Ponta do Sol Residências — eighteen units, twelve-night average stay, one platform.
Talkguest runs the entire guest and financial lifecycle at Ponta do Sol Residências, an 18-unit aparthotel on Madeira's south-west coast. Rui Camacho, the owner, uses the platform for long-stay deposits, WhatsApp-delivered door codes, utility passthrough billing and a factura-ready Portuguese accounting flow.
Eighteen self-catering apartments, mostly digital-nomad guests
Ponta do Sol Residências is an 18-unit aparthotel on the south-west coast of Madeira, a fifteen-minute walk from the village of Ponta do Sol and its Digital Nomads Madeira coworking hub. Rui Camacho opened the property in 2022 as a family investment. Units are studios and one-bedrooms with fitted kitchens, laundry and a workstation; the property does not run a reception in the traditional sense and does not offer daily housekeeping.
The typical guest is a digital-nomad remote worker who books a stay between eight and twenty-eight nights, arrives from Lisbon or a European hub in the late evening, and expects to let themselves into the apartment with a code rather than meet a person at a desk. Average stay across 2025 was 12 nights; average lead time on the direct channel was 34 days; utility charges — electricity, water, cleaning fee for stays over 14 nights — are meaningful line items on every folio.
The four numbers that define this property
Weighted across 2025 across direct and OTA bookings.
Percentage of guests who checked in via the WhatsApp door-code flow without meeting a staff member.
Per-stay electricity and water passthrough for stays over 14 nights, billed on the folio at check-out.
Pre-authorised deposits released within 72 hours of check-out via the platform.
Why a hotel PMS was the wrong shape for an aparthotel
Rui spent his first eighteen months on a mainstream PMS designed for boutique hotels. It handled the reservations, but every workflow around long-stay rentals was a workaround. Deposits had to be captured off-platform through a card link; door codes were sent from a separate mobile app that did not know when a booking was cancelled; electricity readings were kept in a Google Sheet and copy-pasted onto folios by hand.
The two failure modes were expensive. On the deposit side, Rui had two chargeback cases in his first year that took months to resolve because the platform did not carry the deposit paperwork on the reservation. On the utility side, one over-billed stay in early 2024 turned into a 47-day WhatsApp thread with a very angry Belgian software engineer, and Rui refunded €340 to make it go away.
The third problem was factura. Portuguese aparthotels sit in a slightly different VAT category from short-stay hotels, and the previous PMS treated everything as short-stay accommodation. Rui's accountant flagged this at the end of the first year, and the property had to reissue eleven facturas. Since then, factura correctness has been Rui's non-negotiable evaluation criterion.
Deposits, door codes, meters and facturas — one workflow
Talkguest carries a long-stay deposit as a first-class object on the reservation. At booking, the guest's card is pre-authorised for a configurable amount — Rui sets it at €300 for one-bed units and €200 for studios. The authorisation sits on the reservation for the length of the stay and releases automatically 72 hours after check-out unless a claim is filed against it inside the same platform. Every step is timestamped and the paperwork lives on the reservation, which killed the chargeback exposure.
Door codes are generated by Talkguest and delivered on the pre-arrival WhatsApp message twelve hours before check-in. The code is tied to the stay dates via the smart-lock integration; when a booking is cancelled or shortened, the code is invalidated the same second. No separate mobile app, no receptionist typing codes into a smart-lock dashboard.
Utility passthrough uses a custom charge type Rui created in the platform. His maintenance person enters the meter reading at check-out into a mobile form; the platform multiplies by the fixed €/kWh he sets in property settings; the resulting charge lands on the folio with a description line the guest can read. The Belgian software engineer, if he books again, will see exactly what he is being billed for.
Factura runs on Talkguest's Accounting & Invoicing module with the aparthotel VAT profile enabled. Each factura carries the correct rate for accommodation, cleaning fee and utility passthrough. The monthly SAF-T (PT) file exports at the click of a button and goes to Rui's accountant on the first of every month — she has not queried a single one in ten months.
"I run this property with a maintenance person and a housekeeping team of three. There is no reception. Talkguest is the reception. The pre-arrival WhatsApp, the door code, the utility line on the folio, the released deposit — that is my check-in, my check-out and my accounting, and it happens without me being on the property. That is what I needed from a platform for an aparthotel." Rui Camacho — Owner, Ponta do Sol Residências
What actually changed for a property with no reception
The 98% contactless-arrival rate is the headline number and the one that decides whether a guest recommends Ponta do Sol on a nomad forum. The pre-arrival WhatsApp message goes out twelve hours before arrival with the address, the door code, the Wi-Fi password, the note about the closest supermarket in Ponta do Sol village and a link to the local bus timetable. Guests reply with their arrival time; the platform stores it on the reservation; if the flight is delayed, the code still works and Rui does not have to be woken up.
Zero deposit disputes in 2025 is the number Rui repeats to other owners on Madeira. Pre-authorised deposits, on-platform paperwork, 72-hour automatic release. When a guest disputes a claim against the deposit, the paperwork trail is inside the reservation — the card processor sides with the property because the evidence is complete.
The €187 average utility line is a revenue line that would previously have been swallowed. On stays over 14 nights, electricity in Madeira is a real cost — solar-heated water helps but air conditioning in summer does not. Passthrough billing on the folio, with the meter reading shown, has been accepted without dispute by 100% of long-stay guests since it went live.
A second, larger property on the north coast — same platform
Rui has acquired a second property in Porto Moniz, a 24-unit aparthotel currently under refurbishment. It will open on Talkguest in mid-2026, using the same templates, deposit profile, utility passthrough model and factura settings as Ponta do Sol. The two properties will roll up into a single group dashboard with per-property reporting, per-property VAT profiles and one SAF-T (PT) export per month for the accountant.
If you run an aparthotel, self-catering apartments or serviced-apartments building, start at Talkguest for aparthotels, look at the accounting and factura module, or ask us a question through the contact page.