Practical4 min read
Booking a serviced apartment in Nairobi directly
Confirmed the moment you book, no card taken, and the price you are quoted is the price you pay. How direct booking works and why the rate is lower.
Booking with us is short. You pick your dates, the apartment is confirmed straight away, and you pay when you arrive. No card is taken and nothing is charged in between.
That last part is the unusual one, so it is worth explaining — along with why the rate is lower than the same apartment would be anywhere else.
What actually happens
- You pick dates on the site. The calendar shows what is genuinely free — it is the same data we work from, not a cached copy.
- The apartment is yours immediately. The nights are blocked out as you book and you get a confirmation by email. It is not provisional and it will not be resold.
- We are in touch before you travel with the address, how to find us, and anything you have told us about your arrival.
- You pay on arrival — in full, by cash, M-Pesa, card or transfer, whichever suits.
Because nothing is charged when you book, a change of plan costs you nothing. No card was held, so there is nothing to refund and nothing to argue about.
Why we take payment on arrival
Partly it is a fee question. Card processing and platform commission both come out of the rate, and we would rather the rate simply be lower than collect a fee and hand a share of it on.
Partly it is who stays here. A good number of our guests are travelling for treatment at the Upper Hill hospitals and do not know their exact dates until late. Taking money for nights nobody is certain of creates work for everybody and helps no one.
What it means in practice is that the price you are quoted is the price you pay. There is no booking fee, no service charge, and no commission buried inside the nightly rate.
Arrival times
We do not publish a fixed check-in hour, because most of our guests are not arriving at a convenient one. Flights land late; discharge happens when it happens. Tell us your arrival time on the booking form and we will work around it — and if the apartment is booked either side of you, we will say so plainly rather than let you find out at the door.
Changing, extending, cancelling
Plans move, particularly on longer stays. If you have an account you can ask to extend from it directly, and we confirm if the nights are free — extended nights show as their own line, so what you have paid and what you owe stays clear. That matters if somebody else is paying; there is more on that in monthly and corporate stays.
Cancelling is a message or a click, and the terms are on our cancellation page rather than buried.
You do not need an account
Booking does not require one. If you end up with an account it is because we emailed you a link afterwards offering to set one up, not because we made you fill in a password before we would take your booking.
It is worth having for a longer stay — it is where you see what has been paid and ask to extend — but the booking works identically without it.