Founder profile

Shamil Mae

Founder of CheckinGuide

Shamil Mae is a UK property entrepreneur and the founder of CheckinGuide, a platform built for short-let and Airbnb hosts. His work focuses on the day-to-day reality of running short stays: faster check-ins, safer bookings and a calmer guest experience for both sides of the door.

Based

United Kingdom

Focus

Property & hospitality tech

About Shamil Mae

Shamil Mae is a UK-based founder whose work sits at the meeting point of property, hospitality and software. His background is in short-let and serviced accommodation: the practical, slightly chaotic world of turnover days, late arrivals, lost keys, awkward parking notes and guests who message at midnight to ask where the bin store is. That hands-on experience shapes everything he builds today.

Rather than approaching short-lets as a passive investment, Shamil treats each property as a small hospitality business with its own brand, voice and standards. That mindset, owner-operator first, software second, is the thread that runs through his projects.

Why Shamil founded CheckinGuide

CheckinGuide started from a very specific frustration. Running short-let stays meant sending the same WhatsApp messages, PDFs and photos over and over: how to find the building, where the lockbox is, how the boiler works, the bin day, the Wi-Fi password, the quiet hours. Guests still missed the information, still asked the same questions and still left the occasional review mentioning something that had been clearly explained in three different places.

The verification side was just as messy. Asking for ID and a damage deposit through ad-hoc bank transfers or third-party tools felt unprofessional, inconsistent and risky. Hosts wanted a calmer way to screen bookings without scaring genuine guests away.

Shamil built CheckinGuide to bring those moving parts into one straightforward place: a branded digital guest guide, optional ID checks, security deposit holds and pre-arrival upsells, all reachable from a single guest link. The goal is simple. Make the bit between “booking confirmed” and “welcome inside” feel effortless for the guest and predictable for the host.

Shamil’s role in the business

Shamil leads CheckinGuide as founder, with day-to-day involvement across the parts of the business that most shape what hosts and guests experience:

• Product direction. Deciding what the platform should do next, which problems are worth solving and which to leave alone.
• Brand and tone. Keeping the writing, design and identity consistent, calm and recognisable, both inside the app and across marketing.
• Guest and host experience. Walking through real guides, real check-ins and real verification flows to find the bits that feel clunky and tighten them up.
• Technology direction. Working closely on architecture decisions, integrations and the standards that keep guest data handled responsibly.

Because CheckinGuide is built by an active short-let operator rather than a generalist software studio, the priorities tend to mirror the priorities of the hosts who use it.

Other projects

Outside of CheckinGuide, Shamil is connected with a range of ventures across property, accommodation, education, marketing and technology. These projects share a similar thread: practical tools and brands aimed at people who actually operate, rather than purely invest in, short-let and hospitality businesses.

How to get in touch

The most reliable way to reach Shamil and the team is through the CheckinGuide contact page. You can also read more about the wider business and the people behind it on the About CheckinGuide page.

CheckinGuide

Built by a host, for hosts

Digital guest guides, ID verification, security deposits and pre-arrival upsells in one calm, branded link.