Straight answers, from people who can change the product.

Asked most often

Does every member of staff need to install an app?

No. Floor staff — housekeepers, maintenance, porters — use Vabumi through WhatsApp and printed QR codes. No download, no account, no password. Managers and supervisors use the web app in any modern browser; a native iOS, iPadOS and macOS app follows in v1.1.

Do we have to change or replace our PMS?

No. Vabumi runs alongside your PMS as the layer for what happens inside the building. It reads occupancy and checkout to drive the day’s cleaning and writes clean status back on inspection. Opera Cloud is live today; Host and Mews are next; a CSV/file-drop bridge covers go-live while a connector is built. See Integrations.

How long does setup take, and how much of our time does it cost?

Typically three to four weeks from signing, and a few hours of your team’s time in total — not weeks. Vabumi builds the spatial model of the property from floor plans, asset lists and photos, and pre-configures the routines. Your side is one working session of about two hours, plus two optional half-hour check-ins.

Is there a training day?

No, and that is deliberate. Floor staff interact through WhatsApp and QR codes, which they already know how to use. Managers get an invitation to the dashboard at go-live and an optional thirty-minute walkthrough. If a tool needs a training day to be adopted, it will be worked around instead.

Which languages does it handle?

Staff report in whichever language they speak — transcription auto-detects across 90+ languages, and task descriptions, instructions and comments translate on demand. The interface itself ships in English, Norwegian, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Polish.

Where does our data live, and is it used to train AI?

In Europe, and we name where: the database, file storage and backups are on Supabase in Zurich, Switzerland; the application servers are on Railway in Amsterdam. Switzerland is adequacy-covered rather than in the EEA, which is why we say Europe and not “the EU”. Your data is never used to train AI models. Transient calls to AI providers happen under data-processing agreements with no-training commitments, and no guest personal data is stored: Vabumi holds room and status, not guests. The detail is on Security & Privacy, and every processor is named in Annex III of the DPA.

Can we get our data out?

Yes. Monthly compliance PDFs, filtered CSV exports, a live ICS calendar feed, and an organisation-scoped REST key for read access to tasks, routines, completions and spatial entities. If you leave, we make your data available for export for a reasonable period — see section 11 of the Terms.

What happens when the AI gets something wrong?

Every AI-assisted step has a manual fallback: type the task instead of speaking it, assign by hand instead of accepting a suggestion, edit anything the triage produced. Suggestions are suggestions — a manager approves, overrides or reassigns, always.

Is there a minimum contract?

No. One predictable price covers every property in the group and every login, and you stay because it works. Billing runs in advance through Stripe on the cycle shown at purchase.