Guesty review: Pricing, alternatives and features

Guesty was founded almost ten years ago by twin brothers Amiad and Koby Soto in Walnut, California. The platform received generous capital funding from investors like Apax Digital, Vertex Ventures, and Flashpoint.

Today, it’s a leading property management software solution that helps property managers save time, improve profits, and expand their portfolios. Guesty users often five or more properties that require day-to-day task management and operations. 

• Auto-Messaging and Response: Schedule automated messages to go to guests upon completing a particular action, i.e., booking, inquiring about, canceling, or liking a property.
• Automatic time-based communications for confirmation messages upon booking, check-in instructions three days before arrival, and check-out instructions one day before departure
• Auto-synchronization: Updating a listing price or photos? Guesty automatically makes updates for listings on all your channels and offers real-time content updates, eliminating the tediousness of updating every channel.
• Optimize listings per channel: Guesty allows you to optimize prices with discounts and promotions on each channel, all in one place.
• Auto-reviews: Writing reviews can be time-consuming. Guesty offers an auto-review tool that posts automatically depending on your classification of a guest.
• 24/7 Guest Communication: Guesty sorts guest inquiries by the level of urgency to ensure the most critical questions receive immediate attention
• Off-hour guest communication: If you and your team can handle guest communications between 9-5 (or any other time frame), Guesty offers guest communication services during your off-hours

Plus, Guesty offers:

• Booking Website
• Damage Protection
• Extended Stays
• Mobile Management App
• Mobile Management App
• Multi-Unit Management
• Open API
• Owners Portal
• Payment Processing
• Pre-Stay Tools
• Reporting Tools
• Revenue Management
• Task Management
• Unified Inbox

Many customers switched to Guesty from another property management software for its wide-ranging automation tools –specifically the auto-messaging feature. Automation is a trusted friend to every property manager, and Guesty offers automation tools to the max. 

How often have you entered the wrong data in a report or waited too long to post a listing? The company boasts that their customers cut between 50-80% of their workload by automating specific tasks and eliminating human error or forgetfulness.

Do you work with multiple rental channels like Airbnb, Booking.com, and VRBO? Managing notifications, inquiries, bookings, and everything else is time-consuming enough on one application–let alone three. Every short-term rental manager has gone through the stress of double booking, often occurring because one channel didn’t have dates blocked off. 

Guesty offers multi-channel management where you can stay on track with activities on every channel. The tool lets you view and toggle numerous listings on multiple channels without leaving the platform. Customers enjoy the multiple channel management feature as it helps them manage different booking sites with ease. 

Guesty offers an auto-payments feature where property managers don’t have to manage payments. Guesty securely stores guest information and processes payments based on your policies. 

What’s great about Guesty’s payment processing is its simple display, where you can view transactions under one window with ease and share receipts with customers at the click of a button. Another fun feature is “simple upselling,” where Guesty offers your guests a running tab for additional goods and services during their stay.

One of Guesty’s most prominent and unique selling points is its free website service to create your very own booking site. While you may already have multiple channels and a company website, Guesty offers all of its customers a personal booking website to reinforce their branding without any extra fees. Customers especially enjoy Guesty’s flexibility to integrate booking with existing company websites

• Automation tools save time and streamline operations
• Free website builder promotes your brand and saves you money with commission-free bookings
• Multiple channel management and multi-calendar organize listings on various channels
• Branded booking website offers customizable coupons with discounts, featured listings for the home page, mobile-friendly interface, commission-free bookings, opportunity for more web traffic with SEO
• Seamless payment processing with auto payment options

• With it’s continuously improving platform, some services can be glitchy at times
• Payment processing features lack flexibility for special cases

Whether you’re managing one listing or ten, once you subscribe, you will have access to all the features that Guesty has to offer. Price is dependent on the number of listings and whether you’re paying annually or monthly. Plus, they offer a free trial.

• One listing is $49/ month if paid monthly or $44/month if paid annually
• Two listings are $74/month if paid monthly or $66/month if paid annually
• Three listings are $99/month if paid monthly or $88/month if paid annually
• If you manage more than three listings, Guesty invites you to contact them for a quote.

Guesty is a highly-rated platform on sites like Capterra (4.5 out of 5), Trustpilot (4.4 out of 5), and Getappand (4.5 out of 5). The company was founded in 2013 and operates globally, as a preferred software partner of Airbnb.

Hostaway is a vacation rental software offering an all-in-one solution to property managers. The Hostaway software is built to be flexible, customizable, and grow as your business grows, and works to provide tools to automate and simplify marketing, sales, communication, operations, reporting and accounting.

Features include: Property management, communication, analytics & reporting, automation tools, marketing, channel manager, operations.

Pricing is not listed on their website. As every property manager is unique, Hostaway invites you to contact them for a demo and quote.

Built for property managers and vacation rental owners, Lodgify helps vacation rental professionals increase their occupancy and grow their income. The result of real-life short-term rental industry experience, the platform has been designed specifically for vacation rental professionals.

Features include: Property management, channel management, website builder, booking system, templates, integrations.

Pricing

Lodgify offers four different plans to suit your needs – Lite, Starter, Professional and Ultimate. Each plan offers different services, and price points change based on whether you pay monthly, annually, or for two years upfront. For one rental property you can expect to pay: 

• Lite - $0/month, but there is a 3.9% booking fee on every booking made through the platform.
• Starter - $12/month paid annually plus a 1.9% booking fee.
• Professional - This is their most popular plan and costs $32/month paid annually with a 0% booking fee.
• Ultimate - $48/month paid annually with a 0% booking fee.

Check out their website for more detailed pricing.

Established in 2014, Smoobu was developed by rental property managers who created the software to solve the problems they were experiencing. Even today, many of their iterations come about through direct feedback from users. 

Smoobu has a helpful channel manager connecting users to third-party rental portals like Booking.com, Agoda, Airbnb, or Expedia. In addition, it also syncs data between these channels, casting off any worries about manual prices and double bookings.

Features include: Reservation system, booking system, channel manager, website, rates synchronization, availability calendar, guest communications

Pricing

Smoobu offers a Basic plan and a Professional plan, both with no booking or setup fees. Prices vary depending on whether you pay monthly or annually upfront. Property managers who have one unit can expect to pay:

• $0 for the Basic plan
• $17.50/month for the Professional plan
• A free 14-day trial is available for the Professional plan.

Guesty is headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Guesty is for anyone who manages short-term vacation property rentals. If you’re managing more than one property, whether on Airbnb, TripAdvisor, HomeAway or Booking.com, the Guesty platform will centralize all of them to streamline your management processes. 

Guesty is the preferred software partner of Airbnb, and as such, offers complete integration with the Airbnb platform.

Overall, customers love the platform’s easy-to-use and rewarding features, despite it’s higher price point. Guesty is a top-notch property management software that many short-term rental managers use regularly. We especially love the platform’s focus on efficiency, as seen through its endless automation tools and multichannel support.