If you are here because you saw us in your logs

Who we are

ServiceApartment.com is a public reference of serviced apartment buildings. We take no bookings, charge no commission and are not an agency. When a building has a page here, the only link on it goes to the operator's own website, with no affiliate tag and no fee attached.

The crawler, exactly

It identifies itself on every single request as:

ServiceApartmentBot/1.0 (+https://www.serviceapartment.com/crawler)

It sends no cookies and no credentials. It has never had an account anywhere and there is no code in it that can log in to anything.

How often it visits

• At most 40 requests to your site per run, and never more — the limit is fixed in the program itself, not in a settings file someone can edit.
• One request every two seconds, or slower if your robots.txt asks for slower.
• At most once a week.

In practice that is a few dozen page views a week — less than one person browsing your site for ten minutes.

What it reads

A closed list, and nothing outside it is written down even if it is on the page:

• The building's name and address.
• How many units there are and what sizes they come in.
• What is included — utilities, wifi, housekeeping, linen, council tax, parking, gym, laundry.
• Any rate you publish, with the period you stated it in. We never convert a nightly or weekly rate into a monthly one. If you publish a nightly rate, the monthly figure on your page stays blank.
• Your own website address, so we can link to you.

What it refuses to read

• Your words. No descriptions, no marketing copy, no page text. Those are yours and the copyright in them is yours.
• Your photographs. None, of anything, ever.
• People. No staff names, no personal email addresses, no direct or mobile numbers, no pictures of anyone.
• Your availability or your booking system. We hold no dates and no availability, and the crawler does not touch a booking engine.

What it does if your site says no

If your site returns a 401 or 403, shows a bot challenge, a login wall, or a box to tick before continuing, the crawler stops and never comes back. Your site is written to a permanent list and no future run requests it. There is no retry, no changing the agent string, no pretending to be a browser and no proxy. That is a rule in the program, not a policy we intend to follow.

It reads your robots.txt before anything else, obeys it, and keeps a dated copy of the file your server actually sent — so if this is ever questioned, the answer is your file on that day rather than our recollection of it. You can name us specifically:

User-agent: ServiceApartmentBot
Disallow: /

Nothing about your building is published unless you say so

This is the part most people do not expect. Collecting and publishing are separate here, and the second one needs your written permission.

Every building we hold that we have not been given permission for is invisible: no public page, no search result, no sitemap entry, no area listing, no share card, and it is not counted in any total on this site. If we write to you, that email carries a private link to the page as it would look, so you can read it on your own screen before deciding anything. Silence is not consent, and no amount of time turns it into consent.

The off switch

Email us and we will stop crawling your site permanently and delete anything we already hold about your buildings, the same day. We will confirm by email when it is done. We will not ask you to justify it, offer you an alternative first, or route you through a form with three steps in it.

Exclude my site — lee@serviceapartment.com

If you would rather correct your page than remove it, say that instead and we will do that. Both answers are fine and neither costs anything, now or later.

How we work, in full

The methodology page sets out where every fact comes from and how a page is ordered — position here is never for sale. The privacy page covers information about people rather than buildings. If something on this page does not match what you are seeing in your logs, write to lee@serviceapartment.com and we will fix whichever of the two is wrong.