Inside the Homely Stay Guest Experience

We sat down with Nicole Gödecke, Founder of Homely Stay, to talk about how she built a vacation rental brand that runs on quality over quantity, and what it takes to deliver hotel-level hospitality solo across 27 properties and 300 kilometers.

From 5 Tools to One: Ending the Fragmentation

Before Enso Connect, the operation ran across five separate platforms that shared nothing — not data, not design, not logic. Guests received a registration link from one tool, a guidebook link from another, and a Stripe payment link when they wanted to add a service. Each looked different. Each required a separate action to trigger.

The breaking point wasn't any single failure. It was the accumulation. Every morning before arrivals, Nicole pulled information from multiple systems, built manual lists, and checked who had registered, who had paid, and who might be a risk. She was the system.

"Everything was manual. We needed to get all this information from different tools, build lists, check all the guests coming today, registered, paid, everything. And now we have it all in one solution and most of it is automated."

The Boarding Pass replaced all of it. One link, sent once, that follows the guest from booking confirmation through checkout. Nicole describes it as almost exactly the app she had been imagining but had no way to build.

The Automation That Actually Thinks

Nicole's PMS could send a message one hour before check-in. What it couldn't do was conditional logic. It couldn't release check-in instructions only after registration was complete, or calculate city tax based on whether the guest was a leisure traveler, a business guest, or a child, or hold back garage entry codes for guests who hadn't paid for parking.

Enso Connect's "If this then that" automation replaced every one of those manual triggers.

Check-in instructions unlock the moment a guest completes verification, not before, and not a second later than necessary. Guests arriving in the middle of the night can let themselves in without calling Nicole, because everything they need becomes available the moment they finish the process. Her phone is off. It doesn't matter.

"I don't really have contact with them. They think they have. But they don't."

Getting Paid for the Work

Early check-ins and late checkouts used to be absorbed as part of the service. Nicole would call the cleaning company, negotiate the schedule, coordinate the change, and charge nothing for any of it. The baby cot went out and came back damaged, repeatedly, at no cost to the guest who broke it.

Enso Connect's upsell tools changed the equation. Add-ons are now presented to guests directly inside the Boarding Pass, priced clearly, and when purchased, automatically update arrival and departure times in the system.

"If a guest wants an early check-in or late checkout, it's mostly work for us - we have to call the cleaning company, ask them to change the schedule. Now we get paid for the work we didn't get paid for before."

The baby cot now costs 10 euros per stay. Enough to cover a replacement.

A Brand Guests Actually Remember

Homely Stay's founding insight is that most vacation rental apartments are forgettable. Clean, functional, pleasant - and completely interchangeable. Guests leave and don't recall where they stayed, let alone return.

Nicole's answer is intentional design at every level. When nine Munich apartments were underperforming despite being new and well-furnished, she identified the problem: they looked like hotel rooms. Guests had no reason to remember them. She changed the walls - bold, statement wallpapers. She reviewed guest feedback. Occupancy improved. ADR improved. Repeat guests appeared.

The same philosophy extends to the digital experience. Every guest touchpoint now carries the same look, the same link, the same brand.

A Partnership, Not a Subscription

Nicole has been with Enso Connect since near the beginning, when she had 12 apartments.

She's joined beta programs, submitted feature requests, and watched things she asked for actually ship. The inbox she used to run in parallel with her PMS, because some features were missing, is now the only inbox she needs. The support team is always helpful.

"Tell me another company where you can have a meeting with the CEO to share good things, bad things, whatever you want."

"I pay the same price I paid when I started and we have 500% more functions."

As competitors multiply — one of her core markets went from 20 comparable listings to 90 in two years, Homely Stay's differentiation isn't pricing or volume. It's the quality of the experience, from the wallpaper on the wall to the message a guest receives three seconds after asking a question Nicole didn't have to answer.