RoomChecking review: a French housekeeping tool with more ambition than headcount

I run three boutique hotels across England. About 120 rooms between them. Not a chain, just a small collection with shared standards and a small owner who worries too much. When I started looking at housekeeping software, the pitch I kept hearing was the same: we’ll digitise your room assignments, eliminate the paper lists, give you real-time status updates on every room. Fine. I’ve heard that pitch before. What I wanted to know was whether any of these tools could actually handle the particular mess of running housekeeping across three different properties, each with its own team, its own quirks, and its own way of doing things.

RoomChecking caught my attention because it was built in Paris, claims over 600 hotel customers, and kept appearing in conversations with European hoteliers who run properties roughly my size. Three colleagues at a conference mentioned it independently, which either means it’s worth trying or means the sales team was busy that week. I signed up for a trial and ran it across all three properties for several months.

Who’s behind it

RoomChecking was founded in 2013 by Jonathan Weizman, Aaron Marz, and Emile Lugassy. The company is based in Charenton-le-Pont, just outside Paris. Weizman has an interesting background: he came through the dot-com boom, worked in investment banking and tech, and came out of the Microsoft Ventures accelerator in Paris. The company raised about EUR 750,000 in 2017, and here’s the detail that made me pay attention: the money came from Astotel and Hotels Maurice Hurand, both Paris hotel groups who were already using the product. BPI France, the French public investment bank, also participated. When your investors are your customers, that tells you something about whether the product works in practice.

But let me put the numbers in context. Total funding is under a million dollars. The team is somewhere between eight and eleven people, depending on which source you trust. Revenue has been sitting at roughly $2 million for both 2023 and 2024. That’s not growth; that’s a plateau. They serve around 600 properties with a team of about ten. I’ve done the maths and that’s 60 hotels per employee. The word “lean” comes to mind. So does the word “stretched.”

This pattern, the small European company punching above its weight with responsive support and a good product but limited resources, is one I’ve seen before. When I reviewed HiJiffy for guest messaging, the dynamic was similar: a Lisbon-based team, strong product instincts, excellent support, and a lingering question about whether they could maintain all of it as they scale. With RoomChecking, the question is sharper because they haven’t been scaling. The revenue is flat. The team hasn’t grown. The ambition is there but the trajectory isn’t matching it.

They claim to have managed 16,000 rooms during the Paris Olympics, which is a compelling headline. The details behind it are sparse enough that I’d file it under “probably true, partially” and move on.

What I actually tested

RoomChecking operates through a set of role-specific mobile apps they call the Hopr suite. There’s Hopr Attendant for room cleaners, Hopr Inspector for supervisors, Hopr Runner for concierge and task management, and Hopr Maintenance for (you can guess) maintenance. Each one is available on iOS and Android.

I set it up at all three properties. The Cotswolds hotel (45 rooms) went first, because that’s always where I trial things. If something is going to break, I’d rather it breaks where I can see it. After two weeks there, I rolled it out to the Chilterns property and then to the third.

The integration with our PMS was the first test. RoomChecking claims over 120 PMS integrations, though I’d note that the deep, well-documented integration seems to be primarily with Mews. For my setup, it connected and pulled room data through without drama. Check-ins, check-outs, and room status updates came through. Not instant, but close enough that my team wasn’t working from stale information. That’s the baseline, and it cleared it.

The flexibility is real

I’ll start with what works, because there is something here worth acknowledging.

RoomChecking is configurable in a way that most housekeeping tools aren’t. You can build custom checklists for different room types, set up different cleaning workflows for different scenarios (stay-over versus departure versus deep clean), and adjust the whole thing property by property. For someone running three hotels, each with their own room configurations and cleaning standards, this flexibility isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the thing that makes the tool usable at all.

At the Cotswolds property, our cleaning protocol for the four-poster rooms differs from the standard doubles. Different linen count, different turndown checklist, a specific way the bathroom amenities get arranged. RoomChecking let me create separate checklists for each room type without forcing me into a one-size-fits-all template. At the Chilterns property, the team does things differently again: shorter turnover times, a different priority order for departures versus stays. I could configure that without it affecting how the Cotswolds team worked. This is what multi-property management should feel like, and most tools I’ve looked at don’t do it this well.

The periodic cleaning management is also well thought through. Setting up schedules for deep cleans, mattress rotations, curtain washing, all the things that happen on cycles rather than daily, is straightforward. My head housekeeper at the Cotswolds property set this up herself after I showed her the basics, which is about as strong an endorsement as I can give. She’s not someone who takes kindly to new software.

Lost and found: the feature nobody talks about

This surprised me. RoomChecking’s lost and found management is the best implementation of this specific function I’ve come across in any hotel operations tool. You log the item with a photo, tag it to the room and the date, and the system tracks it through to resolution. It sounds trivial, and it is trivial, right up until you’re trying to reunite a guest with a pair of prescription glasses they left in room 22 three weeks ago and nobody can remember which drawer the glasses ended up in.

We lose things constantly. Not in the sense that we’re careless, but in the sense that guests leave things behind and tracking those items across three properties used to involve a shared spreadsheet that nobody updated and a box in each hotel’s back office that nobody labelled properly. RoomChecking turned this into something my team actually uses. The photo documentation means there’s no ambiguity about what the item is. The tracking means I can tell a guest exactly where their forgotten coat is and when they can collect it. Small thing. Big difference to the guest. And that’s how I measure software: does it make things better for the person staying at my hotel?

Where it falls apart

Now for the parts that kept this from being a 7 or an 8.

The translation problem

My housekeeping teams are multilingual. This is not unusual for English hotels. I have staff who speak Polish, Romanian, Portuguese, and Spanish as their first languages. Any tool that my cleaners need to use on their phones, in the middle of a shift, has to work in their language. Not “mostly work.” Work.

RoomChecking’s localisation is, to put it politely, unfinished. Parts of the interface simply cannot be translated. They’re hardcoded in French or English, and if your cleaner doesn’t read either, those sections are opaque. The parts that can be translated have been translated with the kind of quality that suggests someone ran them through a machine translation tool and didn’t have a native speaker check the results. My Romanian housekeeper showed me a screen where the instructions were technically in Romanian but phrased in a way no Romanian person would ever say anything. She understood it. Barely. But she had to pause and work it out rather than glancing and knowing.

For a tool built in France, serving an international hospitality market where housekeeping staff are among the most linguistically diverse employees in any hotel, this is a meaningful failure. It’s not a cosmetic issue. It’s an operational one. Every time a cleaner has to stop and puzzle out what a button means, that’s time added to every room, across every shift, across every day. My teams got used to it, but “got used to it” is a low bar for software you’re paying $199 a month for.

The morning dirty bug

There’s a bug. Every morning, all rooms display as “dirty” regardless of their actual status. My supervisor at the Cotswolds property noticed it on the first day and assumed she’d done something wrong. She hadn’t. It’s a known issue, apparently, where the overnight status sync resets everything to dirty rather than carrying forward the correct status from the previous evening.

I want to be measured about this. The rooms get updated as cleaners start their rounds and mark things off, so by mid-morning the dashboard reflects reality again. But the first hour of the day, when my supervisors are doing their briefings and assigning rooms, the data is wrong. They’ve learned to work around it by checking the PMS directly and cross-referencing, but that defeats the purpose of having a dedicated housekeeping tool. If I wanted my team to check two systems every morning, I could have saved the subscription fee.

A housekeeping tool that doesn’t show you correct room status at the start of the housekeeping day has a problem at its core. The team at RoomChecking seems aware of it, and users have reported it, but it persists. That concerns me more than the bug itself.

The cleaning planner clutter

When you’re looking at the cleaning planner view, which should be the primary tool for supervisors assigning the day’s work, different cleaning types (departures, stay-overs, deep cleans, periodic tasks) all pile into the same visual space without enough differentiation. It gets busy fast. At a 45-room property, this is manageable. When I tried to use it as a cross-property view to see all three hotels at once, the information density became difficult to parse. Colours blur together. The hierarchy of what matters most right now versus what can wait isn’t clear at a glance.

My head housekeeper’s verdict was diplomatic: “I can read it, but I have to read it.” She meant that she couldn’t scan it. She had to study it. That’s too slow for a 7am briefing when you have 14 departures and three late checkouts and a deep clean in room 9 that’s already been pushed twice.

The asset selection problem

When a cleaner creates a maintenance task through the app (leaking tap, broken light, stained carpet), they’re presented with the full asset catalogue. Every asset in the system, across all categories, all the things that really only an admin should see. The result is predictable: cleaners pick the first thing that looks vaguely right, or they pick a random one, and the task gets routed to the wrong department. My maintenance person at the Chilterns property told me he was getting tasks meant for housekeeping and housekeeping was getting tasks meant for him, because the cleaner who raised the issue just tapped something to get past the screen.

This is a permissions problem dressed up as a UX problem. Front-line staff should see a simplified list relevant to their role. Admins should see everything. RoomChecking doesn’t make that distinction, and the consequence is mis-routed work orders and a maintenance person who’s learned to distrust the system’s task assignments.

The small company question

I keep circling back to the team size because it’s the thing that makes me most uneasy about recommending RoomChecking to a colleague.

Eight to eleven employees serving 600 properties is a ratio that only works if nothing goes wrong. And in hotels, things always go wrong. I contacted their support twice during my testing. Both times I got a response within a few hours, which was good, better than many larger vendors manage. The people who responded knew the product and gave me useful answers. That’s the upside of a small team: you’re talking to someone who built the thing, not someone reading from a script.

But what happens when they have 800 properties? Or 1,200? The support experience I had was excellent for a company with ten people and 600 customers. I don’t see how it scales without either hiring or declining. And with flat revenue, hiring seems unlikely in the near term.

Compare this to my experience with Guestline, which I reviewed as my PMS. Guestline was a small, focused UK company that did one thing well for British hoteliers. Then the Access Group bought it and the personal touch eroded. Different situation, same underlying tension: small companies with big ambitions either grow into the ambition or get absorbed by someone who will. RoomChecking hasn’t been acquired, and its customer-investor model suggests a company that wants to stay independent. But independence on flat revenue is a difficult thing to sustain for a decade. I don’t want to be unkind about it. I just want to be honest.

Sophie asked me what hotelkit charges for a similar feature set, and the answer is that hotelkit operates at a different scale entirely, with a bigger team, more funding, and a broader product. RoomChecking is building toward that kind of platform, but it isn’t there yet, and the gap between where it is and where it wants to be is the gap I keep noticing.

The review footprint problem

I asked around before committing to a trial. The feedback I got was thin. Not negative, just thin. A hotelier in Lisbon told me the support was fast. A colleague running a hybrid property in Amsterdam had good things to say about the flexibility. But the volume of people who’d actually used it was small. Among the hoteliers in my network, maybe three had heard of it and only one had tried it.

For a product that’s been on the market since 2013, that’s a narrow footprint. It could mean the product is quietly excellent and undersold. It could mean the market has spoken and wasn’t shouting. I don’t know which, and that uncertainty is part of the score.

Pricing and value

RoomChecking starts at $199 per month, which works out to roughly $2.50 per room per month depending on property size. Volume discounts are available for larger operations. There’s a free trial but no free tier.

For a 45-room property, $199 a month is not expensive if the tool saves your supervisor thirty minutes a day and prevents the kind of miscommunication that leads to a guest walking into an uncleaned room. That’s happened to me twice in four years, and each time it was because of a paper-based system failing at the handover between shifts. A digital system that catches those failures is worth something real.

But at my scale, three properties, I’m looking at a subscription that adds up across the portfolio. And when I weigh that against the translation issues, the morning status bug, the cleaning planner clutter, and the asset routing problem, the value proposition gets more complicated. I’m paying for a tool that works about 80% of the way I need it to, and the remaining 20% requires workarounds that eat into the time savings.

Thomas would want to know about the API. RoomChecking does offer one for custom integrations, and they support multi-PMS setups for groups running different systems across properties. The reservation data display is limited to two weeks ahead by default, apparently because showing more data would slow the system down. You can request an extension from support, but the fact that the default is two weeks tells you something about the platform’s performance headroom. Thomas would have opinions about that architecture.

The Tuesday morning test

Let me describe a specific scenario, because it’s the one that crystallised my rating.

A Tuesday morning at the Cotswolds property. Twelve departures, six stay-overs, two rooms blocked for a deep clean. My supervisor opens RoomChecking at 7:15. Every room shows as dirty, including the six stay-overs that were cleaned and occupied the night before. She knows this is the bug. She switches to the PMS, checks actual statuses, makes mental notes, switches back to RoomChecking, and assigns rooms based on what she knows rather than what the screen tells her. By 8:30, cleaners are working and updating status through the app, so the dashboard catches up to reality. By 10am, everything looks right.

Two of the cleaners are working in Polish. The task descriptions on their phones are in English because the Polish translation is incomplete. They understand enough to do their jobs, but one of them flags a maintenance issue (a cracked tile in the bathroom) and selects the wrong asset category because the list is too long and the labels don’t mean much to her. The maintenance task goes to the wrong queue. My maintenance person finds it two hours later, by which point a guest has already mentioned the cracked tile at reception.

Meanwhile, a guest from last week calls about a pair of sunglasses they think they left in room 11. My supervisor opens the lost and found module, sees the logged item with a photo (tortoiseshell sunglasses, found in the bedside drawer, logged four days ago), and tells the guest we have them. Guest is delighted. That interaction, start to finish, takes ninety seconds.

One feature worked perfectly. Two others created friction that shouldn’t exist. That’s RoomChecking in summary: useful enough that I can see the potential, flawed enough that I can’t ignore the gaps.

Who this is for

RoomChecking works best for European boutique hotels that value flexibility over polish, that need multi-property management without enterprise pricing, and that have supervisors willing to work around some rough edges. If your housekeeping team is monolingual, or at least comfortable in English or French, the translation issues won’t bite as hard. If you run a single property with under 50 rooms and straightforward cleaning workflows, the configurability is a real advantage.

I’d be cautious about recommending it for properties with highly multilingual teams, for hotels where the morning room status needs to be correct from the first minute, or for anyone who doesn’t want to explain to their maintenance staff why tasks keep arriving in the wrong queue.

The comparison I keep making is to Guestline: a small company doing something well for a specific market, with legitimate strengths and a question mark over long-term trajectory. With Guestline, the question was whether the product would survive its new owners. With RoomChecking, the question is whether the company can grow enough to fill the shoes it’s trying to wear.

What I’d tell a colleague

If a hotelier I know asked me about RoomChecking over a coffee, I’d say this: the flexibility is real, the lost and found is excellent, the support is responsive, and the product clearly comes from people who understand how hotels work. I’d also say the localisation needs serious investment, the morning status bug is embarrassing for a housekeeping tool, and you should think carefully about whether a company of ten people can look after you properly in two years’ time.

It’s a 6. Not because it fails, but because it doesn’t quite finish what it starts. The bones are good. The fit and finish isn’t there yet. If they fix the translation layer, sort out the morning sync, and clean up the task routing for front-line staff, this could be a 7 or an 8. Until then, it’s a tool that works well enough if you’re willing to meet it halfway, and I shouldn’t have to meet my software halfway.

James, for all six of us.