Software for UK holiday-let owners

Saturday changeover, cleaner not confirmed, guests already on the A12, the 11pm WiFi question due back tonight, Sykes still wants 22% of every booking, my accountant rang to say the tax bill’s up 40%, and the 2026 register opens in April. I bought a cottage. Not a customer-service job.

You’re the owner of a three-bedroom cottage in Aldeburgh, let mostly through Sykes plus a few direct via your own site that you stopped looking at when the kids got into school; or the partner running a 2-5 cottage portfolio across the Suffolk Coast and the Lavenham barn belt, with Hostaway or Lodgify or OwnerRez half-set-up; or the boutique-agency principal running ten owners’ properties through SuperControl with a hand-built spreadsheet on top; or the PASC-affiliated cottage owner watching the AirDNA market-data for your patch and wondering whether the OTA-driven occupancy or the direct-driven margin is the answer. The stack is the universal mix - Airbnb + Booking.com + Sykes / cottages.com + maybe Hostaway / Lodgify / OwnerRez / Hostfully / Smoobu / Eviivo + PriceLabs + Operto smart locks + Stripe + Xero + WhatsApp with Linda the cleaner - and nothing connects to anything else without you copying a code from one window to another. The cleaner WhatsApp on Saturday morning is half-confirmed. The 11pm WiFi question from the guest who arrived this evening is sitting in your phone next to the work-Slack notification. The Sykes commission’s eaten £600 out of last month’s £2,800 gross. The Airbnb payout that arrived as one £4,213 chunk on Tuesday hides the cleaning fee, the service fee, the host fee and the actual rent under one line in your bank account; your accountant says she needs them split for the post-April-2025 property-income treatment and you don’t know how. The April 2026 registration scheme is going live and you’re not sure whether the gas cert they want is the LGSR or the PAT thing. The Welsh statutory licensing scheme’s already live, the Scottish one’s been live for two years, and there’s English noise about an Article-4-style council overlay landing on top.

We make custom software for UK holiday-let owners - scoped per property or per portfolio, sized to the bit between the cottage you actually own and the Saturday changeover that confirms itself, the 11pm WiFi question that answers itself, the direct-booking site that takes thirty percent of next quarter’s bookings, the OTA payout that splits itself into the four Xero codes your accountant needs, the 2026 register that’s already submitted by April with the cert pack pre-assembled. Not a Hostaway / Lodgify / OwnerRez / Hostfully / Smoobu / Eviivo rip-and-replace - the booking grid works for what it works for. Not an Airbnb / Booking.com / Sykes replacement - the OTAs bring half your revenue and you’d be mad to walk away. The bit between - the cleaner orchestration that turns Saturday-morning dread into a one-tap confirmation, the trained guest agent that answers the dozen routine questions in your voice, the direct-booking site that sits alongside Sykes not instead of it, the OTA-payout-to-Xero bridge that splits the four-to-six hidden line-items every payout actually contains, the consolidated registration-and-cert pack ready for Welsh / Scottish / English schemes - that’s the bit we build. Tell us what your cottage’s week looks like and we’ll come back with a sketch.

What you spend your week on that you shouldn’t have to

• Saturday morning, 11am. Cleaner hasn’t replied to the WhatsApp confirming this afternoon’s turnover. Guests checking in at 4. You’re at your actual job, the “is Linda definitely on for today?” message sitting at the top of your phone and refusing to resolve itself.
• 11pm Wednesday. Guest who arrived at 6 messages “the WiFi password isn’t working, also where’s the boiler pressure dial?”. You answer it for the fourteenth time this year. The welcome book is in the cottage kitchen drawer she didn’t open.
• Sykes takes 22% of every booking. You bought the cottage to make money; you’re paying a fifth of it to a portal that lets the customer book you and then keeps the customer’s email address. The “how do I take some bookings direct” question has been on your list since 2024, and the AirDNA dashboard for your patch suggests Suffolk-Coast direct-bookings averaging 65-80% inside twelve months on a Boostly-style strategy.
• Three Airbnb logins (each cottage), two Booking.com extranets, one Sykes Owner Portal, the Vrbo account you can’t remember the password for. The central diary is the iCal feed Hostaway might be losing again, plus the spreadsheet you keep meaning to update.
• Tuesday’s Airbnb payout arrives as £4,213 in the bank. Hidden in it: £180 cleaning fees (three bookings), £37 of OTA-side fees you can’t really see, £4,196 of actual rent (after the host-side service charge), one refund-adjustment from last week. Xero shows it as £4,213 of “Airbnb income”. Your accountant wants four codes; you give her one.
• April 2026 registration scheme - every English listing will need a unique registration number, every cert (annual LGSR / 5-year EICR / 10-year EPC / FRA review / legionella RA / smoke + CO interlink test) needs to be submitted, and the reg number needs to display on every listing - Airbnb + Booking.com + Vrbo + your direct site. The Welsh statutory licensing scheme’s already live; the Scottish one’s been live since 2022 with renewal cycles already biting; the English one’s the new one to assemble for, with a council-level Article-4 overlay watching on top.
• The accountant rang to say the FHL tax regime’s gone, the mortgage interest is now a 20% credit not a full deduction, the bill’s up 40% and you might want to think about whether selling makes sense. The Form 17 split with your wife needs to be filed before April 6th if it isn’t already.
• A 3-star Sykes review from a guest who actually had a fine stay but left a comment about the kettle. You sat up til midnight crafting the reply. Page-1 ranking on Sykes is sensitive; one mid review and you fall off and the bookings drop.
• The smart-lock battery died on a Friday afternoon. You were on the M11. The guest couldn’t get into the cottage. Forty-minute phone call, an Airbnb refund, a near-miss for a chargeback, and a one-star you spent the weekend talking down to a three.
• January and February. Diary’s empty. Cleaner still wants paying for the “emergency only” monthly check. Mortgage doesn’t pause. The seasonal-cashflow conversation with your spouse happens every year and never gets easier.

These aren’t problems Hostaway’s next release is going to solve. They’re the layer between the cottage that earns money in peak weeks and the cottage that earns money clean, the host who isn’t a customer-service rep on a weekday evening, the OTA payout your accountant can actually use, the 2026 registration that’s in by April, the bookings that arrive direct instead of via twenty-percent commission. That’s what we’d build.

Example problems we could solve

Five things we hear most often from UK holiday-let owners - with what the solved version looks like in your week. Four apply universally across single-cottage / portfolio / agency-managed / glamping (the Saturday changeover, the 11pm WiFi question, the OTA-payout split, the registration scheme); one applies most strongly to the owners ready to shift the commission mix toward direct bookings. Every build is scoped per owner: a single-cottage owner often starts with problems 1 + 2 + 5; a portfolio owner typically needs all five. None of it means binning Hostaway / Lodgify / OwnerRez / Hostfully / Smoobu / Eviivo / SuperControl - they’re the booking grid; we sit on top.

1. The Saturday changeover that confirms itself - and the cleaner who actually replies

The 11am-Saturday moment: 11am Saturday. Linda hasn’t replied to the WhatsApp confirming today’s turnover. Guests at 4pm. You’re at your actual job. You send three more messages by lunchtime. She’s fine, the job’s done by 3:45 - but every Saturday morning is the same low-level dread, fifty-two times a year. The holiday-let-distinct weight is that Saturday changeovers are the single highest-stakes moment of the let-week - a missed turnover is a refund + a review + a cancelled future booking - the cleaner-WhatsApp is the only channel that actually works, and the build is shaped around making the confirmation a one-tap thing on her side and an “only ping me if there’s a problem” on yours.

Solved looks like: the changeover orchestration as a structured event tied to the booking calendar across every channel. Every confirmed booking - Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo, Sykes, direct - automatically generates the changeover work-order against the cleaner WhatsApp the morning of the booking-end (or the evening before for an early check-in), with the date, the property, the smart-lock code window, the specific notes (the new hot-tub guests, the family with the toddler who left toys, the dog who came last time, the linen order already-fired against the supplier). The cleaner replies one tap (✅ confirmed / ⏰ delayed by N hours / ❌ can’t make it, sub needed) - the system locks the changeover into the calendar when she confirms, escalates to the back-up cleaner if she declines, and surfaces “unconfirmed at +90 mins to threshold” to you only when there’s a real problem. The photo-on-completion (key shot of the made-up bedroom, the wiped hob, the welcome basket placed) lands in the per-property album so the “is it actually ready?” question has an answer at 3:30pm without ringing. Same engine handles the changeover-cadence variance: peak season runs five-changes-a-week, off-season runs one, and the cleaner’s pay structure (per-changeover / hourly / blended) writes through to the bookkeeping side without a Sunday-night spreadsheet.

2. The 11pm WiFi question that answers itself - and the welcome book the guest actually reads

The 11pm-Wednesday moment: 11pm Wednesday. The guest who arrived at 6 messages about the WiFi password and the boiler pressure dial. You answer for the fourteenth time. The welcome book is in the kitchen drawer she didn’t open. The holiday-let-distinct weight is that the same dozen guest questions get asked every week of the year by different people, the answers are stable, the host’s evening time isn’t - pre-arrival cadence at 7 days + 2 days + day-of answers the routine 90% before they’re asked, and the in-stay agent on WhatsApp / Airbnb message / Booking.com message answers the remaining 10% in the host’s voice at the hour the host’s putting kids to bed.

The full build: Booking & Review Loop - the pre-arrival cadence + in-stay AI agent + post-stay review prompt. Referenced across fourteen verticals; the holiday-let version’s vertical-distinct features are the 7-day welcome-video + parking + WiFi pre-arrival pack, the 2-day smart-lock code + local-pub recommendation (the agent trained on the cottage’s welcome book + your local-area knowledge - the Snape Maltings concert calendar, the Aldeburgh Carnival August weekend, the “is there a good fish place near the harbour” answer in your voice), the per-channel review prompt routed to the booking platform the guest came in on (so the Sykes guest’s review lands on Sykes where the page-1-ranking sensitivity lives, the Airbnb guest’s lands on Airbnb), and the negative-sentiment intercept that routes a was-it-OK sub-four-star draft to you privately before it goes public.

3. The direct-booking site that takes thirty percent of next quarter’s bookings - and sits alongside Sykes, doesn’t replace it

The £600-on-£2,800 moment: Sykes takes 22% of every booking, plus another £25 of fee they don’t quite call commission. £600 of last month’s £2,800 gone to a portal that won’t even give you the customer’s email address. The “take some direct” question has been on your list since 2024. The holiday-let-distinct weight is that every direct booking is a multiple-of-commission saving - a 22% Sykes cut is the gap between a profitable cottage and a break-even one for a lot of single-cottage owners, the OTAs are valuable as discovery channels but ruinous as the only channels, AirDNA market-data for the Suffolk Coast shows direct-booking shares of 65-80% inside twelve months on Boostly-style strategies, and the build is shaped around making the direct channel exist and work - not around abandoning the channels that bring the top-of-funnel.

Solved looks like: a self-hosted direct-booking site for the cottage (or each cottage in the portfolio), built on the same studio stack we use for mendmyi and the event-venue work, so the cottage isn’t at the mercy of a vendor’s URL strategy or per-listing price escalation. The site’s a proper marketing surface for the cottage - the photos, the area copy, the “what’s near” tiles for Snape Maltings and Aldeburgh and Minsmere and Latitude weekend, the seasonal calendar - with a direct enquiry / direct-booking flow: web form or WhatsApp enquiry → Stripe deposit link → calendar block → guest pre-arrival sequence (problem 2) → cleaner work-order (problem 1) → the same operational shape the OTA bookings flow through. Dynamic-pricing engine (the same PriceLabs-style demand-side data, surfaced on your direct calendar) so the direct rate’s never a sleeping mismatch with the Airbnb rate that pushes a guest back to the OTA. Sits alongside Sykes / Airbnb / Booking.com - we don’t ask you to walk away from the OTAs; we add a direct channel that costs zero commission past the Stripe fee and gives you the customer’s email, so the repeat-booking and the off-season-fill conversations happen with you, not with Sykes. The dashboard shows the direct-vs-OTA mix per quarter so the “is it working?” question has a number; we target half the Boostly-style 65-80% in the first year, conservative.

4. The Airbnb payout that splits itself into four Xero codes - without your accountant emailing you in March

The £4,213-one-line moment: Tuesday’s payout - £4,213 in the bank, one Xero line. Hidden in it: three cleaning fees, the Airbnb host-side service fee, a refund-adjustment from last week, the actual rent. Your accountant wants them split four ways. She emails you in March asking for last summer’s detail. You can’t get it without going booking-by-booking on the Airbnb extranet. The holiday-let-distinct weight is that an OTA payout looks like one transaction and is really four-to-six, the mismatch costs the host real money at year-end (missed reliefs, manual reconciliation, accountant fees you didn’t budget for), and the build is shaped around making the books match the operational reality automatically - so the “can you send me the breakdown of last summer” email never has to be answered.

Solved looks like: the OTA-payout splitter as a structured bridge between every payout (Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo, Sykes, direct Stripe) and Xero (or QuickBooks / FreeAgent). Every booking writes a structured line - gross rent, cleaning fee, OTA service fee, host-side commission, any refund-adjustment, any damage-deposit movement - against the booking object; when the payout lands in your bank, it reconciles automatically against the underlying bookings and writes the four-or-five-line split into the accounting system with the correct codes (rent income, cleaning income, OTA commission expense, refund-adjustment). For the post-April-2025 property-income reality - mortgage interest as a 20% credit not a full deduction, the Form-17-aware joint-owner split, the VAT threshold tracker for the portfolio approaching £90k rolling - the build flags the events your accountant needs to know about before the year-end (the month you crossed £85k rolling, the mortgage-interest total ready for the credit calculation, the Form 17 anniversary). For the owners on Sykes / cottages.com whose statements arrive monthly with the commission already taken, the same logic reverses out the gross-vs-net so the books match the bank either way.

5. The 2026 registration submitted in April - with the cert pack already assembled (and the Welsh / Scottish schemes covered alongside)

The four-listings-three-cottages-seven-inboxes moment: the English register opens in April. Every listing needs a reg number. Every listing needs the certs. You have three cottages and four listings each (Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo, direct). The gas cert’s somewhere in your email. The EICR is on the electrician’s portal. The legionella RA you did yourself on a template last year. The penalty wording is harsher than the registration fee. Meanwhile the Welsh statutory licensing scheme’s already live, the Scottish one’s been live since 2022 with renewal cycles already biting, and your council’s on an Article-4-watch overlay that adds local requirements on top of the national one. The holiday-let-distinct weight is that the 2026 register is the first time a UK STR owner’s been asked to consolidate compliance into a single submission across multiple listings, the certs already exist but live in seven inboxes and three portals, and the build is shaped around making the consolidation a one-screen assembly rather than a three-evening folder-hunt - and making the reg number that comes back display itself on the listings without you copy-pasting it eight times.

Solved looks like: the registration-and-cert pack as a structured live record per property, with the unique reg number broadcasting to every listing channel as soon as it lands. Each cottage carries its cert calendar - annual LGSR (the gas cert), EICR (5-year), EPC (10-year), FRA review (annual or on change), legionella risk assessment (annual review), PAT test (annual), smoke + CO interlink test (every let or at minimum the start of each tenancy) - with the renewal cadence chasing the contractor before each expiry, the cert PDF filing against the property record when it lands, and the “current state of all certs” one-screen view ready for the register submission. When the English register goes live, the submission flows from the same record (the certs are already filed, the property address + EPC rating + insurance details are already structured); the unique reg number it returns writes back to the Airbnb / Booking.com / Vrbo / direct-site listings in the format each requires. The Welsh statutory licensing scheme and the Scottish licensing scheme render from the same evidence pack - different format export, same underlying record. For the broader compliance reality (the C5 use-class question on your council’s Article 4 watch-list, the business-rates 70-day threshold review, the post-April-2025 FHL tax events) the dashboard flags the “things to talk to your accountant or planner about this quarter” so the surprises don’t land in March. For PASC-affiliated owners, the same evidence renders into the PASC code-of-conduct format for federation-side reporting.

The full build: Compliance Evidence Record - licensed-property evidence pack as a structured live record. Referenced across twenty-seven verticals; the holiday-let version’s vertical-distinct feature is the multi-scheme registration broadcast (English 2026 + Welsh statutory + Scottish licensing + council Article-4 overlay) with the per-format export driving each, and the cert calendar that chases the contractor sixty days before each renewal so the “have we got a current LGSR” question never lands the wrong side of a register submission.

The closest things we’ve already built

• mendbuddy - our multi-channel AI agent platform behind the 11pm WiFi auto-answer in problem 2 (the agent trained on your cottage’s welcome book + the trick with the front door + the local pub the owner recommends; answers on WhatsApp / Airbnb message / Booking.com message in your voice), the post-stay review chase, and the Saturday-cleaner-WhatsApp confirmation cascade in problem 1. Voice + WhatsApp + SMS + web chat + Airbnb / Booking.com message. See Mendbuddy.
• repairminder - our SaaS workshop-management software. The asset-register + photo-evidence + cert-calendar pattern is the same shape as the cottage’s cert + cert-renewal record in problem 5: an asset (cottage) carries certs, photos, status, recurring service events. The cottage build inherits the pattern and adds the OTA-channel broadcast for the reg number. See Repairminder.
• mendmyi - our founder’s service-business storefront with full ecommerce on the same studio stack. The direct-booking site in problem 3 is shape-wise the same build - a marketing surface + structured product (the cottage / the let-week) + Stripe payment + WhatsApp enquiry - the reference for any cottage owner whose direct-booking site needs to be a proper marketing surface, not a thin redirect to an OTA. See Mendmyi.
• A private-hire event venue we built end-to-end - the same enquiry-to-deposit-to-event shape, different cadence (a wedding once vs a let-week every week), informs the deposit-ladder + cancellation-policy logic in problem 3.
• pharmaceutical-analytics.com - analytics dashboard built for an analytics consultancy. The owner’s KPI surface (occupancy, ADR, direct-vs-OTA mix, post-commission net per property, cert-on-schedule rate across the portfolio) sits on the same pattern as the analytics dashboards we build elsewhere. See Pharmaceutical Analytics.

If your portfolio’s narrower than the whole of the above

Most of the holiday-let operator-modes we work with - single-cottage owner-host, 2-5 cottage family portfolio, small boutique-agency principal, glamping / shepherds-hut operator, small B&B with self-catering on the side - share most of the hub above. The bits that genuinely differ scope in discovery: a single-cottage owner often starts with problems 1 + 2 + 5 and adds 3 + 4 when the OTA-commission line crosses a threshold; a portfolio owner typically needs all five from the first scope conversation; a boutique-agency principal needs a multi-owner consolidated dashboard layered on top so each owner sees only her own cottage’s data; a glamping / shepherds-hut operator needs the off-grid utility-management layer (water-tank levels, propane reserves, septic schedule) where the cert-calendar normally lives. None of these warrant their own page yet - they’re a discovery conversation, not a separate buyer.

Adjacent verticals

• Hospitalityclosest shape for the booking + comms + deposit pattern; event venues and small hotels share the “every guest needs the same dozen answers” problem and many of the same OTAs.
• Wedding suppliersevent-venue adjacency; the seasonal + deposit-ladder + Saturday-changeover cluster has real customer-segment overlap with the boutique cottage end of holiday-lets.
• Lettings + property managementfor owners running both short-term lets and AST property; the cert / EICR / gas / FRA discipline is the same across both lettings modes.
• Pet servicesfor the dog-friendly cottages running their welcome packs and the local-area dog-walker recommendations; many cottage hosts have a sister business in pet services.

FAQ

Tell us what your cottage’s week looks like

Send an enquiry - what you own (single cottage, 2-5 portfolio, small agency operator, glamping site, boutique B&B) and where (Suffolk Coast / Lavenham belt / Welsh / Scottish / elsewhere). Your current channel mix (Airbnb / Booking.com / Vrbo / Sykes / cottages.com / direct), your current channel manager if any (Hostaway / Lodgify / OwnerRez / Hostfully / Smoobu / Eviivo / SuperControl / Bookalet / paper diary), where the operational pain lives - the Saturday cleaner who doesn’t reply, the 11pm WiFi message, the Sykes commission you’ve decided you can’t keep paying, the OTA payout your accountant can’t read, the 2026 register you’re worried about, the Welsh / Scottish scheme renewal you’ve already got biting. We’ll come back with a sketch of what we’d build and what it would cost. No calendar, no demo to sit through. Email reply, scoped sketch, you decide.