Hostfully Review: Vacation Rental Management Software [2023] : Wheelhouse Blog

Hostfully Review: Vacation Rental Management Software [2023]

January 14, 2023 | Hailey Friedman

With services like Airbnb and Vrbo, listing short-term rentals has never been easier. But for property managers, especially those with multiple properties, keeping track and coordinating reservations and communications can still be time-consuming.

Property management software like Hostfully have revolutionized the way rental property owners manage their businesses. Hostfully is a cloud-based platform that helps vacation rental managers scale their property management business quickly and effectively.

This Hostfully review will cover the platform’s features, pricing, and how it can help streamline your management operations.

What is Hostfully?

Hostfully started in San Francisco by friends looking for a better vacation rental property management solution. Now it’s used to manage over 50,000 properties in 80 countries. Users can work from their computer or phone with the Hostfully Mobile App, guests take advantage of 40,000 guidebooks, and their handy automation features save time for everyone.

Hostfully’s strength lies in its integration with other applications, like the best dynamic pricing software and Airbnb, so that you can manage everything in one place.

Hostfully Software Review

About

Hostfully streamlines all management and communication across your properties so everything is on one platform. Want to look at your reservation calendar? Check. Want to send automated texts to guests who just checked in to your vacation rental? No problem. Need something that integrates into a revenue management tool for automating your rental property price? You can do that too.

This property software will enhance your efficiency whether you have a few listings or manage an extensive portfolio. Let’s look at some of Hostfully’s top features.

Key Features

Property managers can use several automatic key features to stay organized and efficient as they run their businesses.

Automation: Hostfully automates many repetitive tasks required for property management, like messaging, guest vetting, pricing and payments, check-ins, and reviews. This feature will boost your efficiency, freeing up your time and impressing customers with quick responses.
Channel Manager: Property managers today often use at least two listing platforms (like Airbnb and Vrbo) for marketing their properties to customers. Hostfully makes that easier by syncing your listings across 17 sites and OTAs. It also supports iCal to track all the important dates on your calendar.
Booking Pipeline: When it comes to accepting, rejecting, and modifying reservations, Hostfully makes it easy. Track all bookings, automate responses to questions from potential customers, and get quick access to all relevant data with this award-winning software.
Unified Inbox: You can stop worrying about checking inboxes for each of your listings and start managing all guest communication from a single dashboard. This means more than just emails for booking confirmations and check-ins. Using Hostfully, you can text your guests, design templates to respond to their inquiries, and attach any important information so that your customers can relax and enjoy an easy arrival and stay at your property.
Wheelhouse Integration: Property managers rejoice! We love how compatible Hostfully and Wheelhouse are. Close out of a few tabs on your browser by simply logging into Hostfully, visiting the integrations page, and setting Wheelhouse on the agency level to optimize and sync up demand-driven dynamic pricing for your properties.

Hostfully Guidebooks

For many guests, staying in a vacation rental is much easier and more fun with a guide to show them around. Guidebooks are a great way to answer questions, provide suggestions, and provide a better guest experience at your property.

Hostfully’s digital guidebooks are basic mobile websites that do not require an app. You can simply attach a link to your communications with them, and they’ll have all the property information in one place.

They’re a resource for property managers to provide information like driving directions, check-in instructions, and details about other property features like heat, wifi, television, and anything else your guests might want to know.

Boost guest experience by including local recommendations for places to eat and explore. You can even use this feature to take advantage of upsell opportunities.

You get one guidebook for free, but if you have multiple properties, it can be worth it to upgrade. This pricing is managed on a sliding scale, starting at $9.99 per month for one property and $100 for 20 properties. You can learn more about their pricing and features here.

Hostfully Pros

Distribute your listings on all the major channels like Airbnb, Booking.com, HomeAway (VRBO), TripAdvisor, and more to ensure you’re managing systems better than ever.
Provides a centralized calendar that allows you to view all your properties and bookings in one location. You can place holds on your calendar to decide on the inquiries you want for your customers, then handle all booking and check-in details from one unified calendar.
Allows you to automatically send personalized SMS messages to your guests as well as submit payments and track customers for support issues and potential rebookings.
Detailed analytics on property performance, which will help you better understand which channels are driving the most bookings and revenue to your business.
Provides a rich set of integrations that will ensure better guest management, cleaning management, digital signatures, email marketing, and smart home solutions to further evolve your listing management with software specifically designed for the property manager to grow and improve their business.

Hostfully Cons

Only one free Hostfully Guidebook is provided with a basic plan
Support is mainly done via chat or email, and not over the phone.

Hostfully Pricing

Hostfully’s Vacation Rental Management software subscriptions depend on the number of properties you manage. The more properties, the higher the price point. It is worth noting that all monthly subscribers will also pay a one-time implementation fee of $400. However, Hostfully waives this fee if you commit to an annual subscription.

Starter: $99 per month: The starter subscription is great for small-scale property managers with under five listings. You will get full-scale property management features, API sync with all channels, and the Hostfully Mobile App. This subscription includes three phone calls with the onboarding team to help you get started.
Pro: $189 per month: In addition to the features in the Starter plan, it also includes private labeling, team roles, SMS messaging, digital signatures, and more. Pro plan subscriptions can manage up to 11 listings.
Pro Plus: $239 per month: This subscription includes all of the same features as Pro but allows you to manage up to 19 listings.
Premium: $312 per month: The Premium subscription is a great fit for managers with up to 25 listings, with the most comprehensive support and training plan. If you plan on managing more than 25 listings, Hostfully offers Premium features with custom pricing.

Reviews

Feedback in Hostfully reviews is overall very positive. The company has thousands of satisfied customers impressed with the software’s performance.

In Hostfully reviews on Capterra, users highlight the calendar layout as a favorite feature, excellent customer service, and ease of using the software’s interface. Overall, property managers using Hostfully rated the software 4.3 out of 5 stars.

Some customer reviews include:

“Everything about Hostfully shows a pattern of superior thought and workmanship. The Hostfully team members I have come in contact with have all showed me a unique desire to deliver a robust solution to the day to day struggles I deal with as a property manager. I have used 3 other “top rated” alternative property management solutions and they all fall flat and short.”

“We love their direct booking capabilities and their integrations with all of the software platforms that we need.”

“Hostfully’s responsiveness and customer service is top notch!!! It is rare that you get such excellent customer service these days. They are amazing in my book simply for their customer service. But we really appreciate the pipeline feature! It is great to be able to see where every guest is in the process of their booking/stay.”

More About Hostfully

Hostfully Alternatives

Are you curious about how Hostfully compares to other property management software providers? Let’s go through a brief review of the alternatives.

Guesty: Great for short-term rentals and offers several unique features, including 24/7 guest communication, auto-reviews, and listing optimization. Read our Guesty review for more information.
Hostaway: Vacation rental management software providing automated tools, coupon management, and smart locks. Well-designed for short-term and growth-oriented property managers. Learn more from our Hostaway review.
Track: Track offers guest experience management for companies at the enterprise level, so if you are running hundreds of short and long-term properties, they may be a good fit. Track is only available in the USA and only in English. Read our Track review here.
Escapia: Escapia has been a name in the property management industry for over 20 years. They are now a part of the Expedia Group and can help you run your business with accessible guest and owner portals, reservation calendars, accounting options, and more.
Streamline: Streamline is one of the top providers of rental software. Their lead management system is great for generating quotes, and the unified inbox makes it easy to communicate with guests and track bookings. You’ll have to connect with a Streamline agent for a quote, but you can read our review of Streamline here.

Hostfully Customer Support

Support services are available 24/7 with agents all over the world. You can connect via chat, or email the support team directly.

Hostfully customer support starts with freely available resources on starting up and using the software to manage your properties. But if you need help with specific issues, the company prides itself on providing the same support quality regardless of which subscription package you have.

The company has an outstanding customer service rating of over 95%. Check out their customer service page to explore their offerings and recent software developments.

Hostfully Coupons

Hostfully makes it easy to create and manage discount codes for guests. Whether you want to incentivize especially great customers to return to your vacation rental for another stay or to make a reservation at another one of your properties, coupons are just a few clicks away.

Hostfully Mobile App

Are you ready to take your property management on the go? Keep Hostfully’s core features in your pocket so you can stay up-to-date on everything no matter where you are.

The Hostfully Mobile App is available at all subscription levels, empowering you to communicate in real time with guests, check in on reservations, and view your calendar all from your phone. Vacation rental management is now something you can do anywhere at any time.

Bottom Line on Hostfully Vacation Rental Management Software

If you manage more than one rental property, investing in software like Hostfully will improve your performance, save time, and increase your revenue. Plus, it easily integrates with other software and services essential for vacation rental management. You can view your Airbnb reservations, rent equipment from BabyQuip, and screen guests with Autohost–all in the same place.

And with just a couple of clicks, you can connect Wheelhouse and Hostfully to take advantage of our demand-driven dynamic pricing engine. Wheelhouse analyzes over 10 billion data points every day to help your listing earn 40% more revenue.

Ready to boost your properties’ earnings?

Get started with Wheelhouse today.

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