Does Hostaway support video in tasks?

Practically, for operations: no. The task system your cleaners live in is documented for files and images only, and the API has no video anywhere. The only place Hostaway takes video is the website builder, which sells the property rather than maintains it. Here is exactly where the line sits, and how operators run video walkthroughs on Hostaway anyway.

One platform, two answers: operations no, marketing yes

The clean way to understand Hostaway's video story is that it built video support for the product that sells the property, not the product that maintains it.

That asymmetry is not a criticism of Hostaway; it is the standard shape of the category. We ran this same documentation audit across eight vacation rental platforms, and none of the major PMSs supports a video workflow in its task system (Lodgify's optional mobile clips are the lone PMS crack, and the ops layer's Operto Teams captures checklist video that nothing reviews). Guesty caps owner-facing task media at JPEG, JPG, and PNG, Breezeway's checklists offer Photo as the only media element, and Hospitable's Tasks App tracks uploaded photos with no video anywhere. Where PMS platforms do document video, it is consistently on the marketing side, exactly like Booking Website Pro.

What the API says when the docs go quiet

When help articles are vague ("different files"), the API schema is where a platform's real assumptions show. Hostaway's attachment object is built around images.

{
  "taskId":    // "Identifier of task object, if the attachment belongs to a task."
  "name":      // file name
  "url":       // private attachments get a temporary link that expires in 7 days
  "extension": // "e.g. jpeg"
  "mimeType":  // "e.g. image/jpeg"
  "isImage":   // "Whether the attachment is an image"
  "isPublic":
}
// There is an isImage flag. There is no isVideo, no video MIME example,
// and zero occurrences of "video" in the entire API reference.

Two more API facts matter for anyone planning an integration. First, the Task object itself has no attachments field, and there is no endpoint to upload task media; attachments surface through conversation payloads. Second, Hostaway's docs state plainly: We do not support sending attachments in the message. So even image attachments are effectively read-only through the API. If your plan was "we'll push walkthrough videos into Hostaway through the API," the API says no before the file format even comes up. (We cover what the API can do for turnover documentation in our guide to pulling turnover photos from the Hostaway API.)

How to add video walkthroughs to Hostaway tasks

Hostaway stays your system of record for scheduling and task assignment. The video layer rides inside each task as a link, which is the one attachment type every PMS handles perfectly.

Here is the flow operators actually run. A recording link is placed into each Hostaway task, in the task description or as a link attachment. The cleaner opens their task list as usual, taps the link, and their phone's browser opens a guided walkthrough recorder; there is no app to install and no login to remember. The video uploads in the background while they film, so a cleaner on a tight same-day turnover never stands in the driveway waiting on an upload bar. When the walkthrough is analyzed, the report comes back as a link too, viewable from the task, email, or dashboard. Hostaway never stores a byte of video, which is precisely why the pattern is durable: it works with the platform's design instead of against it.

This matters more for video than it ever did for photos because of what full-coverage video enables. A photo checklist shows you the angles someone chose to shoot. A walkthrough video covers the whole room, which means the footage can be compared against the last turnover's footage, and the question every ops team burns time on, "is this damage new, or was it already reported?", gets answered by comparison instead of by someone digging through old task threads.

Frequently asked questions

Sources