Urban Hosts: automating climate control in the Basque Country without touching the existing setup

Urban Hosts is one of the largest accommodation operators in the Basque Country.

Its challenge was not a hotel's challenge. A hotel has everything under one roof: if something needs checking, someone goes upstairs. An operator like Urban Hosts has the estate spread across the region, and every physical check costs a real journey, with its car, its traffic and its lost hour.

In that context, not knowing the climate status of a property is not a minor annoyance. It is a constant choice between going blind and not going at all.

Northern weather is not southern weather

It is worth saying, because it changes the product. In northern Spain the dominant problem is not August air conditioning: it is heating, spread over far more months of the year.

A radiator or a heat pump running in an empty flat draws nobody's attention: it makes no noise, it is invisible from the street and nobody walks in to check. It simply consumes, day after day, until the bill arrives.

That is why the automations that matter most here are the absence ones: standby when there is no booking, and switch-off when the stay ends.

What did not have to happen

As with R2R, the headline is what was not installed.

Urban Hosts already had smart thermostats in place. No hardware to buy, no cable to pull, no visiting properties one by one. Everything already there was used, and the booking calendar was connected over iCal.

From starting to running: under 24 hours.

What got automated

• Switch-on before check-in, so the guest does not walk into a cold flat in January.
• Standby when there is no booking.
• Daily programs, cutting the drip of a unit idling on low all day.
• Temperature limits, without locking the guest out of the thermostat.
• Alerts when a property loses connection or is not reaching temperature.

Why this case matters

Because the fast-installation argument is usually proved in a building, where everything is in one place. Here it is proved in the opposite scenario: scattered properties, across a region with real distances, and still live in a day.

The more spread out the estate, the more each journey costs and the more it is worth seeing everything from one screen.