TrustedStays development

In late March, UnderTheDoormat learned that NHS staff across the UK were struggling to find places to stay during the Coronavirus crisis. They needed safe places to protect vulnerable people in their household or to reduce long commutes following reassignments.

The NHS has agreements with hotels which can work for large scale re-housing in single blocks, but staff needs are diverse and dispersed across the country. In response, companies in our industry came together under the Short-Term Accommodation Association to meet this urgent need.

We created a scheme to house NHS workers in free accommodation - NHS Homes.co.uk. This scheme grew into an industry initiative with over 30 UK companies offering more than £20m in free accommodation across 2,500 homes across the UK -- as covered in [multiple publications][0].

Our vision in May was to transform this voluntary scheme into the UK's first centrally managed, professional home accommodation portal to government procurement via the Crown Commerical Service (CCS). This would continue to meet the societal need for housing while also supporting the Tourism & Hospitality sector badly hit by Covid.

The first Innovate UK grant enabled us to build the first iteration of this digital portal - TrustedStays.co.uk which enabled automation beyond the NHS Homes site. It enables workers to identify the home they would like to stay in and to request their employer to book it for them. The portal is live & was built on time and on budget.

However, it still relies on manual processes to convert bookings, involving both Property Managers & Employers. This creates a delay in the process.

Our aim with this grant is to build TrustedStays into a fully automated platform, able to provide real-time data including photos, live calendars, and instant bookings for properties. For the first time _ever_, government bodies will be able to book homes for their staff, in a location of their choosing, at the click of a button.

This scalability will attract more property partners and enable us to achieve our target of 10,000 listings across the UK by end of 2021\.

This build will enable us to place thousands of government workers and to protect vulnerable populations across the country in professionally managed homes that would otherwise be inaccessible to them - at short notice, helping to support during any second wave - all via a single portal.

Currently government and NHS workers are only able to book hotels and corporate serviced apartments. With the growth of the home accommodation sector (\>14% of the market in 2018 in London), the professionally managed segment (accredited by Quality in Tourism) provides an important opportunity for government to save costs and provide socially distant options to its workers.

The purchasing power of government and, later, corporates would provide a critical income to offset the industry loss of tourism & discretionary travel in the foreseeable future and help the industry provide a valuable source of income and jobs to communities across the UK.

[0]: https://underthedoormat.com/press/underthedoormats-nhs-homes-initiative-gains-nationwide-press-coverage-2