Picture this. A guest approaches the front desk to check in, and asks whether you saw their request for a baby cot.

You have no idea what they’re talking about.

Somewhere between the reservation comment they left at booking and this moment, the request got lost. Maybe it was spotted but never logged. Maybe it was logged somewhere nobody checked. Either way, the cot isn’t in the room, the guest is standing in front of you, and now someone needs to fix it - fast, and under pressure.

It’s an uncomfortable moment. For the guest, it signals that your team wasn’t paying attention: not a good start to the stay, in other words. For you, and the people you work with, it causes the kind of avoidable stress that lingers over time.

Situations like this happen all the time. Not because hotel teams are careless, but because their processes were never set up to succeed.

When a guest makes a request at booking, whether or not it’s picked up depends on so many factors: did someone at the front desk notice it? Did they have the time and headspace to log it? Did they log it in the right place? Did housekeeping spot it? Did they pass it on to the right person? Did it get actioned before the guest arrived?

Every step in that chain is a point where something can slip. It’s a problem we know well - and so we set out to solve it.

Meet The Trace Agent

Let’s try that again. The guest approaches the front desk and asks about the baby cot.

You smile, because you already know. It’s been in the room since this morning.

You didn’t spend mental energy tracking the request. Nobody had to manually transfer a note from the PMS into a task management system. Nobody chased anyone. It just happened, because by the time that guest arrived an AI agent had already read their reservation comment, created the housekeeping task, and made sure it was actioned.

That’s the Trace Agent. Built by Sweeply in partnership with Apaleo, it connects what guests ask for at booking to what your operations team delivers on the ground - automatically, and without the manual effort that usually sits in between.

The Trace Agent at THE FLAG Zürich

THE FLAG, a hotel and serviced apartment group in Zürich, was one of the first properties to put the Trace Agent into live operations. Guest requests were coming in through reservation comments but reaching the team through a slow, manual chain - which was error-prone and taxing for the team, too.

With the Trace Agent running, that chain no longer depends on human intervention. The agent reads reservation comments, identifies guest needs and preferences, and creates the relevant tasks directly in Sweeply. It runs inside the tech stack THE FLAG already uses, connecting through Sweeply’s open APIs and operating within the Apaleo ecosystem. No new infrastructure required.

The results after rollout:

• 30 tasks created automatically every day

• 3.5 hours saved per week on task creation alone

• Fewer missed requests and less back-and-forth between reception and housekeeping

• Faster response times on guest needs, from booking to fulfilment

“Sweeply is more than a housekeeping app - it’s a fulfilment platform for AI agents. By opening our APIs to autonomous systems, we enable agents not just to understand guest needs, but to act on them. When an agent identifies a guest preference, Sweeply makes sure it actually happens.” - Frans Gardarsson, VP Product at Sweeply

The Trace Agent’s impact

Thirty tasks a day. Three and a half hours a week. Those figures are meaningful, but the bigger change is structural.

When a guest request no longer depends on someone remembering to log it, an entire category of potential operational failure disappears. Teams stop wasting headspace on information transfer and start using it on guests. The front desk stops fielding uncomfortable questions about requests that never arrived. Housekeeping stops chasing reception for details they should already have.

The Trace Agent solves one workflow: reservation comments to housekeeping tasks. But the same principle - closing the gap between what a guest needs and what the operations team can act on - applies across maintenance, room preparation, resource planning, and the broader coordination that keeps a property running.

That’s one less thing to remember, and one better experience to deliver.