How AraBnB grew from 24 to 42 apartments without adding to its team

About AraBnB

AraBnB was founded in July 2024 by Hreshan Raheja and Pranay Manghnani, who went through high school and university together before starting the company.

In its first year the company managed around 20 properties for 10 to 11 owners. Today it runs 42 luxury apartments across Downtown, Dubai Marina, Palm Jumeirah, Dubai Harbour and Business Bay, with AED 100M+ in assets under management.

The problem: automation that could not hold a condition

AraBnB's PMS at that time, Hostaway, could send scheduled messages. What it could not do was add conditions. For special cases this showed to be a problem. For example when someone booked a property on the same day of the stay for one day, they would receive a check-in message, a follow-up on the stay, and a check-out reminder. With Hostaway automations, all of those would trigger in one go.

A guest arriving for a single night received their welcome, their mid-stay check and their reminder to leave the access cards on the table, all at once, before they had opened the door.

Compliance, done by hand, every single day

Dubai's tourism regulator requires guest details filed on the day of check-in and closed off on the day of check-out. Someone on the team uploaded every ID manually, twice per stay.

Direct bookings with nothing behind them

For AraBnB, direct bookings lacked the damage-protection mechanism available through its OTA channels. As direct bookings grew into a larger share of the business, so did the share of stays with no protection at all, on apartments at the top end of the Dubai market.

From first meeting to live, in two days

AraBnB met the Guestway team on the last day of Scale Middle East. The demo happened the next day, in AraBnB's own office.

"Once we saw that it was legitimately of value," Hreshan says, "my operations manager and the Guestway team literally just sat that day itself and helped us get onboarded."

What changed: the guest journey is now conditional

AraBnB rebuilt its guest communication as conditional journeys in Guestway. Each stay now carries its own set of touchpoints: the booking confirmation, the check-in instructions, the mid-stay check, the check-out reminder, the review request. Every touchpoint carries the conditions under which it should exist at all. Now each touchpoint fires only when the booking it belongs to calls for it.

Two things moved inside that same journey:

• The Dubai Department of Economy and Tourism (DET) upload runs as a step in the guest journey rather than sitting on a team member's task list. Guest details are filed on check-in and closed on check-out.
• The guest portal carries the stay details guests used to ask for one message at a time: access instructions, what is nearby, how things work in the apartment.

Compliance and ID-verification became a by-product of the journey instead of a daily task.

One inbox, whatever channel the guest uses

Email, WhatsApp, SMS, chat and the messages that arrive through the OTAs all land in the same place, with the booking sitting next to the conversation.

For a guest relations team spread across time zones, that changes what a handover costs. Picking up a guest means reading one thread, not reconstructing a conversation from four places.

Damage protection on direct bookings

Every booking now arrives with optional protection: a damage waiver charged per night, or a refundable deposit, chosen by the guest at booking.

It sits in the same journey as their check-in instructions and their ID-verification.

Running a distributed team on data rather than guesswork

AraBnB's team works from around the world. Before Guestway, deciding when they should be online was a judgement call.

"I'm a very data-centric, quantitative guy," Hreshan says. "I love looking at the analytics to understand whether our guest relations team is messaging guests in the right manner at the right time, what our response rate is, which hours during the day guests message us the most."

That reading changed how the rota is built. Instead of covering the clock, AraBnB schedules its virtual assistants into the windows where guest messages actually arrive, optimising for response rate.

The work those assistants no longer do is as significant as the work they now do well. The manual ID uploads are gone. The repetitive messaging is gone.

What changed as AraBnB grew

AraBnB went from 24 apartments to 42 in eleven months, during a period of regional conflict in which it opened its apartments to stranded travellers free of charge, a decision that drew national press coverage. What made the growth possible operationally is that the guest journey got standardized and the additional work added per new listing decreased significantly.

Guests noticed the difference at the other end. "A lot of the guests that stayed with us just decided to renew every month, and come back and stay with us at a different period altogether," Hreshan says. For a portfolio built on mid-stay apartments, repeat and extension are the numbers that matter.