1. The Concept Behind The Social Hub: A Hybrid Hospitality Model
The Social Hub is a unique hospitality brand that blends elements of student housing, extended-stay accommodation, and traditional hotel services. Designed to foster a vibrant and connected community, The Social Hub provides high-quality accommodations for students staying for entire semesters, professionals needing extended stays, and short-term hotel guests looking for a modern and dynamic experience.
What makes The Social Hub different is its large-scale, multi-building setup, with some locations managing 600+ rooms spread across multiple buildings. Unlike a traditional hotel where cleaning and maintenance follow a relatively straightforward daily schedule, The Social Hub must carefully coordinate cleaning and housekeeping operations based on the type of guest, the length of stay, and the specific building or floor where they are housed.
Each guest segment has a unique housekeeping schedule that must be followed precisely to maintain efficiency. Students receive a scheduled monthly cleaning, assigned on specific days based on their floor and the week of the year. Extended-stay guests have weekly cleanings, scheduled according to their assigned floor and day of the week. Hotel guests follow a more traditional model, with daily or every-three-day cleanings depending on their booking type.
This mix of guest types means that housekeeping cannot operate in a one-size-fits-all manner. Instead, a carefully structured, automated system is required to ensure that the right rooms are cleaned at the right time, staff are deployed efficiently across multiple buildings, and no unnecessary cleaning is scheduled.
2. How RoomChecking and Hopr Support The Social Hub’s Vision
Given the scale and complexity of The Social Hub’s operations, manual scheduling and tracking were not viable options. The Social Hub needed an automated system that could assign the right cleanings to the right staff without requiring constant oversight. By integrating directly with Mews, RoomChecking allows The Social Hub to automate cleanings based on accommodation service type, rate codes, or group names, ensuring that the correct cleaning plan is applied to each room automatically.
For student accommodations, RoomChecking enables The Social Hub to create structured monthly cleaning schedules, ensuring that each floor is serviced on a designated day. This level of predictability reduces confusion for both staff and residents. The extended-stay segment operates similarly, with predefined weekly cleaning schedules ensuring that every guest receives the necessary service without disrupting operations.
Hotel guest rooms require more frequent servicing, but RoomChecking ensures that cleaning schedules are optimized based on stay duration and check-out patterns. If a hotel guest is staying for multiple nights and has selected an every-three-day cleaning cycle, the system assigns the appropriate tasks without manual intervention. Additionally, house-use rooms are automatically excluded from cleaning schedules, ensuring that staff time is spent only on necessary tasks.
Some of the hotels even have customized it into 89 different types of cleaning rules based on client/cleaning type.
3. Cleaning schedules per type of segment, booking type
Extended Stay Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday/Friday
At some properties they handle the segment “extended stay” meaning clients staying for 1 week or more. These clients get different type of cleanings from a hotel guest. They get a cleaning on weekdays Monday-Friday depending on the floor they stay on. In order to optimize staffing the goal is to not have all the cleanings of the extended stay on the same day. For this reason, they organise the cleanings based on the segment + the floor the room that the specific client has booked is located at.
Extended stay periodical cleaning
Other properties are smaller and therefore for them it is not as important to schedule the cleanings in the sense that they decide à specific day of cleaning for à specific floor. They simply give the client 1 cleaning in the middle of their stay OR one cleaning in the middle of each 7 days spent at the hotel.
It can look like this;
Student Cleaning per Building/Floor/Cluster
Student cleanings are different and it is probably the one cleaning that requires the most attention with the extended stays in terms of planning out days, weeks, forecasting staff, knowing which day is busier than others and so on.
- Section: which section within the buildin and floor
- Reservation type: Student
- Credits: How much time does the cleaning take so we can correctly forecast staff
- Specific other information?
Choose your day and week and choose your cluster (cluster of rooms defined by you the hotel) – In RoomChecking you can build out your property and base operations on exactly how the property looks in terms of building, floor, section and more.
Hotel 3 or 4 star without change sheets
Some cleaning rules are more simple, just an everyday cleaning for the clients that booked as hotel guests.
Hotel 3 or 4 with change sheets
The different properties have extended stay and students mixed with either 3 or 4 stars. Depending on the type of properties the change sheets happens every other day or every 3rd day. This is very easy to set up in the system and will be applied accordingly. Create the rule above and simple combine with another rule and place it above to mark the priority. For example, I want the hotel rooms to be cleaned each day, but on the 3rd day I want to replace the daily cleaning without change sheets with a change sheets cleaning instead. Place the change sheets cleaning automation on top of the daily cleaning.
Mix it up with different type of periodical cleaning rules.
Cleaning based on Rate Name/Group Name
Sometimes it is not just the segment that will define the reservations cleaning schedule or what type of clenaing or service they will get upon arrival or during their stay.
Some of our clients, TSH included, have specific contracts with specific groups, each contract defining à cleaning rota. For example à B2B client that gets à cleaning only each 3rd day, à Student from à specific school that gets à cleaning each 7 days from the first Monday. Whatever it can be, it is very easy to add these automations into the “rules” and they will also be triggered automatically. Meaning, if finally, the guest in room 101 is neither à student, hotel guest or extended stay, OR MAYBE even better he is an extended stay but with à specific group name, the client won’t get cleaning according to the extended stay rules only, but his group name will define à specific cleaning rota for his stay. You can even name the cleanings differently to better be able to forecast this. See below and example of other information that the cleaning automation can be based on.
The real power of the system is that all these rules can be mixed and co-exist. The correct rule (even if you mix in 90) will be applied to the correct reservation and thus the correct room or apartment.
Why it is so flexible?
At RoomChecking we clean RESERVATIONS and not rooms. This means that the rule doesn”t apply to the specific room. In The Social Hubs case, this means that room 101 for example can be hybrid. IF the client that booked is à hotel client, the hotel cleanings will be applied to room 101, IF the client booked as an extended stay maybe à weekly Monday cleaning will be applied, OR IF the client booked for several month as à student, well room 101 will get à cleaning once à month, à specific week and day based on the cluster/section the student stays in. This means that à room can transform from hotel to even an office, to HouseUse when we then cancel the cleaning and more.
One of the biggest challenges for The Social Hub is managing workforce efficiency across multiple buildings and hundreds of rooms. Without a clear system, cleaning assignments could easily become unbalanced, with some teams overburdened while others are underutilized. RoomChecking automates work allocation, ensuring that cleaners are scheduled based on demand and that workloads are distributed evenly.
Hopr plays a critical role in forecasting peak cleaning periods, allowing The Social Hub to anticipate high-demand days and adjust staffing accordingly. Because student and extended-stay cleanings follow a predefined schedule, there are certain periods where cleaning demand is significantly higher. By analyzing cleaning data, The Social Hub can identify these peak workload days and proactively adjust staffing levels to avoid last-minute disruptions.
In addition to housekeeping, maintenance operations are also optimized within RoomChecking. Given the size of The Social Hub properties, maintenance teams must be assigned efficiently to reduce delays and improve response times. With predefined scheduling, maintenance workers are assigned to specific buildings or floors on designated days, ensuring that issues are addressed quickly and without unnecessary manual task distribution. Instead of relying on dispatchers to manually assign work, the system automatically routes maintenance tasks to the correct staff based on predefined schedules, improving response times and allowing more time for preventative maintenance.
4. The Benefits of an Automated and Forecasting-Based Approach
The implementation of RoomChecking and Hopr has allowed The Social Hub to transform the way it manages large-scale housekeeping and maintenance operations. One of the most immediate benefits has been the reduction in manual scheduling efforts. Instead of requiring staff to constantly adjust cleaning and maintenance assignments, the system automatically ensures that each room receives the appropriate service at the right time.
The structured approach to student and extended-stay cleanings has also eliminated operational inefficiencies. Cleaners know exactly which rooms to service and when, reducing wasted time and ensuring that the entire cleaning workflow is predictable. This level of organization means that operations teams no longer have to manually track or remind cleaners about which rooms need service—it’s all handled automatically.
Hopr’s forecasting capabilities have been a game-changer, allowing The Social Hub to plan ahead for busy periods. Instead of being caught off guard by spikes in cleaning demand, the team can proactively schedule more staff on high-demand days, ensuring that cleaning services run smoothly even during peak periods. This has led to a more balanced workload for housekeeping teams, reducing stress and improving overall efficiency.
Beyond cleaning, the ability to predefine maintenance schedules has improved how The Social Hub handles repairs and preventative maintenance. With dedicated maintenance workers assigned to specific buildings on designated days, operational teams no longer need to manually dispatch tasks. The system automatically assigns work orders to the correct personnel, ensuring that every issue is handled by the right team member without unnecessary delays.
Financially, this level of automation and planning has allowed The Social Hub to optimize labor costs while maintaining high service standards. By ensuring that cleaners and maintenance workers are allocated efficiently, staffing levels are optimized based on real demand rather than estimated need. This reduces unnecessary labor costs and ensures that resources are deployed only where they are needed most.
5. Conclusion: A Model for Managing Large-Scale Hybrid Hospitality
The Social Hub’s unique hospitality model presents operational challenges that traditional hotel management systems are not designed to handle. With a mix of student housing, extended stays, and hotel guests, a tailored approach to housekeeping, workforce scheduling, and maintenance is essential. By implementing RoomChecking and Hopr, The Social Hub has successfully automated its complex cleaning workflows, optimized workforce distribution, and introduced data-driven forecasting that enhances operational efficiency.
With 15.000 rooms and in some properties 700+ rooms across multiple buildings in some locations, the ability to plan and automate at scale is a critical advantage. RoomChecking ensures that every cleaning and maintenance task is assigned based on the specific needs of each guest type, while Hopr provides predictive insights that allow the team to stay ahead of operational challenges.
By leveraging automation, structured scheduling, and forecasting, The Social Hub has created an operational model that not only works today but is scalable for future expansion. As hybrid hospitality continues to evolve, The Social Hub stands as a pioneering example of how technology can enable seamless, efficient, and cost-effective hotel operations in multi-segment accommodations.
The Social Hub is truly properties where RomChecking has made à huge difference and saved countless hours, errors and enhanced the guest experience and staff efficiency and morale.
