About Lodging Apartments
Lodging Apartments is a pioneering company in the Barcelona tourism sector, with more than 20 years of experience in management of tourist apartments.
Founded by Ezequiel Vallejo, the company has grown to become a benchmark in the sector, characterized by a team of specialized professionals and an approach focused on customer satisfaction.
Over the course of these two decades, Lodging Apartments has established its reputation by offering carefully selected apartments, located in the best areas and with all the necessary amenities to ensure the best experience for your customers. In addition, they have developed an exclusive sales platform that allows their users to easily access a wide range of services, supported by a customer service team available 24 hours a day in five languages.
La sustainability is also a priority for Lodging Apartments, demonstrated by its membership in associations such as APARTUR, Biosphere Sustainable and Tree-Nation, reinforcing their commitment to responsible tourism.
The challenge
Lodging Apartments, managing own and third-party properties, faced an important operational challenge: obtaining bills for supplies (water, electricity, gas, among others) for their properties and those of the owners for whom they manage properties.
“The challenges we were trying to overcome with Polaroo were to have more controlled supplies, without having to spend a lot of time on it”, Melania Cristea, Operations Director at Lodging Apartment
This process required that, every month, they had to contact their landlords to request the invoices. You needed to know about the bills the amount paid, and the consumption made, since within the real estate operating policies, there are clauses for charging guests for excess consumption.
“Before working with Polaroo, at the end of each reservation, we went to the pages of the different supplies (Water, Electricity, Gas) and we would download the bills, which were then recorded in an Excel and checked if the amount paid by the customer exceeded or was missing to claim anything. It was manual work, which took quite a bit of time.” Melania Cristea, Operations Director at Lodging Apartment
As Melania says, this generated a delay in your operations and, therefore, prevented the recovery of the cost associated with the excess consumption made by the guest, impacting the profitability of their properties.
As the company grew and its apartment portfolio expanded, the need to improve operational efficiency became apparent. Lodging Apartments was looking for a solution that would allow them to access invoices without having to contact their owners, in addition to achieving agility in calculating balance sheets.
The Solution
That's when Lodging Apartments decided to integrate the Polaroo software to facilitate the control of consumption and expenses of services such as water, electricity and gas in your buildings and those of your owners, automating and centralizing all the information in one place.
With the Polaroo platform:
- El the manual and repetitive process of collecting and individually reviewing invoices was left behind, now they can view all the invoices and their information digitally in one place.
- With just a few clicks, The Lodging team can review a specific period and know the exact consumption of each apartment, without having to access multiple supplier platforms.
The results
Since implementing the software in April of this year, the Lodging Apartments team has experienced a significant improvement in supply management efficiency:
- Homeowners can recover the extra expense that each stay has entailed, increasing their profitability.
- The time previously spent in manual processes have been significantly reduced by more than 120 hours, allowing the team to spend more time on strategic tasks that directly contribute to customer growth and satisfaction.
This joint work allows Lodging Apartments to move towards a more efficient, automated and current management of the management of its basic supplies, in line with its vision of offering superior service and remaining competitive in the tourist apartment market.