Key Summary

The Partner: StayinLondon, a boutique property management firm specialising in high-end short-term rentals since 2016.
The Challenge: Late-night lockouts and 24/7 guest emergencies led to staff burnout and created an obstacle that made scaling harder.
How did StayinLondon use KeyNest?: Deployed KeyNest GuestCare to provide 24/7 professional guest support and admin, fully integrated with their PMS.
Key Results:
- Ends Staff Burnout: Reclaims nights and weekends for the team by removing the need for 2:00 AM emergency callouts.
- Seamless Support: Agents act as a direct extension of the brand, resolving guest issues with high-level training and local knowledge.
- Operational Scalability: Shifts focus from ‘firefighting’ to growth and host relations, making it easier to expand into a larger portfolio.
- 24/7 Reliability: Guaranteed 100% response rate for guests, ensuring professional assistance is always available.

Established in 2016, StayinLondon is a boutique property management company that specialises in high-end, short-term rental locations. Taking pride in differentiating themselves from larger management firms, StayinLondon maintains a curated portfolio to guarantee a more personalised, hands-on service for guests and hosts alike.

As StayinLondon’s portfolio inevitably started to grow, it needed to find a way to handle potential guest emergencies, especially unfortunate, late-night lockouts - this is where KeyNest GuestCare could take the reins of customer support and give the time back to the StayinLondon team.

Midnight Callouts

The StayinLondon team differentiates themselves by providing a more bespoke, involved service for their guests and hosts. An issue common to most short-term rental hosts quickly became apparent - dealing with guests that accidentally lost the keys to a property.

“Before KeyNest, we regularly had calls that could turn into a potential nightmare,” explains Dainius Podolinskis, CEO and Founder of StayinLondon.

From the dedication to providing the best guest experience, Dainius found himself personally delivering keys to worried guests. However, this quickly led to several prominent issues that needed to be addressed.

Staff Burnout: The small StayinLondon team had to be on-call 24/7 for any kind of guest emergency.
Inconsistent Support: Dainius found offshore assistants to be inadequate, and didn’t want to tackle a potential drop in quality for guest care.
Harder to Scale: You cannot scale a 30-property portfolio to 100 properties if the founder has to personally wake up at 2:00 AM for a lockout.

Regaining hours, nights and weekends thanks to KeyNest GuestCare

Having already taken full advantage of the expansive KeyNest Points network, the StayinLondon team were already aware of how KeyNest could help enhance operations, so decided on implementing KeyNest GuestCare as a means of providing useful guest admin and support.

“The quality of work and GuestCare agent’s training is very high.” - Dainius

GuestCare agents have access to the host's PMS, and have in-depth details and knowledge of individual properties and the surrounding area, enabling them to provide useful and vital information to all guests that need support.

By offloading customer support to GuestCare, StayinLondon benefitted in several ways.

Seamless Brand Extension

“When GuestCare answers the phone, they just say “thank you for calling StayinLondon”, so guests don’t even realise that it’s not directly our team.” - Dainius

Speedy Issue Solving

Most basic guest admin issues (forgotten codes, directions and access codes to spare keys) are resolved instantly by GuestCare without ever involving StayinLondon management.

24/7 Safety Net

Whether a guest has lost their bag, and thus their property keys, or been delayed travelling and arrive at unsociable hours, immediate and professional guest assistance is available at all times.

Reclaiming the Night

Reflecting on how business operations have improved since using GuestCare as their dedicated customer support, Dainius said:

“It removes the stress of late night or weekend situations and it gives us the opportunity to focus more on the guest experience, and also more time spent with the host [...] with GuestCare in place, we can spend time discussing positive things [with property hosts] about the performance of the listing and improvements we can make rather than just discussing ‘firefighting’.”

KeyNest GuestCare has helped StayinLondon reconsider scaling options, making it easier to expand as GuestCare could now be used as part of the sales pitch.

*GuestCare helped Dainius and the rest of management regain their weekends.*

“They’ve not missed a single call. Even if [guests] don’t get through, GuestCare always call back. For small businesses, like mine, you get to the point, when you’re scaling, that you have to have such systems in place because, if you don’t, then you’ll be the one picking up the key at 2AM!” - Dainius

How StayinLondon Avoided Staff Burnout with KeyNest GuestCare