Trinity College Oxford Streamlines the Full Student Accommodation Journey with StarRez

Arrival Week Stress Amplified by Multiple Systems & Friction

In Oxford, students arrive into a uniquely intense academic rhythm: short terms, full timetables, and the steady expectation to get up to speed quickly. For accommodation teams, that pressure shows up in a familiar way. The more steps, logins, and disconnected processes students face, the more queries housing teams field at precisely the wrong moment.

Before Trinity College Oxford moved to StarRez, contracting and arrivals involved a patchwork of methods that demanded more effort from students and more chasing from staff. As Jon Davies, Head of Accommodation Services, explained, the College had tried to modernise signatures with a separate platform, but it still didn’t solve the basic problem: “We used to use a real hodgepodge mix of paper, and then we went on to a separate platform to just try and get signatures… and you never get 100% of them.” Even with contractual protections in place, incomplete signatures created administrative drag and uncertainty.

Meanwhile, the student experience was far from seamless. Students had to navigate a separate contract platform with strict account requirements, and if they logged in incorrectly or created an account outside the expected parameters, the licence simply wouldn’t appear. When that happened, the housing team had limited visibility and little ability to resolve the issue directly, resulting in unnecessary back-and-forth. “We’d send them an email saying, hi, welcome, log into this contract platform… and it would then require them to have logged in with their Trinity email address,” Jon said. “If they logged in with another one, there’s obviously no licence there and it was nothing we could fix.”

The result? A predictable surge of student queries at the busiest time of year. “I’d probably get 40 or 50 emails from students having issues finding licences,” Jon recalled, plus additional follow-up for those who hadn’t signed at all.

At Trinity, where operational work sits with a very lean team, those inefficiencies were amplified. When asked how many people were on the housing team, Jon’s answer was simple: “Well, me.” That reality made one thing clear: the College needed a system that reduced friction, cut manual effort, and guided students through each step without adding complexity.

“Trying to get them to bookmark multiple different apps or web pages is an uphill battle. But having one place that you log into with your SSO… it’s far more user-friendly.”

- Jon Davies, Head of Accommodation Services, Trinity College Oxford

One Connected Platform for the Whole Resident Journey

Trinity’s approach with StarRez centred on unifying the student accommodation experience, including contracting, communications, arrivals, and ongoing operations into one intuitive, sign-once environment.

An Easy-to-Access, Tailored Student Portal

Rather than forcing students to create accounts or remember yet another password, Trinity implemented a single sign-on experience through the University SSO and used the portal to keep tasks clear, timely, and manageable. StarRez’s resident portal is designed to give residents a self-service experience while enabling staff to guide next steps and communications.

Jon saw the impact immediately: “They found it very easy to log-on, because we had our single sign-on set up via the University SSO. There weren’t any passwords to remember or email addresses to enter… it just worked.”

Trinity also focused on reducing cognitive overload by showing students only what was relevant at a given stage. “We set it so that they only ever saw what they needed to at that time,” Jon said. “It wasn’t like they even had a massive list of options to think to themselves, what am I meant to be doing? It was just there, saying, do this.”

Digital Contracting Reaches 100% Signature Completion

The most striking impact from the year was contract completion rate. “Every single one of our licence agreements were signed this year, for the first time ever,” Jon said.

That wasn’t simply a feel-good milestone; it removed a recurring operational burden and reduced risk. With StarRez, issuing licences and tracking progress was no longer an exercise in cross-referencing spreadsheets and chasing paper. It became visible, manageable, reliable, and repeatable.

Jon described building list views to monitor progress and automate nudges: “Because you have the list views, I just created a list view of all the licences that I’d sent out… and it was set to email every Thursday saying you haven’t signed your licence.” The outcome was a first for the College: “The last person signed their licence about a week or so beforehand.”

Faster Arrivals with QR-Code Check-in & StarRez Go

If contracting was Trinity’s major back-office win, arrival day was the moment the benefits became obvious for everyone, staff and students alike.

In October, Trinity ran its first mass check-in using QR codes, with staff checking students in via StarRez Go, the mobile app designed for on-the-go housing operations such as check-ins, inspections, and maintenance logging.

Previously, the process was paper-heavy and manual: “We used to get them to fill out an A5 piece of paper… and that used to go back to our Porters’ Lodge and then they would then stack it up and I’d manually do it.”

This year, Jon and colleagues ran StarRez Go on their devices and checked students in live as they arrived. “It was so easy for us to do that we never had a queue,” he said. “We were actually fighting over each other as who got to scan the QR code.”

The time savings were dramatic and tangible. Cutting the process from 2–5 minutes to just 10–15 seconds using QR codes and StarRez Go resulted in up to a 95% reduction in average check-in time.

“Everyone was sort of checked in by 1:00. We normally run the event till 4:00... We never had a queue. We were actually fighting over each other as who got to scan the QR code.”

- Jon Davies, Head of Accommodation Services, Trinity College Oxford

Secure Collaboration Through Granular Permissions

As Trinity expanded how different teams interact with StarRez including porters, housekeeping, maintenance, and wellbeing, permissions mattered. Jon emphasised the value of granular control, especially around sensitive information.

“We’ve got everything locked down… specifically around concerns,” he said. “We want the wellbeing team to be able to see pretty much everything… but then we certainly don’t want anyone else seeing what they do.”

He also noted how practical it is to maintain: “If there’s ever anything that we need to change, it’s usually a case of duplicating a group that’s closest to it, changing a couple of settings, and putting new people onto it.”

Less Stress, More Time Back, and a Better Student Experience

1) A Smoother Experience for Students Without Extra Effort

The combination of SSO, a carefully configured portal experience, and mobile check-in removed common points of friction. Students didn’t need to remember a new password, troubleshoot a third-party contract platform, or wait in long queues to collect their keys.

The change in student queries tells the story. “I think maybe two students… had some queries about the use of the web portal,” Jon said. Compared with the 40 or 50 emails previously received about accessing contracts, the reduction was dramatic and reflected how the portal’s flexibility allowed Trinity to design a clearer, more intuitive student journey.

And crucially, Trinity is meeting students where they are. As Jon put it, Oxford students are “so pressured for everything” that simplifying the accommodation process isn’t just convenient; it’s genuinely supportive.

2) Massive Time Savings for a Lean Operation

StarRez didn’t only reduce student-facing friction; it reduced staff burden in ways that opened up capacity to improve and expand services.

One of Jon’s clearest examples was reallocations: “Reallocations are something that used to take me honestly, two weeks to do, is now being done in 20 minutes.”

He also described the old licence-generation process as another week of work, collecting data into massive Excel sheet to upload elsewhere. Now, those processes are consolidated and far easier to manage.

“All in for me, it’s been massively time-saving... Very, very user-friendly. To the point that when there are ever any issues, I’m able, usually, to deal with them myself… either looking on StarCare Online for solutions, or just having a dig into the settings.”

- Jon Davies, Head of Accommodation Services, Trinity College Oxford

3) A Calmer Run-Up to Arrivals & Space to Improve What Comes Next

The operational calm wasn’t limited to arrival day itself; it changed the weeks leading up to arrivals. Jon described a striking shift in team experience. “We were all saying around here in the run-up that we must have missed something this year… because it got to two weeks beforehand, and there was nothing else to do.”

Instead of the usual scramble, teams were prepared and aligned. “The Porters’ Lodge were happy, all of the housekeeping team were happy, all the rooms were scheduled to be ready,” Jon said. “It was easy.”

That regained breathing room is now being reinvested into further improvements, including mobile inspections, housekeeping workflows, and student inventories. Jon’s aim is to keep building on the same principle: one system, one journey, fewer missed steps.

4) Building Towards Year-Round Accommodation & Events in One System

Trinity is also implementing StarRez Conference & Events, with a goal of going live around Christmas or Easter. The long-term driver is consistent with the College’s housing strategy: “Our main driver for that is just having one system for the staff to use, so that we don’t have systems galore.”

Part of StarRez’s unified platform for thriving communities, StarRez Conference & Events is designed to manage end-to-end event and guest operations, helping institutions coordinate bookings, communications, and logistics in a single environment.

For Trinity, where the annual cycle includes Easter events, visiting programmes, summer university groups, and then student arrivals again, bringing conferences and accommodation into one platform supports a more coherent experience for everyone using the College’s spaces.

Why StarRez?

“If it’s just two words, it’d be user-friendliness,” Jon said. “If you want the full sentence… how easy and intuitive the system is to use… it’s been brilliant.”

He’s particularly confident it will enable broader adoption across teams: “A lot of our cleaning team aren’t that tech literate, but I’m not really that concerned because it is just a very easy-to-use platform.”

“[StarRez] is easy and intuitive to use… it’s been brilliant.”

- Jon Davies, Head of Accommodation Services, Trinity College Oxford

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