Five years looking for a tool that didn't exist. In the end it took my grandmother's name.

I'm not a programmer. I'm a host. I've been renting out my holiday home in Gran Canaria for years, and for a long time I had one fixed idea: that a guest staying in my home shouldn't feel they're giving anything up compared to a hotel. The same quality, but with the closeness only an owner can give.

Without realizing it, I was chasing something I'd learned as a child, in a house where anyone who walked in was treated like family. But I'll get to that at the end.

That idea took me five years. Five years looking for a tool that, in truth, I was never going to find. And a road full of attempts that never quite fit.

I tried almost everything

I went through several PMSs, check-in software, electronic locks. I tried digital guides, guest apps, PDFs, Canva slides with a link. The idea was always the same: give the guest the best experience I possibly could.

But no tool fit completely. I was always left limping on one side or another.

In time I understood why. They weren't designed for someone like me. Their ideal customer was someone else: chains, big management companies, businesses with dedicated teams. The host with one or two properties on top of their day job wasn't who they were built for. And you could tell.

The phone that never stops ringing

Being a host has a downside people rarely talk about: we're the point of contact, and we have to be available at all times.

I have a job, like most of us. Not all of us do this full time. And I felt helpless when I looked at my phone and saw a guest had written half an hour ago, waiting for a reply, even for a question that didn't matter. A hotel has a front desk, with someone dedicated to the guest. We are the front desk. Around the clock.

And then, the same questions over and over. No matter how much I updated the information, it seemed they never opened it: they'd go to pick up the keys at the wrong door and write to me frustrated, thinking they'd been scammed. If I had my phone in hand, I answered right away. If not, they started their holiday waiting at the door, with a bad taste in their mouth. And that bad start made them more sensitive to everything for the rest of the stay.

The day something broke

There was a turning point.

A guest had had a perfect stay. Flawless communication, positive feedback, they even said they wanted to come back. Three days after checkout, I got a notice: the platform had refunded them almost 400 € over a complaint about the cleaning.

I was travelling. The trip took a back seat. I wasn't even given the benefit of the doubt, with years of spotless reviews behind me. The refund was already done, automatically.

The reason? A cockroach inside the fridge. But in the photos there was no way it was real: it was dry, it had been dead in the sun for weeks, and placed in plain sight with a care that made it clear it was staged. Someone had decided to try to get a free holiday at my expense.

Support kept closing my cases, I kept reopening them. I asked for supervisors, explained everything from scratch again and again. What saved me was a video that had been recorded that day during the cleaning, because I wasn't on the island: you could see the fridge open, spotless, no trace of anything. It took me three days to get the dispute accepted.

I won. But something stayed with me. Not because of the 400 €. Because of the feeling of being alone. That the platform, whose customer is the guest and not me, had left me unprotected.

Since that day I photograph the state of the place before every check-in. Fridge included.

So I started building

I started making a tool for myself. At first it was a simple web app.

It didn't appear over a weekend. For months I changed it almost every week, because every guest brought me a situation I hadn't foreseen. What it does today, it learned from hundreds of real conversations, not from a meeting.

Little by little it took shape. An app that answered the frequent questions the way I would have if I'd had my phone in hand. That offered a late check-out only when no one was arriving that night, without turning into a market stall. That gave the guest suggestions during their stay: where to eat, which beach, what events are on this week. And a system for the cleaning team that recorded the real state of the place, with live photos of the points I defined, and generated a certificate linked to the next booking.

That casual video that saved me from the cockroach had become something permanent: a way never to feel unprotected again.

At last I had what I'd spent more than five years looking for.

From a tool for me to a tool for everyone

I ran it that way for a season, and it saved me so much grief that one thing became clear: if it worked for me, there was no way I was the only one who felt like this.

That's when I decided to turn it into a product for other hosts. It stopped being my personal patch-up and became something anyone could use. And it needed a name.

Why it's called anpıra

It didn't matter what time you arrived: she always welcomed you with a coffee, a smile and a real desire to listen. She offered you everything she had, food until you couldn't eat any more, she asked if you were okay, if you needed money.

Welcoming someone into her home was never a duty for her. It was her way of loving.

If I think of the person who best knew how to make someone feel welcome, only she comes to mind. I wanted the software to convey exactly that feeling.

anpıra is my tribute to her.

May it care as much as she cared for me.

Everything I understand about welcoming someone, about making them feel at home, I learned from her. Not in a course or a book. In her living room, watching her love people with coffee, food and time.

And with hosts, something similar happens to me.

They don't know me. But I know them. Because I've been, and still am, one of them.

I know what it is to look at your phone with guilt, to defend yourself alone against an unfair claim, to give a gesture that far too often is taken for granted. And that's why I want to care for them.

What I really learned

For years I thought the problem was mine. That other hosts managed their time, their incidents, their bookings better. That I was the one falling short.

Then I talked to others and found we were all in the same boat. It's just that no one had built a tool thinking of the owner first.

anpira only alerts you to what matters and handles the rest. It answers the repetitive questions, accompanies the guest during the stay and gives you a hand when you truly need it. So your phone stops ringing over nothing and you can go back to spending your time on what matters, without the guilt of checking “just in case”.

That cleaning certificate grew too: today it carries a timestamp legally recognized across the entire European Union. It doesn't replace common sense, but it provides much stronger evidence, with a certain date, when someone tries to take advantage of the owner.

In the end I understood that technology isn't there to replace hospitality. It's there to give us back the time to devote to it.

I suppose that, deep down, I've spent five years trying to make software give a guest a small part of what I felt every time I walked through my grandmother's door.

anpıra, respira.