Sweeply review: the housekeeping app my staff understood without being told what it does

Housekeeping at my resort has always run on a system I’d describe as “organised shouting.” Katerina prints a sheet every morning. She walks the corridor with a pen. When something needs attention, she phones reception or walks over. If Maria is on the evening shift, she gets a handwritten note stuck to the back office door. It works. It has worked for years. My mother ran it the same way, minus the mobile phone.

But this winter I started thinking about whether we were wasting time we didn’t have. Every April I hire new people, some of whom have never cleaned a hotel room professionally. They need to know which rooms are departures, which are stayovers, which are ready for inspection. Katerina explains it, they nod, and by the third day they’ve usually got it. Sometimes by the fifth. The question was whether software could make that first week less bumpy, without adding its own confusion on top.

Sweeply kept coming up. A hotelier I spoke to at the Independent Hotel Show in Amsterdam last year mentioned it as “the one that actually makes sense to housekeepers.” That phrase stuck with me, because most housekeeping software I’d seen looked like it was designed for managers sitting at desks, not for the people carrying the mop buckets.

What Sweeply actually is

Sweeply is a cloud-based housekeeping and task management tool from Iceland. Founded in 2019 in Reykjavik, originally under the name Spectaflow before rebranding around 2022. Three co-founders: Petur Orri Saemundsen, Erlendur Steinn Gudnason, and Frans Veigar Gardarsson. One of them had previously built operations management software for a vacation rental company, which explains why parts of Sweeply feel like they were designed by someone who’s actually stood in a hotel corridor wondering which rooms still need cleaning.

They raised about $2 million in seed funding from Frumtak Ventures in early 2022. That’s it. No Series A, no big venture round, no $85M war chest like some of the guest communication platforms I’ve reviewed. They’re a team of somewhere between eleven and fifty people, running 200-plus clients across 26 countries on that seed money. That’s either impressively lean or worryingly small, depending on how you look at it. I’ll come back to this.

The product has three modules: housekeeping management, task management for maintenance, and Guest Connect, which is a guest-facing portal where guests can opt in or out of daily cleaning. The housekeeping module is the heart of it. Everything revolves around a colour-coded board showing room status in real time. Green means clean and inspected. Red means needs attention. Yellow means in progress. You get the idea. It’s visual, it’s immediate, and it doesn’t require reading English menus or decoding abbreviations.

They integrate with Mews, which is what we use, along with Apaleo, Cloudbeds, Guestline, Noovy, and about ten others. The Mews integration was one of the reasons I agreed to test it. I didn’t want another tool that required me to manually update room statuses in two places.

Handing it to Nikos

Anyone who reads my reviews knows the test. I don’t evaluate software by sitting with it for a week, reading the documentation, and forming a measured opinion. I give it to the newest, least experienced person on my team and watch what happens. If they can use it, the software works. If they look confused, the software has a problem, not my staff.

Nikos is twenty now, in his second season, studying tourism in Heraklion. He’s sharper than last year but still cautious with new tools. When I showed him the RoomRaccoon PMS, he had test reservations running by lunchtime. When I handed him Noovy, he made his first booking in under four minutes. The bar has been set.

With Sweeply, I didn’t even explain what the app was for. I opened it on his phone, pointed him at the board, and said, “Tell me what you think this does.”

He looked at it for about ten seconds. “It’s the rooms. The colours are whether they’re clean or not.”

That was it. No instructions, no walkthrough, no training manual. The colour coding did the explaining. Green rooms, red rooms, yellow rooms. Nikos understood the interface before I’d told him a single thing about it. In two years of testing software with him, that’s never happened before. Every other tool required at least some explanation. Sweeply required none.

Within twenty minutes he was tapping rooms to update their status, marking tasks as complete, and reporting a (fake) maintenance issue in room 14. He figured out the photo upload for the maintenance report on his own. “Can I take a picture of the broken shutter?” he asked. Yes, Nikos. That’s exactly what it’s for.

Katerina, who has three seasons behind her and can train new hires on almost anything, was more measured. She spent about half an hour going through the manager view, checking how tasks get assigned, how the priority system works, and how the daily overview looks. Her verdict: “It’s simple. Maybe too simple.” Coming from Katerina, that’s both a compliment and a warning. She liked that she could see every room’s status at a glance without scrolling through menus. She didn’t like that the reporting tells her what was done but not much about how efficiently it was done or where the bottlenecks are.

The colour-coding matters more than you’d think

I need to spend a moment on this because it’s the thing that sets Sweeply apart from other operational tools I’ve used.

My resort is thirty rooms. That’s small by most standards, but during peak season I have staff who speak Greek, a bit of English, some Albanian, and occasionally Romanian. Not everyone reads the same language fluently. Not everyone is comfortable with text-heavy interfaces. When Duve’s dashboard is open, it’s a wall of words. When I was testing hotelkit for Thomas, who asked me to look at the mobile app from a housekeeper’s perspective, the interface was functional but dense. Menus, sub-menus, text labels everywhere. It’s built for staff who are comfortable with software. My staff are comfortable with sponges and bedsheets.

Sweeply’s approach is different. Colours carry the meaning. You don’t need to read “Departure - Needs Deep Clean” if the room is bright red with a specific icon. You just need to know red means go clean that room. The app supports multiple languages, including options like Bulgarian and Danish that you don’t always see, but the beauty of it is that the language almost doesn’t matter. A housekeeper who speaks only Albanian can use the same board as a manager who speaks only Greek. The colours are the common language.

At Volkshotel in Amsterdam, a 196-room property, they chose Sweeply specifically because their diverse staff needed something that worked regardless of language barriers. I’m running a much smaller operation, but the principle is identical. When Nikos started his first season, his English was shaky and his confidence with software was low. He would have struggled with a text-heavy housekeeping tool. He did not struggle with Sweeply.

The sustainability angle

This is where Sweeply does something I haven’t seen other housekeeping tools attempt in the same way.

Their Guest Connect module lets guests choose whether they want daily housekeeping. It’s opt-in rather than opt-out, which is a subtle but important difference. The guest gets a link, usually through a QR code in the room or a booking confirmation message, and they can say “skip the cleaning today.” When a guest skips, Sweeply partners with an organisation called Hotels for Trees to plant a tree. Sweeply themselves pledged a hundred trees at the start plus twenty-five per month.

I was sceptical at first. Green initiatives in hospitality often feel performative. A card on the pillow saying “reuse your towels to save the planet” while the hotel runs the air conditioning at full blast with the windows open. But the Islandshotel case study changed my mind a bit. They’re an 18-property chain in Iceland, and after implementing Sweeply’s optional housekeeping, 70% of their guests chose to skip daily cleaning between June and December 2023. Seventy percent. That’s not a token gesture. That’s a real reduction in water, chemicals, energy, and laundry. They also reported saving 6,400 hours of housekeeping labour across those 18 properties in four months.

For my thirty rooms, the maths is smaller but the logic is the same. If even half my guests in July and August chose to skip a mid-stay clean, that’s Maria not having to do twelve rooms on her evening shift. That’s laundry costs dropping. That’s water usage falling during a Greek summer when every litre matters. I like this idea. My guests are increasingly the kind of people who care about this sort of thing, and giving them a real choice feels more honest than the towel card.

I haven’t activated Guest Connect for a full season yet, so I can’t quote numbers from my own property. But the principle is sound, and the fact that it ties into actual reforestation rather than just being a checkbox on a sustainability page gives it some credibility.

The Mews integration

Since we run on Mews, the integration quality matters. When a guest checks in through Mews, Sweeply should know about it. When a departure is registered, the room should flip to “needs cleaning” without anyone doing it manually. When a guest extends their stay, the stayover schedule should adjust.

In practice, the integration worked. Not perfectly, but well enough. Room statuses synced within a few minutes of a change in Mews. Departures showed up as rooms needing cleaning. Stayover tasks appeared on the board for the right mornings. I didn’t have to double-enter anything, which was my main concern.

There were a couple of hiccups during testing. One afternoon a guest extension didn’t propagate for about forty minutes, which meant Katerina had room 22 flagged as a departure clean when it was actually a stayover. She caught it because she checks the Mews calendar out of habit. Not a disaster, but exactly the kind of mismatch that erodes trust in a system. I don’t know whether this was a Mews issue or a Sweeply issue. The sync delay resolved itself and didn’t recur, but I noted it.

For context, the integration that gets the most praise from other users is the Apaleo connection, which apparently works in near real-time and even supports an AI-driven task creation feature. A property in Zurich reported 30 automated tasks generated per day through the Apaleo integration. That’s a different world from my thirty rooms, but it tells me Sweeply takes the Apaleo relationship more seriously than some of their other PMS connections. I don’t know if Mews will ever get that level of attention.

What didn’t work

Here’s where the 7 becomes a 7 instead of an 8 or a 9.

Reporting is too basic. Katerina wanted to know things like: how long does each room take to clean on average? Which floor takes longest? Are departure cleans taking longer on weekends? Where are we losing time? Sweeply’s reporting gives you a record of what was done and when, but it doesn’t break things down in the ways that would actually help me make staffing decisions. Other users say the same thing. The company has acknowledged the gap and released some improvements, but as of my testing, the reports still felt like a list of completed tasks rather than an analytical tool.

This is the kind of feature that matters more than you’d think. At thirty rooms, I can sort of hold the operational picture in my head. Katerina can tell me which rooms take longer because she’s been doing this for three seasons. But if I had fifty rooms, or if Katerina left, I’d need the software to tell me what she currently carries in her memory. Right now, Sweeply can’t do that well enough.

The company is tiny and thinly funded. I keep coming back to this. $2 million in seed funding. Eleven to fifty employees. That’s enough to build a good product and serve a couple hundred clients, but is it enough to survive the next five years? To keep improving the reporting? To add the integrations I might need down the road? I asked around in my network and nobody had heard of them. That’s not necessarily damning, but it’s not reassuring either. When I searched for independent reviews outside the vendor’s own case studies, I couldn’t find much. The kind of peer feedback you’d normally encounter from other hoteliers sharing their experiences was largely absent.

Compare that to hotelkit, which Thomas reviewed for us and which wins industry awards year after year. Hotelkit is the established name in hotel operations software. They have the reviews, the case studies, the brand recognition. Sweeply is building something good, but they’re building it very quietly, and quiet can look like absent if you’re a small hotelier trying to make a safe bet.

Most of their case studies feature bigger properties. Islandshotel has 18 properties. Volkshotel has 196 rooms. STAYERY operates multiple locations across Germany. These are mid-to-large operations. When I looked for case studies from properties like mine, small independents with twenty to forty rooms, seasonal staff, tight budgets, I didn’t find them. The product works at my scale. I’ve proved that. But the company doesn’t seem to be telling stories about properties like mine, and that made me feel like I’m not quite the customer they’re designing for.

You can’t customise the look much. This is a minor gripe, but a real one. I couldn’t adjust the interface to match our branding. The colours are Sweeply’s colours. The layout is Sweeply’s layout. For a staff-facing tool, this matters less than it would for something guests see. But Katerina mentioned it, and she’s right: if your housekeepers are using three different apps during a shift, each with its own visual language, a little brand consistency would help them feel like it all belongs to the same hotel.

Something personal I dislike

I don’t like being an early adopter. I’ve done it before and been burned. I used a booking engine three years ago from a startup that folded six months later. I lost my templates, my settings, everything. Had to rebuild from scratch in peak season with a team that was already stretched.

Sweeply gives me that same nervous feeling. The product is good. Nikos understood it instantly. The sustainability angle is smart and real. But when I look at the company behind it, I see a tiny team from Iceland running on seed money with no obvious next funding round, competing in a category where hotelkit has been winning awards for years and bigger players have far more resources. If I commit to Sweeply and they run out of runway, I’m back to Katerina’s printed sheets and handwritten notes. That’s not a catastrophe for a thirty-room hotel, but it’s a disruption I’d rather avoid.

I want them to succeed. I think what they’ve built is clever and thoughtful. But wanting and trusting are different things, and trust takes time to build.

How it compares

I haven’t tested every housekeeping tool out there, so I’ll stick to what I know.

Hotelkit, which Thomas reviewed, is the industry standard. More features, more depth, more reporting, bigger client base, established funding. But it’s also more complex, more expensive, and designed for properties that have an operations manager sitting at a desk all day. For my thirty rooms, hotelkit felt like overkill when Thomas showed me the backend. Sweeply felt like the right amount of tool. Whether “right amount” is enough depends on your ambitions.

When I reviewed RoomRaccoon, I gave it a 7 for similar reasons: great for small independents, easy to learn, but some rough edges. Sweeply sits in that same category of tools that are perfect for their niche but make you wonder about the long-term trajectory. Both are companies I’m rooting for while keeping one eye on the exit.

For what it’s worth, Sweeply integrates with Noovy, which I also reviewed and rated 6/10. If you’re running a very lean operation on Noovy’s PMS and want to add housekeeping management, the combination could work well and cheaply. I haven’t tested them together, but the integration exists.

Maria’s evening shift

I haven’t mentioned Maria much, and that’s partly because the evening shift is quieter. But I did ask her to use Sweeply for a week to track her tasks. Maria handles late checkouts, evening turndowns for guests who request them, and the occasional urgent clean when someone spills wine on a bedspread at nine in the evening.

She liked two things. First, she could see on her phone which rooms had already been cleaned during the day and which still needed attention, without calling Katerina or checking the paper sheet in the back office. The real-time board updated itself. That saved her a phone call each evening, which sounds trivial but adds up over a season. Second, when she reported a maintenance issue (a leaking tap in room 8), she could attach a photo and it went directly to the task board. No more writing it on a sticky note that may or may not survive until morning.

What she didn’t like: the app sent her notifications for things happening during the day shift that had nothing to do with her. She couldn’t filter her view to show only rooms relevant to her shift. This goes back to the customisation issue. The tool doesn’t know that Maria only cares about evening tasks. It shows her everything. For a 196-room hotel with shift managers and departmental divisions, that might be filtered at a different level. For us, Maria just has to scroll past the noise.

Would I keep it?

I’m pulled in two directions. The product is the best housekeeping interface I’ve used. The way Nikos understood it without explanation is something I can’t ignore. The sustainability features are real, not decorative. The Mews integration works well enough. The price isn’t unreasonable.

But the reporting gap means I’m still relying on Katerina’s memory and my own intuition for operational decisions. The company’s size and funding make me nervous. And most of the hotels that Sweeply showcases as success stories look nothing like mine.

I think I’ll use it this coming season, April through October, and see how it holds up under real pressure. Thirty rooms, full occupancy, new hires learning the ropes, Maria’s evening shifts, the August chaos when every room turns over daily. If it survives that, I’ll feel better about committing longer term. If the reporting improves by then, I might even raise the score.

For now, it’s a 7. A warm 7, if that makes sense. A tool I like from a company I’m not sure about.

Elena, for all six of us