Short-term rentals & Airbnb
Know when your rental guests arrive – and when they leave
Remote turnaround management runs on guesses. Did they get in alright? Have they actually left, or are they having a slow morning? Can the cleaner go now, or will they walk in on someone?
Spåna answers those questions from sensors rather than from messages the guest may never reply to. The moment motion is first detected after a booking starts, you know they are in. When the property goes quiet for a sustained stretch on checkout day, you know it is clear. Neither requires the guest to do anything, and neither requires a camera.
That last point is not a small one. Indoor cameras in short-term rentals are a genuine trust problem, are banned outright on some platforms, and are the sort of thing that shows up in a review whether or not you disclosed them. Motion and door sensors sit on the right side of that line: they tell you that a door opened and that a room was moved through, which is all a turnaround actually needs to know. Nothing is recorded, nothing is watched.
The gap between bookings is the other half of the value. An empty property is where the expensive problems happen – a door left open overnight, a window that never got shut, heating that failed in January. A door-left-open alert on the front door and a temperature-below alert are cheap insurance against a burst pipe or a break-in, and they run whether or not anyone is booked.
For anyone running more than one property, the practical benefit is that the whole thing collapses into a single feed. Instead of chasing individual guests for arrival times, you get an alert per property when it matters, on your phone, with the room named. The cleaner gets dispatched on the basis of the property actually being empty rather than on the basis of checkout time being 11am.
A caveat worth setting expectations on: Spåna reads sensors, so it knows the property was entered, not who entered it. It cannot distinguish your guest from your cleaner from you. In practice this rarely matters for turnaround management – the timing is the useful part – but it is worth knowing before you build a process around it.
Alerts worth setting up
Each of these is a rule you configure once in Spåna against a room. Tune the durations and thresholds until the alerts you get are ones you act on.
- Someone arrives
- Fires the first time motion is detected in the entrance or living area. This is your check-in confirmation – it lands the moment the guest is actually inside, without you having to ask.
- No movement
- Set a duration of a couple of hours on checkout day. When it fires, the property has gone quiet and is almost certainly empty, which is the signal to send the cleaner.
- Door or window left open
- Catches the front door or a window left open past a duration you set. Between bookings this is a security alert; during a stay it is usually just a heating bill.
- Temperature drops below
- Set a floor – around 10°C is a common one – on an empty property in winter. Crossing it means the heating has failed and you have a frozen-pipe problem forming.
What this setup needs
Spåna watches sensors that are already paired to your DIRIGERA hub, so most of this is placement rather than shopping.
- A motion sensor in the entrance or main living space. One is usually enough for arrival and quiet detection – you are looking for occupancy, not a map of the flat.
- An open/close sensor on the front door, and on any window you would rather not have left open.
- A temperature sensor if the property sits empty in winter. This is the one that pays for itself the first time it fires.
- A DIRIGERA hub in the property, plus a small always-on device running the Spåna agent. A Raspberry Pi tucked in a cupboard is the usual answer.
Questions
- Can I get an alert when a guest arrives at my short-term rental?
- Yes. Spåna reads the motion and door sensors already in the property, so you know when someone enters and when the place has gone quiet again after checkout. No cameras and nothing intrusive.
- Are motion sensors allowed in an Airbnb?
- Policies vary by platform and jurisdiction, and you should check the current rules and disclose what you have installed. The important distinction is that Spåna uses no cameras or microphones – it only knows that a room was moved through.
- Can Spåna tell the difference between my guest and my cleaner?
- No. Spåna reads sensors, so it knows the property was entered, not who entered it. For turnaround timing this is rarely a limitation, but it is worth knowing before building a process on it.
- Does this work across several properties?
- Yes. Each property needs its own hub and agent, and alerts arrive labelled by room so a multi-property feed stays readable.
Built on the sensors you already have
Every alert on this page runs on standard IKEA DIRIGERA sensors – motion, door/window and temperature. Group them into rooms, set your own alerts, and Spåna does the watching.