Guesty vs Hospitable vs Hostaway

[Shane Bishop]

Hello BP community!! For a small, but growing portfolio, do you recommend Guesty, Hospitable, Hostaway, or another PMS to centralize everything across multiple OTAs? We recently launched an STR and are listed on various OTAs, so we set up an account with Guesty for our PMS to centralize everything. Honest opinion, it seems to have its ups and downs. The direct booking website creation was very simple and for the most part we've had success, but it's very clunky and not super user-friendly so we are spinning our wheels a bit with it. We've heard good things about Hospitable and Hostaway, but I was hoping others that maybe have tried multiple PMS's could provide some insight into which software they found best.

Thanks!!

[Ken Boone]

I used Your Porter which became Guesty for Hosts which became Guesty Lite. When it worked it worked great, when it didn't work - you got double bookings and you couldn't call anyone and their support was overseas only on their time, so you had to wait at least 24 hours to get an answer to your problem which usually wasn't an answer, but a dumb question. I know horrible run on long sentence. Like their support was.

I did a ton of research and did demos on probably the top 10 PMSs at the time - end of 2024. I learned a few things. #1 You want to be API connected to VRBO.

For a few reasons - you don't get double bookings that way - guaranteed.
And you process the payments and pay your taxes instead of VRBO doing it.
I initially thought this was a negative as I didn't want extra work. I soon learned it to be a positive because VRBO can't force me to refund someone if they so desire. I control the payment processing.

I also learned there are PMSs out there that tell you they are API connected - at the time Hospitable - however after talking at length to them I learned that VRBO is still processing your payments and doing your taxes when you are connected to them. Well that is not how the VRBO API works and when you push them on it - at least at the time they will concur - it is not the true VRBO API. That may have changed by now though - I don't know. At the time in the FB groups people were complaining about a lot of VRBO drops with them and having to restart the service or something. I'm sure that has been resolved by now but that also impacted my choice.

I ended up going to Hostaway Jan 2025. They were about the most expensive and they are not perfect just like any PMS. Their customer support is much better than what I had in the past though. But it did streamline some of my processes, I no longer needed two other services I was using - 1) Zapier 2) SignNow. I also gained the ability to collect info up front such as email - think AirBnb - and Photo ID and selfie. Once I got this drilled down I have been pretty happy with things. There are of course caveats as I said they are not perfect.

The other thing I learned is switching a PMS is a real PITA. Especially when you are doing multiple properties, multiple platforms, and direct bookings. There is going to be a really compelling reason to get me to change PMS at this time - it was not fun.

I know in some of the big STR groups the consensus has been OwnerRez. I spent an hour on the phone with them as well and further time researching them.My understanding is that it can do about anything you want, however, it is way more complicated to get things down. I didn't want to deal with that.

So that is where I am at in a nutshell.