Checking the calendars live…
Tap your check-in, then your check-out, then press Search.
The exact address is shared once your booking is confirmed.
Your property managers
We run Spare Keys Stay ourselves, here in Boston. Questions before you book? Daryl answers personally.
Call or text 617-799-4558 [email protected]Registered with the City of Boston · STR-629372
The free options first
Free and low-cost housing for patients and families in Boston - Hope Lodge, Ronald McDonald House, Hospitality Homes - and whole apartments when those are full.
If you are coming to Boston for treatment, ask about these before you book anything. They are real, they are free or close to it, and most people arriving from out of state have never heard of them.
Hospitality Homes (hosp.org) matches patients and their caregivers with host homes and donated apartments across Boston during treatment. It is not limited to one illness or one hospital.
The AstraZeneca Hope Lodge Center in Jamaica Plain, run by the American Cancer Society, gives cancer patients and a caregiver a free place to stay during treatment. There is no charge to either of you.
Christopher's Haven provides apartments for families whose child is being treated for cancer at a Boston medical center, with siblings welcome, for a suggested donation of $50 a night. The Ronald McDonald House in Charlestown has family apartments, free of charge, for stays of 3 to 90 nights; it fills from a waitlist, through your hospital social worker. Families of children being treated for cancer can also ask about The Boston House.
And ask your own hospital first. Mass General, Dana-Farber, Boston Children's and Brigham and Women's all have patient services or social work teams who keep housing lists and can tell you which hotels give a medical rate. That phone call is free and it is the single most useful thing on this page.
For each hospital - how far it is, its own lodging office and its parking - see apartments near Boston Children's Hospital and MGH.
Typical drive in minutes from our Dorchester apartments, outside rush hour. From Hyde Park, Longwood is about the same and the others 5 to 10 minutes further. Longwood at shift change is its own event.
We would rather say this plainly than have you find out after a week of phone calls. Most of the programmes above are built around cancer care and children's treatment, and most carry conditions: a referral from your care team, a minimum distance from home, a waiting list, or all three. Beds are finite and demand is not.
So a parent bringing a child to Boston Children's has a real chance. An adult coming in for a transplant workup, a course of infusions, a joint replacement or a surgical follow-up usually qualifies for nothing beyond a Hospitality Homes host home (if they live more than 50 miles from the hospital), and most of those suit two people - not the two or three relatives who came with them.
That is the gap we exist in. If one of the programmes above takes you, take it - it is free and it is closer to the hospital than we are.
A two-night trip is fine in a hotel. A three-week course of treatment is a different problem, and the costs that break it are not the room rate.
Treatment changes what someone can eat, often at short notice and often on days when nothing sounds bearable. A kitchen answers that. Three restaurant meals a day for a family, for weeks, does not - and by the second week nobody wants another restaurant meal anyway.
Hospital days generate laundry, and a hotel basement machine or a per-item bag service is a poor answer to it. So is a family of four sharing one room when the patient needs to sleep at odd hours and someone else needs to be awake. And in Boston, hotel parking is charged nightly on top of the room, which people rarely budget for until the bill arrives.
A whole apartment, not a room in one. A full kitchen. A washer and dryer inside the apartment rather than in a shared basement. Free parking on site, included in the price, so a car is not a running cost. Stays from a single night to several months, all bookable online, and stays of 7 nights or more are 10% off, and 28 nights or more 15% off.
Our apartments are in Dorchester and Hyde Park, a 15 to 25 minute drive from the main hospitals (from Hyde Park, about the same to Longwood and 5 to 10 minutes more to BMC, Tufts and Mass General), which is close enough to go back for an evening visit and far enough to sleep. We have written up the distances hospital by hospital in apartments near Boston's hospitals, and if Boston Medical Center is your hospital, that trip has its own page.
We are not a medical facility and we are not affiliated with any hospital. We are nineteen apartments owned by the people who look after them.
Is parking included, and is it at the building? A nightly parking charge or a garage four streets away changes the arithmetic of a long stay.
Is the laundry inside the unit, or shared? Can you actually cook a meal, or is it a microwave and a kettle? Is there a second room, so one person can sleep while another is awake?
And ask what happens if treatment runs long. Plans change on the hospital's schedule, not yours, and the answer to "can we extend" is worth knowing before you need it rather than after.
Dana-Farber and Brigham and Women's sit side by side in the Longwood Medical Area, a 19 to 25 minute drive from our apartments. Whole apartments with a kitchen, laundry in most and free parking, for a week or longer as easily as a night - so treatment days end somewhere you can cook and rest.
Every apartment books online for any length, from one night to a year, and the calendar shows the total for exactly your nights before you pay - stays of 7 nights or more are 10% off, and 28 nights or more 15% off. If treatment runs on, tell us before your end date: when the nights after it are free, we extend you in the same apartment. A full kitchen in all 19 apartments, and a washer and dryer inside most of them, make a long stay work like home.
Our Dorchester apartments are a 15 to 20 minute drive from Boston Medical Center outside rush hour, and the Hyde Park ones 20 to 30. BMC's own lodging page lists hotels much closer to the door - if you need one night before an early appointment, book one of those. For a week or more, an apartment gives you a second bedroom, a kitchen and free parking at the door. For morning appointments leave a little early: traffic into Boston builds from about 7:30am.
Boston Children's, Dana-Farber, Brigham and Women's and Beth Israel Deaconess sit together in the Longwood Medical Area, a 19 to 25 minute drive from our Dorchester apartments and 20 to 25 from Hyde Park. Ask the hospital's patient services team first: families travelling from far away can often stay at the Yawkey Family Inn or Ronald McDonald House, and Hope Lodge gives a cancer patient and one caregiver a free place to stay during treatment. Boston Children's validated patient and family parking is $11 for up to 24 hours, so the hospital car park is rarely the expensive part - and the space at the apartment is free.
Our apartments sleep 3 to 10, so the people taking turns at the bedside can stay together, in real bedrooms with doors - someone can sleep while someone else is up. Every apartment has free off-street parking, so a second car costs nothing, and a full kitchen means the meal you cook for the patient, or for each other, happens at a table instead of in a hotel room.
