLoop gives them one list of work, with an owner and a record for every apartment.

How a long-stay request flows through TaskLoop

Every request follows four steps: request, assign, act, rate.

Request. Each apartment has its own QR code. The guest scans it, describes what they need and submits it, at any hour, without phoning the office. Requests from calls, emails or messages to guest relations are logged in the admin dashboard, so everything sits in one list. See QR code requests.

Assign. Guest relations or the operations manager assigns the task to a housekeeper, a technician or a department, with a priority, a deadline and instructions such as “guest works from home, call before entering” or “key at reception”.

Act. Staff receive a push notification on the TaskLoop mobile app, accept the task, update its status and complete it. They attach a photo when it helps: the cleared filter, the new hob element, the finished clean.

Rate. The guest sees the request tracked to completion and rates the service.

If a task runs past its deadline, it escalates to a supervisor. On a long stay that matters: a guest who waits three days for a washing machine repair is a guest who does not extend.

Mid-stay cleans

Mid-stay cleaning is where serviced apartments most often slip. The clean was promised for Tuesday; the guest changed it to Wednesday by message; the housekeeper on Wednesday did not know. The guest comes home to an unmade bed and writes a review.

In TaskLoop, each mid-stay clean is a task for a specific apartment, date and time, assigned to housekeeping with the guest’s instructions. When the guest moves it, the task moves, and the housekeeper sees the change on the app. The housekeeping supervisor sees which cleans are done, which are running and which are late. Recurring cleaning schedules for each stay are generated automatically from a single setup.

Maintenance in units that people live in

Long-stay guests find faults that short-stay guests never notice. TaskLoop treats each one as a work order: the unit, the fault, the person who reported it, the technician who fixed it, the time it took and a photo of the result.

Over time, that record tells you which apartments keep generating jobs, which appliance models fail most and which faults return after being “fixed”. When a unit has to come off sale for a repair, the operations manager can see exactly which job is holding it and update the PMS accordingly. For how to structure the record, read how to keep a hotel maintenance log; the same principles apply to apartments.

Owner-managed units

In owner-managed buildings, the operator runs the apartments on behalf of individual owners. Owners want to know the state of their unit and why they are being charged for a repair. Without a record, those conversations turn into arguments.

TaskLoop gives you a dated history of every task in every unit, with photos where they were taken. When an owner asks why a new washing machine was needed, you can show the three earlier repair attempts, who did them and what was found. Owner statements and charges stay in your PMS or accounting system. TaskLoop supplies the evidence behind them. See why photo proof of work matters.

Turnovers between stays

When a long stay ends, the apartment needs a deep clean, a check of inventory and appliances, and often a small repair or two before the next guest arrives. Each of these can be a task assigned to housekeeping or maintenance with a deadline that matches the next arrival, so the operations manager can see on one screen whether the apartment will be ready.

Who uses what

Next to your PMS

Your PMS, such as Oracle OPERA, Cloudbeds or Mews, keeps handling reservations, rates and billing. TaskLoop runs the operational work. It works alongside your PMS; it is not integrated with it. See integrations for what that means day to day.

Getting started

Start with guest requests and mid-stay cleans, the two areas where long-stay guests feel delays most. Put QR codes in a single floor or block, route guest relations’ messages through the dashboard and look at response times and ratings after a few weeks.

Pricing is quote-based and depends on the number of units and your team. Book a free demo or read more about hotel management with TaskLoop.