List your hotel or apartments with Flexiestays: how it works

Flexiestays runs eight aparthotels of its own on Bournemouth's West Cliff, and it also runs a booking platform: a direct-booking online travel agency at flexiestays.com through which travellers search, compare and book accommodation. Hotels, guesthouses, aparthotels and apartment owners across Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole list on it to reach guests they would not otherwise reach. This is how listing works, in plain terms, from the standard agreement every listed property signs.

What Flexiestays is, and is not

Flexiestays is a distribution channel, the way Airbnb and Booking.com are. It markets your property, takes the booking, collects the guest's payment and pays you the balance. It does not clean your rooms, staff your desk, check your guests in or set your house rules. You run the property exactly as you do today, and you talk to your guests: messages come to you through the Flexiestays chat and you answer them. Our team supports you on payments, cancellations and anything to do with the platform, and steps in on a material complaint, but the stay itself is between you and the guest.

That is a different offer from a management company, and it is the point. Nothing about how you operate changes. What changes is who is booking.

Why properties list: the winter

A leisure hotel on this coast lives on twenty summer weekends. Flexiestays' own demand does not: corporate and contractor accounts, relocations, hospital staff, film crews and long stays fill the months a seafront hotel cannot fill on its own, and the town's calendar has just added four European nights at the Vitality between October and January. The corporate accommodation guide describes that demand; a listed property is where some of it is placed when our own apartments are full or a booker wants a different area, a different price point or a different town. Poole and Christchurch properties get their own demand, covered in hotels in Christchurch and Poole.

What we list

• Hotels, aparthotels, guesthouses, B&Bs, serviced apartments and holiday lets anywhere in Bournemouth, Christchurch or Poole, holding the licences, planning consents and fire and safety certificates the law requires.
• Accurate content. Room types, photographs, amenities, check-in and check-out times and a cancellation policy, kept up to date. Flexiestays may reformat content for display but never changes its substance.
• Rates in pounds sterling, no higher than the public rates you show on any other online channel for the same room, dates and conditions. Your own website, a closed loyalty scheme, email-only offers and members-only rates are exempt.

How your availability connects

Through Bakuun. Bakuun is a B2B travel platform whose connectivity hub, B-Aggregate, links a booking channel to more than 210 channel managers and property systems through a single connection, according to Bakuun. If your property runs on a channel manager or PMS such as SiteMinder, Cloudbeds, Guesty, Hostify, Lodgify or SuperControl, Flexiestays connects to it through Bakuun. Rates and availability update automatically, bookings land in your system, and there is nothing for you to key in twice. This is the route most hotels take.

Through Roibos. Roibos is a B2B hotel distribution marketplace where hotels and distribution partners contract directly, without intermediaries, and the hotel keeps control of its rates and inventory in real time, as Roibos describes it. A hotel already on Roibos adds Flexiestays as a distribution partner from its own dashboard.

Directly, in the Owner Dashboard. No channel manager? You manage rates, availability and closed-out dates yourself in the Flexiestays Owner Dashboard, or sync an iCal feed from your calendar, and you block any date sold elsewhere within two hours of it being confirmed. Bookings arrive by email and in the dashboard. This suits small hotels, guesthouses and single apartments.

Whichever route, the property remains responsible for keeping availability accurate: an overbooking caused by a stale feed or a missed block is resolved by the property, which is the same rule every channel applies.

How a booking works

1. A guest books on flexiestays.com. With Instant Book the booking confirms on payment; with Request-to-Book you confirm or decline within an agreed window.
2. Flexiestays collects the payment as merchant of record, sends the guest a confirmation and sends you the booking by email, through your channel manager or in the dashboard. You acknowledge it and enter it in your system within 24 hours.
3. The guest messages you in the chat with questions, arrival times and requests. You host the stay.
4. Within 14 days of check-out, Flexiestays pays the net amount to your bank account: the booking value less one commission, with VAT charged on the commission only. A VAT statement and the full booking and payment history sit in your Owner Dashboard.

Cancellations follow the tier you chose: Flexible, Moderate, Strict or a custom policy. Where a guest cancels within the policy, Flexiestays processes the refund and waives its commission on the refunded portion. Where a guest cancels outside the policy and no refund is due, you are paid as normal.

The terms, in brief

• Non-exclusive. List anywhere else you like.
• One commission, on completed bookings only. No listing fee, no subscription, no charge on a cancelled and refunded booking.
• A six-month initial term, then rolling monthly; after the initial term either side can end it on 30 days' written notice, and any confirmed booking with later dates is honoured.
• Reviews are published and never incentivised. Asking guests for a review, or offering something for one, ends the listing.
• Guest data is shared only to fulfil the booking: name, contact details and arrival information, under UK GDPR.
• You keep your content. The licence to show your photographs and descriptions ends with the agreement.

How to list

Email partners@flexiestays.com with:

• The property name and address
• The type of property and its room types
• Whether you use a channel manager or PMS, and which one
• When you could go live

The team sends the standard agreement, sets up the connection through Bakuun, Roibos or the Owner Dashboard, and checks the listing with you before it goes live. Winter is when a new listing earns its keep, so the sooner a property is connected the better. The business desk has the other routes, and why Bournemouth hotels are switching models sets out the wider case.

Email the partnerships team