Harry Beaumont, founder of Comfort Short Stays, used Uplisting to transform his fast-growing but chaotic short-term rental business into a streamlined, margin-focused operation, enabling him to scale to 130+ properties, automate core tasks, and launch profitable in-house services.
Harry Beaumont, Founder and Director of Comfort Short Stays, stumbled into the short-term rental business by accident. What began in 2017 as a desperate attempt to cover rent on a university flat, quickly transformed into a thriving multi-faceted STR enterprise. Today, Comfort Short Stays manages around 130 properties, and separate in-house essential services businesses, a testament toHarry's ingenuity and his strategic partnership with Uplisting.
In the early days, Harry single-handedly managed every aspect of the business, from cleaning the properties to guest communication. He vividly recalls eating lunch in his car while rushing between turnovers, and using a notepad to track all the check-ins that day, writing down which property, what time guests arrived, and their mobile numbers. The inflection point came when his portfolio grew from five to ten units, making self-management unsustainable. "When I went from five units to ten, that was where I was like, I cannot manage this. This is mental.”
His biggest pain points? Time-consuming and manual guest messages and client statements. It was at this point that Harry knew he needed a solution that could streamline operations, automate repetitive tasks, and scale with his ambitious growth plans.
When researching PMS solutions, Comfort Short Stays initially tried Guesty, but quickly found it overly complex and expensive, prompting Harry to look at other options. "Uplisting] does as good a job, if not better, than the bigger providers that are double the price, realistically. And it's easy to use. When we moved to Uplisting, it was probably two days [to train staff] as opposed to a week [with Guesty].”
Uplisting's ability to consolidate all guest communications in one clear interface, combined with automated messaging, drastically reduced the time Harry and his team spent on queries, a “massive benefit” to Comfort Short Stays. With guest messages automated, Harry could truly start to feel the time-saving impact of Uplisting: "It was at that point I understood why people pay for the software," Harry noted.
Before Uplisting, Harry recalls generating client statements as a tedious process involving spreadsheets and manual report pulling, often resulting in errors. Uplisting's integrated client statements feature eliminated this, and enabled Comfort Short Stays to acquire more management contracts.
Beyond communication and client management, Uplisting helped Comfort Short Stays establish a repeatable, efficient process for managing new properties from start to finish. This newfound control was crucial for scaling: "For us, getting a system in place to handle the entire journey of a new property from receiving the keys to your first guest checking in was critical. Uplisting has been a huge part of that, and I couldn’t run the business without it."
With Uplisting, Comfort Short Stays transformed from a "chaotic," volume-driven business into a more controlled, margin-focused operation. This shift allowed them to grow their portfolio to over 130 properties while maintaining a lean team of just five people, including Harry.
Uplisting's ability to streamline his core hosting operations gave Harry the bandwidth to pursue an even bigger vision: controlling the entire guest experience and maximizing profitability. He saw a clear opportunity to optimize costs and quality by bringing essential services in-house. "If you see how much money you pay out to your cleaning companies and to your linen, it's like wow, if you can bring all those in-house, all these little savings add up and you get a better product because you’re in control of what guests are actually getting," Harry explains.
This realization led Harry to establish separate cleaning and linen businesses that service Comfort Short Stays' properties. This move not only gives him complete oversight of service quality but also provides a unique competitive edge: his linen business now also supplies competitors! This clever strategy offers Harry and his team valuable market insights, helping to understand which areas in Nottingham are most active based on linen demand.
It's a true testament to Harry's entrepreneurial spirit and his knack for turning operational needs into new revenue streams. And begs the question to all hosts out there – what opportunities could you unlock if you had more time in the day?
Managing everything manually was time-consuming, error-prone, and unsustainable beyond a handful of properties.
Scaling from 5 to 10 units created operational chaos, with no clear system to onboard and manage new properties efficiently.
Previous PMS experience was overly complex, costly, and slow to train staff, draining time and resources.
Automated guest messaging and a unified communications hub drastically reduced time spent on queries.
Integrated client statements eliminated manual reporting errors and enabled growth into new management contracts.
Established streamlined processes for onboarding and managing properties, freeing time to expand into profitable in-house services like cleaning and linen
From reliable channel management to direct bookings to guest messaging to virtually every other aspect of your property business - there's Uplisting.
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