Spacez Captains

An iPhone home screen with Spacez Captains installed as an app, circled by hand and annotated: built this one first, the Console app reuses its shell almost exactly. Spacez Captains sign-in: phone number and a four digit PIN, caretaker access only. Today’s arrivals: guest cards with the property, party size, office notes and a Start Check-In action.
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50+

Properties running their check-ins through it

30 → 8 min

Average check-in time per booking

24

Screens a caretaker works in on the ground

0

Check-ins lost when the signal drops

The guest watched while we copied their ID by hand, and none of it was visible to anyone not standing there.

Overview

Every Spacez stay starts with a caretaker at the property. They check the guest’s ID, walk them in, and handle whatever the house does next. That work ran on WhatsApp threads and paper forms, which made it slow at the door and invisible to everyone who was not standing there.

Where it gets used decided most of the design. A caretaker holds a phone in one hand with a guest waiting in front of them, and villas do not have reliable signal. A tool that needs a live connection gets abandoned the first time it fails, and an abandoned tool is worse than none, because the team keeps believing the data is there.

Not one engineering ticket was raised for Captains. The screens, the offline model and all 24 of them are one person’s work. It shipped as a web app, became installable as a progressive web app, and now runs as a real app on a caretaker’s phone, sharing a single codebase with the Console the office uses.

Outcome

Captains and its ops dashboard went live across 50+ properties. Average check-in came down from 30 minutes to 8.

A check-in taken in a dead zone is written on the phone and sent when the signal returns, so nobody stands in a doorway waiting for a bar of reception. And because every check-in and ticket writes to the same record as the booking, what happened at the property stopped being something the office had to ask about.

Built for a doorway with no signal

The slowest part of a check-in was copying a document by hand while the guest watched. Pointing a camera at the ID and reading the details off it removed that step, which is most of the twenty-two minutes.

The harder half was what happens when there is no connection, because that is the moment the whole thing either holds or quietly stops being used.

A check-in moves through two lanes over time. On the phone: the check-in is recorded at the door, held on the device with its photographs while there is no signal, sent once when the connection returns carrying its own identifier so a retry is harmless, and cleared at logout so the next caretaker inherits nothing. On the server: no record exists at all until the signal returns, at which point it is received without duplication and lands on the booking rather than in a separate log. AT THE DOOR STILL OFFLINE SIGNAL RETURNS NEXT SHIFT On the phone the caretaker On the server the office Check-in recorded ID photographed, guest walked in Held on the phone The submission and its photos, together Sent once It carries its own id, so a retry is harmless Logout clears it The next caretaker inherits nothing Received Nothing arrives twice On the booking Not in a separate log to reconcile no record yet, and nobody is waiting on one
One check-in, two lanes. The caretaker is never waiting on the server.

Step five is the one that came from watching rather than planning. Phones are handed over at the end of a shift, which means an unsent queue is not just a technical problem, it is one caretaker’s work appearing under another’s name.

Ticketing followed the same rule. Instead of describing a broken geyser in a message, the caretaker photographs it and it becomes a ticket attached to the property and the stay, which is quicker to raise and leaves nothing to interpret at the other end.

Spacez Captains showing the bookings list, each card carrying the property, the guest and the channel it came from.
The app as a caretaker uses it, on seeded data. 2:04, no sound.

The one the others were built from

Captains shipped before the Console app existed, which made it the place to find out what a native shell around the web app actually costs. Every question got answered here first: what the icon and splash need, which hosts the app is allowed to navigate to, how a session survives the phone being killed, what a push notification has to carry to open the right ticket.

When the Console needed the same treatment, almost none of that was decided twice. It reuses this shell nearly line for line, with a different bundle id and a different URL behind it. One app took the time; the second took an afternoon.

Reflection

The temptation with a field tool is to design it at a desk, where there is always signal and never a guest waiting. Every decision worth keeping here came from the other direction: the camera instead of the keyboard, the queue instead of the spinner, the logout that wipes the phone. Nobody asked for any of them, and they are the reason it is still being used.

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