At 24 rooms and 90% occupancy, The Annex Hotel in Toronto has no room for operational slack. Every miscommunication between departments, every minute lost to manual coordination – it all lands on a team already wearing multiple hats.
Sean Killeen, Hotel Manager at The Annex, manages that reality with Flexkeeping at the centre of it.
The numbers make the case plainly. Across room assignment efficiency, maintenance communication and internal task management, The Annex saves an estimated 21 hours per month and CAD $437 per month in direct labour costs, without adding a single person to the team.
That compounds into a 372% return on investment in Year 1, rising to 454% in Year 2.
For a 24-room boutique, those returns come not from scale but from doing the same work with far less friction.
Before Flexkeeping, the housekeeping team and front desk coordinated manually through Slack, WhatsApp or a walk downstairs to report a clean room. It worked, but it was slow and fragile.
Flexkeeping replaced that with one shared view. Room statuses update in real time. Maintenance tasks are raised and tracked in the same place. Nobody chases anyone for an ETA.
The result is a 57% improvement in overall productivity across housekeeping, maintenance and front-of-house. Sean says:
»I can focus more on the front desk and host duties, which allows me to have a little bit more time with guests. Just getting more face-to-face interaction with people.«
Sean isn't behind a desk. He's working shifts alongside his team, covering front desk and hosting. Flexkeeping's integration with Mews means room statuses flow directly into the PMS. There are no manual updates across two systems.
»The fact that I can just reference Mews and the two of them talk to one another – and I can see when rooms are clean, inspected or out of order – is a big win.«
When a guest asks about early check-in, Sean has the answer. When a room is ready, he knows before anyone has to tell him.
Issues raised during an inspection no longer sit in a WhatsApp thread waiting to be actioned. They're logged, assigned and followed through in Flexkeeping, in parallel with housekeeping.
That has resulted in a 100% productivity improvement on maintenance task management and an 80% improvement in how internal repairs are communicated across the team.
The Annex has changed housekeeping providers several times since Sean joined. Each time, Flexkeeping made the transition faster.
»Whenever those changes happen, it's really easy to walk someone through Flexkeeping and train them on how to use the system.«
New staff typically understand the app within two days. That ease of onboarding also freed Sean from a level of micromanagement he no longer needs.
»I'm a lot more confident in their abilities just based on the fact that they have a really good management tool. It makes their lives a lot easier, which in turn makes the management team's lives a lot easier.«
»Ease of use and time saving is going to be the biggest benefit. Having one place to go for housekeeping, maintenance and lost and found, as opposed to spreading yourself across a bunch of different platforms. Of all the apps I've used, Flexkeeping is probably the easiest to transition to and understand.«
Well said, Sean.