For hotels and aparthotels

Whole buildings, run as one operation

Aparthotels, small hotels and multi-let buildings across Bournemouth, Poole and Dorset. Take the distribution on its own for 5% and keep your staff, or hand the whole operation over for 15%.

List the building · 5% Talk to us about the whole operation
Who this is for

Operators, not freeholders

This page is written for people who already run something. Aparthotels with a reception desk and a rota. Small independent hotels that are strong from June to September and quiet the rest of the year. Multi-let houses where every room is let separately. Whole buildings bought as a single asset and let unit by unit. If the keys are yours to fill and the standard across them is your problem, you are in the right place. The serviced accommodation and aparthotel pillar covers how we run this kind of stock day to day.

Now the part most management firms leave vague. This is not block management and it is not leasehold management. We do not act as a managing agent for a freeholder or a residents' management company. We do not set service charge budgets, run communal repairs on behalf of leaseholders, handle statutory consultations or collect ground rent. That is a different profession with a different qualification, and pretending otherwise would help nobody. We operate lettings. Occupancy, rate, changeovers, guests, revenue.

If you own the building as an investment rather than running it yourself, the investor page is the better read, and serviced accommodation vs buy-to-let sets out the arithmetic honestly.

The problem

What actually goes wrong in a building

It is almost never the weekends. August sells itself. Four things quietly eat an operator's year instead.

  • Midweek gaps. Friday and Saturday go. Tuesday in November sits there. A building with twenty keys and a soft midweek is not losing one booking, it is losing the same booking twenty times.
  • OTA dependency. One channel ends up driving most of the volume. Commission compounds across every unit, and when that channel changes how it ranks you, your revenue moves without you having touched anything.
  • Inconsistent housekeeping. Unit 3 scores 4.9 and unit 7 scores 4.2 at the same rate, for reasons nobody has written down. The average drags the whole building's ranking with it.
  • No single view. Occupancy in one spreadsheet, cleaning in a WhatsApp group, revenue in the PMS, complaints in someone's inbox. Nobody can answer "how did the building do last month" in under a day.

Distribution is the lever that moves the first two, and it is the cheapest one you have. Our published indicative model runs a well-distributed property at 68% occupancy against 47% for one sitting on limited channels. Those are modelled assumptions used for illustration on the income estimator, not measured results from your building and not a promise. But the direction is the point: across a whole building, an occupancy gap of that shape compounds every single night.

Plan A

Distribution without adding overhead

List on Flexiestays, 5% of booking revenue. You keep your staff, your PMS, your pricing and your standards. Nothing about how you run the building changes. We add the units to the Flexiestays booking platform, put them in front of the guest audience we already market to, and keep the calendar in sync with the channels you sell on today so a Flexiestays booking cannot double-sell a unit.

Say this plainly, because operators are used to being upsold: you do not need to hire us to manage anything. Flexiestays has two doors and this is one of them. It is not a trial, a loss-leader or a service reserved for managed clients. Bookings taken through the platform carry no OTA commission, which is the whole reason an operator with a commission problem should look at it first. See how listing on Flexiestays works and what marketing and distribution covers.

Plan B

Or hand the operation over

Fully Managed, 15% of booking revenue. Sometimes the honest answer is that running the building has stopped being the business you wanted to be in. On the managed plan we take it end to end: photography and copy for every unit, distribution across Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo, Expedia and Flexiestays, dynamic pricing that moves midweek and shoulder-season rates instead of leaving them flat, 24/7 guest communication and check-in, changeovers, maintenance and reporting. The Flexiestays listing is included inside the 15%, not charged on top of it.

What it costs and what the fee actually buys is set out on pricing and in what management fees really cover. You do not have to decide for the whole building at once, and most operators should not.

Standards

Consistency across units

One unit is a room. Twenty units at slightly different standards is a reputation problem with compound interest, because guests review the building, not the key. On the managed plan every unit runs to the same changeover checklist, the same photo standard on completion, the same linen specification, and its own inventory. Housekeeping flags defects into maintenance rather than leaving them for the next guest to find.

Cleaning, linen, laundry, maintenance and interior design are always delivered through a vetted trusted-partner network that FSM coordinates and holds to a standard. We do not run cleaning crews or a laundry in-house, and we will not pretend we do. That is what lets us cover a fifteen-unit Saturday changeover without the standard collapsing on the last three. See cleaning, linen and laundry, maintenance and repairs, and interior design and furnishing if the building needs bringing up to one spec before it is worth listing at all.

Reporting

Reporting an operator can actually use

The number an operator needs is not "how did the property do". It is which keys are carrying the building and which are being carried. Reporting runs per unit and at building level, with a monthly statement and payout through the owner portal on the managed plan. If your lender, your board or your accountant needs a figure in a particular shape, ask before you sign.

Proof

What a building did with us

We are not going to invent an occupancy uplift to fill this space. When an operator gives us permission to publish their numbers, they will go here, with the building named and the figures checked.

Aparthotel, Bournemouth

{{TODO: confirm with FSM}} — real figures and a real owner quote go here. We publish nothing we have not verified, so this slot stays empty until FSM supplies it.

In the meantime, ask us for the workings behind any figure we quote you at valuation. If we cannot show you how it was built, do not believe it.

Pricing

Start with distribution. Upgrade if it earns it.

Most operators should take the 5% door first: no management contract, no change to your staff or your systems. The managed plan is there when running the building stops being worth your time.

Recommended for this page List on Flexiestays
5 %
of booking revenue

Keep managing it yourself. Just reach more guests.

Who it suits. Owners and operators who already run their own property and want extra bookings, not a manager.

  • Your property listed on the Flexiestays booking platform
  • Promoted to the Flexiestays guest audience
  • Calendar kept in sync with the channels you already use
  • Direct bookings that carry no OTA commission
  • Keep full control of pricing, guests and standards
  • No management contract, no lock-in
  • Guest communication (you keep it)
  • Cleaning and linen coordination (you keep it)
  • Pricing and calendar management (you keep it)
List my property Read the detail
Fully Managed
15 %
of booking revenue

Hand it over. We run the whole thing.

Who it suits. Owners who want the income without the work, and operators who want a single team running the building.

  • Everything in List on Flexiestays, included
  • Listing, photography and copy across every major channel
  • Dynamic pricing and calendar management
  • 24/7 guest communication and check-in
  • Cleaning and linen coordinated through vetted partners
  • Maintenance, compliance and safety checks
  • Owner portal, monthly statement and payout
Get a free valuation Read the detail

The Flexiestays listing is included inside the fully managed fee. It is not charged twice, and it is not reserved for managed clients: anyone can take the 5% listing on its own. Compare both plans in full.

FAQs

Operator questions, answered

The five things every operator asks us before the second meeting.

No. Block and leasehold management is a separate profession: service charge budgets and accounts, communal repairs on behalf of leaseholders, statutory consultations, ground rent, and duties owed to a freeholder. FSM does not do any of that and does not act as a managing agent for a freeholder or a residents’ management company. What we do is operate lettings: filling units, running changeovers, handling guests and reporting on revenue. If you need a block manager, you need a different firm, and we will say so on the first call rather than waste your time.
Yes, and on the 5% listing plan that is the assumption. You carry on running the building exactly as you do now, with your own staff, your own pricing and your own systems, and we simply add distribution. On the fully managed plan we coordinate housekeeping, linen and laundry through a vetted trusted-partner network rather than an in-house crew, because that is how we hold a standard across units and cover a bad Saturday. If you already have a team you rate, tell us: an arrangement that keeps them in place is a conversation, not a refusal.
The exact list of supported PMS and channel-manager integrations is {{TODO: confirm with FSM}}. What we can say plainly is that the point of the 5% plan is not to make you replace your stack. Calendars are kept in sync with the channels you already use so that a Flexiestays booking cannot double-book a unit you have already sold. Bring your setup to the first call and we will tell you what connects, what needs a workaround, and what does not work at all.
Yes. Operators rarely want to hand over twenty keys to a firm they have never worked with, and we would not advise it. A common route is to put the whole building on the 5% listing plan for distribution, then move a handful of the weaker-performing units onto the fully managed plan and compare them against the ones your own team still runs. If the managed units do not earn their 15%, you have lost very little and learned something.
Reporting is per unit and for the building as a whole, so you can see which keys are carrying the operation and which are being carried. On the fully managed plan that comes with a monthly statement and payout through the owner portal. The precise metric set and the export formats available to operators are {{TODO: confirm with FSM}}. If you need a specific figure in a specific shape because your lender or your board asks for it, ask us before you sign, not after.
Keep reading

Where to go next

Serviced accommodation & aparthotels Whole buildings run as one operation Read more List on Flexiestays The 5% door: distribution only, keep your staff and your systems Read more The Flexiestays booking platform How the platform works, and why direct bookings carry no OTA commission Read more Serviced accommodation vs buy-to-let The arithmetic behind running a building rather than letting it Read more Marketing & distribution Your property listed and synced across all major booking channels. Read more Owner portal & reporting See your bookings, earnings and calendar in one place, any time. Read more Portfolio investors If you own the building rather than run it Read more

Find out what your property could earn

Send us the address and the bedroom count. We come back with a realistic projection, the fee, and how we would run it. No pressure, no obligation.

Get a free valuation WhatsApp us +44 7840 500157