We’ve combined all of our Red Apple Apartments blogs into one super blog! Now you can keep track of all our company news as well as travel tips and stories for all the cities we service.

Please visit us at RedAppleApartments.wordpress.com and don’t forget to update any bookmarks you may have.

Red Apple Apartments lists a number of hotel apartments in each of its cities, but what exactly is a hotel apartment? Is it a hotel or an apartment? A two-headed beast? We prefer to think of it as the best of both worlds.

Many travelers, whether visiting a city on business or pleasure, like the independence of cooking their own meals or at least preparing their own cup of coffee in the morning. If you are traveling with children or with a group of colleagues, it is important to have private bedrooms while still sharing a living space. A hotel apartment offers these freedoms, but has the added benefit of a front desk with concierge services and extra bonuses like restaurants on the premises, a gym or fitness center, covered parking, or even room service.

We recently talked with Øyvind Øvsthus, the manager of a major hotel apartment in Oslo, about the advantages this two-headed accommodation option can offer the discerning traveler. Øyvind has worked his way up the chain of command over the past five years from working behind the front desk to managing an entire complex. He knows all about what makes apartment hotels special and the secret is service. He oversees an experienced team of hospitality managers, head housekeepers, and chefs, who work every day to make guests feel like just that…guests. So, while our slogan is “Feels just like home,” Øyvind Øvsthus’s hotel apartment goes the extra step to make sure that you are treated like a guest in your own home. You can do your own laundry or send it out for dry cleaning. You can cook your own meals or visit the lunch buffet. You can work on your laptop in bed or give a presentation in the conference room. You can stay for one night or move in for a year. How’s that for service options?

Øyvind Øvsthus was educated in Australia and holds a business degree in hotel and event management. He manages 244 apartments in Oslo, and he and his experienced hospitality team are waiting to treat you like a guest in your own home.

Book one of Øyvind Øvsthus’s expertly serviced hotel apartments in Oslo for any length of time at www.redappleapartments.com.

Great photographs of your apartment will often lead a potential tenant to choose your apartment over another rental. Especially when you are trying to rent out property over the internet, photographs prove that the space is a real apartment and not an internet scam. But more than that, good photographs will prove that the apartment is also a livable home and serve as a warm invitation.

But interior spaces are some of the most difficult subjects to photograph and when you are photographing your apartment you will be facing a subject that can feel “empty” or “lifeless.” Here are a few tips to combat a lifeless photo and help you welcome tenants over the internet into your home.

Setting the Scene:
The first step is to clean the apartment. Clean everything. Make your bed, straighten the rugs and curtains, put away the magazines, hide the garbage can, and put the toilet seat down. You might even have to put away things that aren’t usually put away. Less is more when it comes to décor to help a room not appear “cluttered” in a photo. On the other hand, the apartment should seem like someone lives there, not totally empty, so set the kitchen table or put a vase of flowers on the nightstand.

Lighting the Scene:
Most cameras are designed to take photos outdoors and indoor spaces are just too dark to look good. Natural light from outside is best, but cameras are attracted to bright windows like moths to flames and everything else in the room will be darkened. Try to let the light in through the window without actually having the window in the shot. Don’t use the flash, unless you have a good flash that you can bounce off a wall or ceiling (if you don’t know what this means, don’t use your flash). Turn on every lamp in the room for a nice warm glow, but by all means, avoid fluorescent lighting, which can cast an alien green light in photos or make your apartment look like a hospital.

What to Shoot:
Everything. The more the merrier. You can always delete the ones that don’t look good or you can send them all to us and we will pick out the best photos of your apartment for the website. Shoot every room in your house. Take close ups of your best pieces of furniture and decorative art. Small architectural details or decorations may seem insignificant but can help represent the design style of the apartment. If you have a great view, photograph it. Great sunsets? Photograph one. If your apartment is in a historic building, photograph the exterior as well.

How to Shoot:
Steadying your camera is crucial. Even if you set the perfect scene and light it well, a blurry photo is useless. If you have a tripod, use it. If you don’t, try to rest the camera on a table or flat surface or steady your hand against the wall. Most basic cameras don’t have a wide enough lens to capture an entire room, so you’ll have to back into a corner or shoot a room through a doorway. Try the room from many different angles and all corners and doorways. Don’t always take the photos from eye level. Crouch down or stand on a stool for different perspectives, but try to have as little of the ceiling in the shot as possible.

Let the Room Be the Star:
People like to rent an apartment that is empty—that is, without other people living there, so photograph your apartment without yourself or your family members in the shot. Watch out for mirrors! A self-portrait of you with a camera in the bathroom mirror won’t help sell your apartment.

To Summarize:
• Clean the apartment
• Add a few small decorative touches
• Shoot during the day when it’s bright, but not too sunny
• Photograph every room
• Take lots of photos and choose the best

If you want to list your apartment with Red Apple Apartments, follow the above advice and send your beautiful apartment photographs to info@redappleapartments.com. We’ll get back to you right away and hopefully you’ll have tenants in no time at all.

At Red Apple Apartments we pride ourselves on our service and we do everything we can to make your stay in our apartment and your entire visit to Oslo as comfortable and relaxing as possible. While we want you to feel at home in our accommodation, we also recognize that you might want to get out and do some sightseeing during your stay. So if you decide to leave the comfort of your apartment, we have created a city guide to help you plan your excursions.

The guide has information on city history, local cultural attractions, recreational activities, day trips around the area, and general dining, shopping and transportation information. Everything is on our website so you can plan ahead or decide on something to do once you get to your apartment (all of our properties include internet access).

Check out our city guide to Oslo or learn about any of our other destinations and pack your bags!

About Copenhagen

About Helsinki

About Reykjavik

About Stockholm

You may have noticed that our home page is getting crowded with flags. That’s because Red Apple Apartments is now represented in all of the Nordic countries with new apartments recently listed in Stockholm, Helsinki and Oslo. We are excited to be serving these important capitals. Each Scandinavian capital offers history, art and nature in abundance and our apartments are always located either right in the heart of the city center or with easy access to city attractions and amenities.

Our lists are also growing longer in Copenhagen and Reykjavik with several new apartments added to these established cities.

We’re excited to continue to find affordable luxurious apartments in these five dynamic cities. Check the website often for new arrivals as many of our apartments are being booked as soon as they are listed. And if you are an apartment owner in one of these cities, please contact us at info@redappleapartments.com if you want to see your property listed on our website.

Sunday’s edition of the U.K.’s Observer featured an article about an “Instant Weekend” to Reykjavik, and as proof that Red Apple Apartments is becoming a household name in Reykjavik accommodation, the article recommends us for finding an affordable and comfortable place to stay in Iceland’s capital. Of course this is no surprise to anyone who has already stayed in one of our apartments in Reykjavik or Copenhagen, but now you don’t have to take our word for it…a trusted name in travel journalism has spoken!

If you want to take the Observer’s advice and make a spontaneous visit to Reykjavik, please check out our list of apartments in Reykjavik at www.redappleapartments.com or contact us at info@redappleapartments.com and we’ll help you find a place to call home for the weekend…or longer if you fall in love with Iceland.

As an international company, we have an international staff and each of us brings our culture, experience and talents to Red Apple Apartments to make it a truly global company ready to serve customers all over the world. We currently have staff in four different countries and today we’d like to introduce you to our management team, located in Sweden.

Ragnar Saevarsson
Managing Director
ragnar@redappleapartments.com

Ragnar is co-founder of Red Apple Apartments. He holds Master’s degrees in Entrepreneurship and International Marketing & Brand Management from Lund University in Sweden. He held several management positions in sales and marketing before starting Red Apple Apartments. He is at home in the virtual world of the internet and has a keen eye for design. He speaks fluent English and has a good grasp of Danish and Swedish. Ragnar is well-traveled and places an importance on health, fitness and recreation in his life. He has two children and lives with his wife, Sesselía Birgisdóttir, in Lund, Sweden.

Sesselía Birgisdóttir
Marketing Director
sesselia@redappleapartments.com

Sesselía is co-founder of Red Apple Apartments. She has two Master’s degrees—International Marketing & Brand Management and Managing People, Knowledge & Change—from Lund University in Sweden. She worked for many years in the publishing industry in marketing and sales and brings her creative skills to Red Apple Apartments, where she also exercises her talents in public relations. She lives in Sweden with her husband, Ragnar Saevarsson, and has a daughter and stepson. She divides her time between work, family and travel—sometimes doing all three at once. She speaks fluent English and Icelandic and some Swedish and Faroese. She has made several attempts to learn Spanish and has sincere hopes to get it down one day.

Jennifer Pemberton
Communications Manager
jennifer@redappleapartments.com

Jennifer is from the United States and holds a Master’s degree in Creative Writing. She has taught writing and literature to university students in the U.S. and China and serves as our web editor and writer, among her many tasks at Red Apple. She has worked as an editor for university publications, a history magazine, and an expedition travel company. Her work as a travel writer has taken her to the Antarctic and Shanghai, where she worked on writing an online travel guide to China. She has recently moved to Sweden, where her husband is a Master’s student at Lund University. She is passionate about travel and the outdoors and is an avid camper and backpacker. She speaks English fluently and knows the language intimately. She also knows some basic Spanish and Mandarin Chinese, and she can say hello and thank you in at least 15 other languages.

Lyazzat Salikova
Customer Relations Manager
lyazzat@redappleapartments.com

Lyazzat has a Master’s degree in Entrepreneurship from Lund University in Sweden and her business ideas and customer relations skills are valued at Red Apple Apartments. Originally from Kazakhstan, her knowledge of the global community comes from working for the United Nations and several U.S. government development agencies. She has lived in the U.K., Germany and Indonesia and her passion for travel has taken her to over 30 other countries. She is fluent in Russian, English and Kazakh and picked up quite a bit of German. Her Russian enables her to understand many Slavic languages and she hopes to add Swedish to her list soon. She lives in Sweden and, when she’s not touring Europe on the back of her husband’s Harley, she enjoys the comforts of home—reading, cooking and relaxing.

Is your laptop computer your ‘office’ or an indispensable tool on which you depend for a living? Is your

Travelling with a laptop

laptop just a faithful companion, and you decide travelling ‘together’ to Oslo? There are some things you should know in order to protect and use it properly. Take a look on our advises!

Before your departure for Oslo, we would suggest preparing your laptop computer for the future challenges. If your plan is to have Internet access, you have to check if the security updates and a firewall are installed, so as to prevent intrusions from other computers that are using the Internet. If you need your files fully protected, our recommendation is to encode them or to transfer them to a portable CD. Why not try this for encoding your files?

If you’ll fly to Oslo in economy class and you’re planning to use your computer for a long time, we would say it’s good bringing a second battery. That is not necessary if you’re flying in first or business class, where your seat has a power outlet. Check this to see which are the airlines providing seats with power outlets for laptops, go to.

Before leaving for Oslo, you should know that is possible to need a plug adapter to accommodate the type of electrical plug used at your hotel. We would recommend a careful reading of the labels on your power adaptor.

If your looking for a place to go online, there are lot of WiFi hotspots around the city. Most coffee houses have WiFi, if you have problems finding one you can ask just around.

Being aware of these common threats and preventing them, you can stay connected on your trip Oslo as long as you need to.

Social Bookmarks:

Technorati Profile