How Lisbon Keys Collective managed multilingual operations across 118 apartments in five European countries with StayReply

Lisbon Keys Collective was founded as a single-market operator managing short-term rental apartments in central Lisbon. The early business focused on the Alfama and Bairro Alto neighbourhoods, with a portfolio of around twenty apartments by the end of the first two years. The founders, a Portuguese-Italian couple with backgrounds in hospitality and technology, built the business on a model of carefully selected properties and a guest experience designed around the cultural specifics of Lisbon — recommendations for less touristic neighbourhoods, partnerships with local restaurants, and detailed neighbourhood guides written by team members who lived in the relevant areas.

The expansion beyond Portugal was driven by demand from existing property owners. Several of the landlords who owned apartments in Lisbon also owned properties in Porto, Madrid, Seville, Barcelona, and eventually Milan. By 2022, the company had expanded into a multi-country operator, with properties across Portugal, Spain, Italy, and a small number in southern France and Greece. The portfolio reached one hundred and eighteen apartments distributed across five countries, with operational teams in each market.

The multilingual nature of the operation was both a defining feature and a source of operational complexity. Guests came from across Europe, the Americas, and increasingly Asia, with bookings frequently involving cross-language interactions. The team itself was multilingual by design — collectively the staff spoke Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, English, and German, with several team members fluent in three or more of these languages.

The operational challenge was that the business had grown faster than its internal systems could accommodate. What had worked as a Lisbon-only operation with twenty apartments and a unified team did not work as a multi-country operation with one hundred and eighteen apartments and dispersed teams across five jurisdictions. The founders had been spending an increasing portion of their time acting as the connective tissue between the country teams, which was neither scalable nor a good use of their attention.

Where complexity starts to compound

The challenges at Lisbon Keys Collective were structural and multi-dimensional. The team was dealing not just with the volume of guest communication associated with one hundred-plus properties, but with the variability introduced by operating across multiple markets, languages, legal jurisdictions, and operational contexts.

Several patterns emerged as the business grew:

• Guest communication standards varied between country teams, with each market developing its own conventions for how to handle pre-arrival information, mid-stay check-ins, and post-departure follow-up

• Multilingual handling was inconsistent, with some team members defaulting to English when the guest's preferred language was something else, while others did the opposite

• Property-specific information — access codes, local recommendations, neighbourhood guides — was stored in different formats and systems depending on which country team had created the listing

• Cross-market knowledge sharing was minimal, with each country team operating largely independently and reinventing solutions to common problems

• Owner communication was fragmented, with multi-property owners receiving different communication patterns from different country teams

• The founders were spending significant time translating context between country teams, particularly when issues arose that required input from a team in a different market

The result was a business that was operating effectively at the country level but inefficiently at the company level. Each country team was doing good work, but the company as a whole was not benefiting from the scale it had achieved.

Introducing structure without slowing teams down

The implementation of StayReply at Lisbon Keys Collective was approached as an exercise in building a shared operational layer across the country teams, rather than imposing a single way of working. The founders were clear that the country teams should retain ownership of how they operated within their markets, but that there needed to be a common structure underneath that allowed the business to function as a coherent whole.

The first area of focus was the standardisation of the operational moments that were genuinely consistent across markets. Pre-arrival messaging, check-in confirmation, access information delivery, and post-stay follow-up all moved into automated flows that ran in the guest's preferred language. The flows were built in a multi-language structure, with each market team contributing the linguistic and cultural content for their language, but with the underlying workflow logic shared across the business.

The centralised inbox became the operational core. Every guest message, regardless of which country team owned the property or which language it came in, was routed into a single view. The assignment logic ensured that messages were routed to a team member who could respond in the guest's language and who had context on the relevant market. Where no immediate language match was available, the platform's translation support allowed any team member to handle the message while preserving the guest's original language preference for future interactions.

Property-specific information was systemised into a structured profile for each apartment, available to any team member regardless of which country team had created the listing. This meant that a guest support team member in Portugal could handle an inbound message about a property in Spain or Italy with full context, even without local knowledge of that specific market.

From individual knowledge to shared systems

The shift from country-specific knowledge to shared institutional knowledge was the most consequential change at Lisbon Keys Collective. Each country team had developed its own expertise — about local regulations, neighbourhood characteristics, partner relationships, and operational patterns — and the challenge was to make this expertise available across the business without diluting the local depth.

The team approached this by building out structured knowledge bases for each market, attached to the property profiles and accessible to any team member. Local recommendations, neighbourhood-specific guidance, regulatory considerations, and partner relationships were documented in a consistent format, which made it possible for cross-market handling of guest issues when needed.

The impact on multilingual guest handling was significant. Where previously a guest who wrote in German might receive different quality responses depending on which team member happened to pick up the message, the system now routed and supported the conversation in a consistent way regardless of the individual handler. Guests began to comment on the consistency of communication across stays in different countries, which had previously varied considerably.

Onboarding new team members became substantially faster. The country teams could bring in new staff and have them productive within their first week, because the property-specific and market-specific information they needed was available to them in the platform. The institutional knowledge of the business was no longer trapped in the experience of long-tenured staff.

Improving coordination across teams

The coordination challenges at Lisbon Keys Collective were particularly complex because of the multi-country structure. Cleaners and maintenance contractors operated at the city level, with different vendor relationships and operational patterns in each market. Owner communication varied by jurisdiction, with different regulatory requirements and reporting expectations across the five countries.

Bringing these operations into a shared platform required careful design. Local operations were preserved — Portuguese cleaners worked with their Portuguese coordinator, Italian maintenance contractors continued to operate within their existing relationships — but the visibility of these operations was made consistent across the business. A maintenance issue raised in Madrid was logged in the same structure as one raised in Lisbon, which meant that the senior operations team could see the state of operations across the portfolio in a unified view.

Owner communication, in particular, benefited from the standardisation. Multi-property owners who had previously received different communication patterns from different country teams now received consolidated reports across their portfolio, regardless of which markets their properties were in. This was particularly valuable for the institutional owners — small property investment groups that owned five or more apartments across multiple cities — who had previously found the fragmented communication a source of friction.

Cross-market issue resolution also became more efficient. When a guest who had booked apartments in both Lisbon and Madrid raised an issue that involved both stays, the conversation could be handled in a single thread with both country teams contributing as needed, rather than the issue being split across two parallel conversations.

A system that evolves with the organisation

Lisbon Keys Collective has continued to refine the system as the business has grown into new markets. The expansion into Milan and the smaller portfolios in southern France and Greece were brought online using the same operational structure as the established markets, which significantly reduced the time required to bring new markets to operational maturity.

The team has also adapted the system to support a growing volume of long-stay bookings — apartments rented for periods of one month or more, which involve different communication patterns from short stays. Mid-month check-ins, utility and service coordination, and longer-form post-stay feedback collection have been built into dedicated workflows for this segment.

The founders have shifted their attention significantly. Where previously they were spending much of their time acting as the connective tissue between country teams, they now focus on the strategic development of the business — new market opportunities, partnerships with property owners, and the development of new service offerings. The operational layer holds the business together in ways that previously required their continuous attention.