Shelves 1 and 2What a short-stay booking actually is
A booking on the first two shelves produces a guest. There is no tenancy, so there is no deposit scheme, no prescribed information and no notice period; there is an arrival window, a departure time and a changeover in between. The agreement is the booking confirmation, and it carries four things and no more: the arrival date, the number of nights, the number of people in the party and the address. If any of those four is wrong the booking is corrected before the code is issued, because every one of them changes the work.
Everything else on these two shelves follows from the number of turns rather than the number of nights. The strip below is one month. Seven bookings fill twenty-one of its thirty nights, and the tick under each booking is a departure that has to be cleaned, re-stocked and re-let before four o'clock the same day or the night after.
Twenty-one nights let across seven bookings, and seven turns to do in the nine nights that are left over.
ArrivalThe code that changes between guests
Entry is by a numbered key safe. The code is set for the booking and changed at the departure, which means a guest who comes back a month later finds their old number does not work, and that is the point of it. The arrival note sent before the stay carries the code, the location of the safe described in words rather than in a photograph, the refuse collection day, the stopcock, and the number of the parking bay if the building has one.
The arrival window opens at four o'clock. Earlier arrivals are agreed in advance or not at all, because the flat between ten and four is a working flat with a crew in it, and letting a party into a half-finished changeover produces a complaint about the changeover.
DuringInside the booking
A nightly booking of one to six nights is left alone. Linen is set once at the changeover and consumables are stocked for the length of the stay: tea, coffee, a bin liner roll, one spare of each bathroom item. Nobody enters an occupied flat except for a reported fault or a safety matter, and then with notice to the guest first.
From seven nights the arrangement changes. A mid-stay service is offered and agreed in writing before the arrival: a towel change, a bin round and a quick check of the bathroom on a named day at a named hour. It is offered rather than imposed, and a guest who declines it gets a flat nobody walks into for the whole booking. The longer stay also gets its meters read at the arrival and again at the departure, so that a fortnight of heating is a number rather than an argument.
RecordThe guest register and the meters
Every booking is entered in the register kept for the address: arrival date, nights, party size, departure date and the date the code was changed. The register is the only place a guest's details are written down, it is not sent anywhere, and it is the record that answers a question about a particular night months afterwards when nobody remembers.
Where a flat on these shelves is held by this company under its own lease rather than managed for an owner, the register belongs to this office. Where it is operated for an owner on a fee basis, the register belongs to the instruction and goes back with the keys when the instruction ends.
BoundaryWhat these two shelves are not
They are not a letting. Nothing on the nightly or weekly shelf creates security of tenure, and nothing on it is a residence. A guest who asks to stay on past the booking is moved to shelf three or shelf four with a new agreement, a schedule of condition and the paperwork those shelves carry, or is not moved at all. Running a long occupation on a short-stay booking because it is easier is how the wrong document ends up in the file.