Serviced accommodation: one phrase, two meanings

Serviced accommodation, or SA, is furnished accommodation let by the night or week with cleaning and some service thrown in, as opposed to a tenancy, where you rent a flat and look after it yourself. That's the broad version, but in the UK the phrase does two jobs, and if you ask two people what it means you may well get two answers.

Two meanings, and what SA looks like in London

On travel and tourism courses, and in industry statistics, serviced accommodation means anywhere staff look after you during the stay: hotels, guesthouses, B&Bs, inns. The other side is non-serviced, which is self-catering, covering holiday cottages, caravans, campsites and holiday lets, where someone hands you the keys and leaves you to it.

In the property and business travel trade, SA is narrower. It means furnished apartments let for short and medium stays, with bills, Wi-Fi, linen and cleaning rolled into a nightly rate. Serviced apartments, aparthotels and professionally managed short-let flats all come under it. When a relocation firm or a landlord on a property forum says SA, that's what they mean, and it's the sense we use for the rest of this page. In London, most of what you'll be offered falls into one of four types.

• A purpose-built serviced apartment building: dozens of flats, a reception desk, often a gym, one operator running the lot.
• An aparthotel: hotel-style lobby and check-in, studios with kitchenettes, usually a chain brand, and bookable for a single night.
• Serviced apartments in a period building: a handful of flats in a converted townhouse or mansion block, run by a small operator, with keys by code or by appointment.
• Managed short lets and corporate housing: individual flats in ordinary residential blocks, furnished and cleaned by a management company, and often let by the month.

Minimum stays and tax

There's no legal minimum, so the operator decides. Aparthotels and bigger buildings often take one night, smaller residences commonly want three to seven, and a few only do monthly bookings.

That monthly line isn't arbitrary. In places HMRC treats as similar to hotels, once a continuous stay passes twenty-eight nights, VAT is charged only on the part of the bill that isn't accommodation, and at least a fifth of the bill has to be counted as facilities. Whether a building qualifies is a question for its accountant, so ask for a quote that shows VAT across the whole stay.

Flats in ordinary residential blocks in Greater London come under planning rules instead. Let as a whole home for stays shorter than ninety consecutive nights, a flat can be used that way for no more than ninety nights a calendar year without planning permission, which is why some managed flats in London won't take anything under ninety nights.

How it's sold, and who regulates it

Booking direct means dealing with the operator's own reservations team by phone, email or website. You read the cancellation terms first-hand, and it's the route where extras like early check-in or a long-stay rate tend to get agreed. Agencies, meaning corporate housing agents and relocation companies, place business travellers and people moving for work, usually for a month or more. They earn their keep on paperwork and pulling everything into one invoice, and they're paid by commission or a management fee.

Booking sites such as Booking.com, Expedia and Airbnb list serviced apartments alongside hotels and private homes. The operator pays the site a commission, and your booking and payment normally run through the site, which can mean two sets of terms to wade through if plans change. London Residency sits a little to one side of all that: we list about a hundred and fifty residences and pass your dates to each residence's own reservations team, so you book and pay them directly.

Nobody regulates SA as a category yet. The government has confirmed a national register for short-term lets in England, due to go live in March 2027, with registration numbers shown on listings. Until then the most useful quality mark is ISAAP, an accreditation for serviced apartment operators that checks fire and health and safety compliance alongside comfort, and the trade body is ASAP, the Association of Serviced Apartment Providers.

Whichever route you take, get four things in writing before you pay anyone: the cleaning schedule, the deposit and when it comes back, the cancellation terms, and whether the rate includes VAT.

So what actually is a serviced apartment?

A serviced apartment is a furnished flat with its own kitchen, living room and separate bedroom, booked by the night like a hotel room and cleaned and looked after by a management team while you're in it. What changes from one building to the next is how much hotel comes with the flat.

The basics barely change from place to place. You get a bedroom with a door you can shut, a sofa that isn't also your bed, and a kitchen with a hob, oven and fridge, usually with a dishwasher too. There's enough crockery for everyone the flat sleeps, plus linen, towels and Wi-Fi. Electricity, heating and water are in the price, so you never open a utility account, pay council tax or sign a tenancy.

You pay per apartment rather than per person, and the rate is quoted by the night. A cleaner comes in on whatever schedule the residence sets, which might be daily in one building and twice a week or weekly in the next, and if the boiler packs up, someone from the management team answers the phone.

The three overlap, which is why people get muddled, and the quickest way to tell them apart is to ask who runs the place and who you ring when something breaks.

As a rough guide, the cheapest places we list start at about £150 a night, and a typical starting rate is nearer £270. Those are entry prices for the smallest unit on a slow night, and a two-bedroom in June will sit well above them. Per-apartment pricing is where the sums start to work in your favour: two couples sharing a 2 bed serviced apartment in London split one rate, where a hotel would charge them for two rooms, and families come off better still. Length of stay shifts things again, since plenty of residences drop the nightly rate for a week or a month, and a handful only take bookings of four weeks or more.

Studios are the smallest, one room with a kitchen along the wall and a separate bathroom. They're fine for one person for a week, and fairly scarce. One- and two-bedroom flats are by far the easiest to find, three-bedrooms are thinner on the ground, and four-bedroom places are rare enough that they go first in summer and over Christmas.

A 1 bed serviced apartment in London suits a couple, or a solo work trip where you'd rather not answer emails from the bed. With three adults, book two bedrooms instead of putting someone on the sofa bed, and check the bathroom count while you're at it, because a two-bedroom with one bathroom is common in period buildings.

Past the flat itself, the definition gets loose. Some residences have a reception desk and a lift and plenty don't, gyms are less common, and pools are rare. Air conditioning is roughly a coin toss, which you'll care about in a London July.

A converted Georgian terrace in Marylebone might have no lift, no desk and a key safe by the door, and still be a lovely flat, while a purpose-built block in Canary Wharf will have a 24-hour desk and a gym. Both count as serviced apartments, so it pays to know which kind you're booking. Ask how often the flat is cleaned and the linen changed, how you collect the keys if you land after the desk shuts, and how big the security deposit is and when it comes back. The answers tell you more about a residence than the photos ever will.

• Space: a hotel room is one room and a bathroom. A serviced apartment is a flat, so even a one-bedroom has its own living area and kitchen. An Airbnb could be anything from a spare room to a townhouse.
• Who runs it: hotels and serviced apartments have a professional operator, staff and a reservations team. Most Airbnb listings are run by the owner or a small letting company.
• Cleaning: hotels clean every day. Serviced apartments clean and change the linen on a fixed schedule. On Airbnb you usually pay a one-off cleaning fee and nobody comes in while you're there.
• Food: hotels sell you breakfast. Serviced apartments hand you a kitchen and leave the rest to you, though some buildings have a restaurant or will sort out a grocery delivery.
• The London rule: a whole home on Airbnb in Greater London can only be let for short stays for ninety nights a calendar year without planning permission. Serviced apartment buildings run as year-round businesses, so they aren't booking around that cap.

Who actually books these places? Mostly people in the middle of something

Service accommodation (the trade usually says serviced) is booked less by tourists than by people whose lives have been knocked sideways for a while: a family between houses, a patient between appointments, a crew between locations. Each wants something a bit different from the flat, and getting it right first time saves a second move.

Take a finance director who transfers from New York to the London office in August. The family follows a fortnight later, and the rental they've picked won't be free until October. They need three bedrooms, a washing machine and a sensible run to school, and two hotel rooms for eight weeks is expensive and wearing, with nowhere to cook a proper supper.

About half the residences we list offer three-bedroom flats; four bedrooms or more is a lot rarer. Book the whole stretch in one go and ask about extension terms at the same time, since the move-in date on the permanent flat almost always slips.

The private clinics round Harley Street in Marylebone, and Great Ormond Street Hospital in Bloomsbury, bring patients and their families from abroad for treatment that can run to weeks, and the apartment becomes a recovery room.

In that situation the finish barely matters. What does is a lift (plenty of residences don't have one), step-free entry, a kitchen you can cook a specific diet in, and a short taxi ride to appointments rather than a walk. Ask whether the building will take in deliveries of medication or equipment while you're out, and whether housekeeping can be moved around rest periods. If a relative is sleeping over, a second bedroom is worth more than a better view.

Productions shooting on location in London tend to put heads of department and cast into apartments rather than hotels for runs of several weeks. With early calls, blackout blinds matter more than a lobby, and so does a way into the building at 5am. Parking is the hard part, because very few residences have any. Production offices also want one invoice for several flats, which operators with their own reservations team do all the time. It's worth asking, too, whether the residence can hang on to luggage and kit for a day either side, since crews rarely arrive or leave at check-in time and a building with a staffed desk can usually help where a key-safe flat can't.

When a home floods or catches fire, buildings and contents policies usually pay for alternative accommodation of a similar standard while the repairs are done, which can mean months. Often the loss adjuster or a specialist placement firm makes the booking. Read your policy for its alternative accommodation limit, which is often capped separately, and ask for somewhere close to the house so the children stay at the same school and you can meet the builders. Mention the dog early, because only about one residence in five takes pets.

A consultancy placing six people with a client in the City for three months will usually pair colleagues up in two-bedroom flats. It keeps the cost per head down without anyone queuing for a bathroom at 7am, provided the flat has two. Stays past four weeks can also cut the VAT on the bill in buildings HMRC treats like hotels, so ask the residence about that before the purchase order goes in. For this kind of booking location beats finish, and since nearly every residence is within about ten minutes' walk of a station, choose by Tube line to the client's office rather than by neighbourhood.

Whoever the guest is, these stays tend to have a few things in common. Someone else is usually footing the bill, the end date is uncertain, and ordinary life has to carry on around the stay. So ask for flexible extension terms, a named contact at the residence, invoices in the payer's name, and a clear answer on what happens to the deposit if the stay ends early.