Guesty vs OwnerRez
This article examines Guesty vs OwnerRez by concentrating on the main features that a hospitality management software should offer. The data has been collected from Guesty’s and OwnerRez’s websites and help articles. We also checked their reviews at Capterra to find the aspects that the actual users are emphasising.
Guest Review
In Capterra, Guesty has a rating of 4.4, with the highest score for Ease of Use.
Trustpilot introduces Guesty as an Excellent tool with a 4.6 TrustScore.
In Capterra, OwnerRez has a rating of 4.9, with the highest score for Customer Service, Features, and Value for Money.
Trustpilot introduces OwnerRez as an Average tool with a 2.8 TrustScore.
Guesty automates collecting guest information and verifying reservation details, Check-in Forms, rental agreements that explain your terms and conditions, and collecting guests’ e-signatures.
Guesty’s integration with CheKin allows the automatic collection of necessary documentation from guests, directs relevant information to the authorities, and allows guests to check in online ahead of time.
While working with OwnerRez, you do not need to worry about the bookings that come from OTAs to which you have an API connection, as everything will automatically be visible in your account.
You can enable push notifications through the OwnerRez’s Web App to receive alerts, such as a new booking notification, on all your devices.
However, you may face some difficulties if your booking is direct. Then, everything should be done manually. Here are the steps:
- Create the booking and enter guest details.
- Activate payment collection and enter their card information.
- Schedule the security deposit.
- Reach out to guests for further information, such as photo ID and signing of the terms and conditions (through the Renter Agreements feature).
After taking these steps, the booking will be created, and it will resemble one created automatically.
Guesty provides integrations with 60 different marketing platforms or channels. Almost every single channel uses a 2-way API connection instead of 1-way or an iCal connection.
Guesty has direct integrations with six online booking platforms, including Airbnb, Booking.com, Agoda, TripAdvisor, HomeAway and Misterb&b.
By using Guesty:
- You will access an auto-pricing tool which automatically adjusts prices across all booking platforms according to your specifications.
- You can use the official, step-by-step, Guesty-guided connection process for integrating with various OTAs.
- For Airbnb Integration, if you already have an Airbnb account, the integration takes about 5 minutes, and within 24 hours, all of your data from your Airbnb account or multiple accounts are pulled into Guesty.
The full API integration is only available for Airbnb, Vrbo and Booking.com. In addition, you will have full access to all API integrations if you have five or more properties.
When you open the window for each channel synchronisation, you can see the list of your listings with Sync Status, Listing Status, the last time a booking was made for each property, and the last time the information changed or synced again.
Guesty cleaning management enables you to:
- Create and assign cleaning tasks.
- Schedule tasks for specific dates and times, or even set them up as recurring tasks.
- Track the progress of each task, monitor completion status, and see who is responsible for each task.
Guesty’s “Auto Tasks” feature helps automate scheduling tasks for specific events, such as automatically creating cleaning tasks after every guest checkout.
OwnerRez offers several ways to keep the cleaners posted about the latest housekeeping tasks:
- Custom Cleaner iCals
Using iCal integration, you can create a custom calendar for your property, export all your bookings there, and share the link with your cleaners.
- Portal Access
With login details, your cleaners can access your calendar, notes, and guest details based on the levels of access you define.
(This feature is available only if you use the Property Management Premium Feature.)
- Custom Trigger Emails
You can create a trigger email in OwnerRez to be sent out after each departure so that the cleaner knows about the latest check-outs.
- Third-Party Alerts
If you turn on Third-Party Alerts for each property and put in the cleaner’s name/email address, the system will email the assignee automatically each time a booking hits, gets cancelled, or changed.
- Stay Report
The stay report shows you who is arriving, departing, and staying. This report can be printed and sent to your cleaners as a schedule.
Guesty’s auto messaging enables you to send check-in instructions only if the Check-in Form has been completed. You can also use the filters to send your guests reminders to fill out the Check-in Form.
Guesty Locks Manager provides a contactless check-in experience. It allows you to access the automatic generation of unique codes and comprehensive real-time updates on lock statuses.
OwnerRez is integrated with eRentalLock and a couple of other door lock companies for self check-ins. It can automatically generate codes for your many different door locks, including numeric sequence locks and Wi-Fi locks – each time a booking is created.
However, you still need to inform the guest about the code. For that, you can create an email template within the system with your preferred trigger rule. Based on that, OwnerRez will automatically send an email to your guests to enter the property without your presence.
- Guesty offers its website builder to its users free of charge. However, Guesty charges a 3% commission of the income as its subscription fee.
- Guesty’s website reflects all reservations made through your website in your central calendar.
- Guesty allows you to sync your existing website with Guesty’s booking platform through Guesty’s Open API.
The website created by Guesty:
- Enables you to create customisable coupons to offer discounts to your customers. The user can set the minimum number of nights required, valid reservation dates, expiration of the coupon, and the number of times the coupon can be used.
- Allows customisation in a sense that features the listing of your choice on the homepage.
- Can be integrated with Google Analytics to keep track of your marketing efforts.
- Allows you to set up a Facebook Pixel to capture abandoned bookings directly through Facebook Ads.
OwnerRez offers hosted websites for its customers for an extra charge.
If you have one property, the fee for having a hosted website would be $10.00 per month, which may differ based on the number of your listings.
The website includes:
- A page per property
- A booking engine
- An availability calendar
- Your different rate plans for the season
- Images and videos
- Reviews
- Amenities
- Property location
- Google Vacation Rental Structured Data
Guesty allows you to:
- Incorporate mid-term stays into your rental company’s business model.
- Apply custom rate strategies to your listings, and Guesty will automatically adjust your prices and minimum night rules accordingly.
- Add your longer-term listings to Airbnb’s Monthly Stay programme along with other leading mid-term booking channels.
- Filter reports by the length of stay to tag extended stays within the Guesty admin to automate customised communication.
OwnerRez does not include an extended stay option. It means you cannot define different monthly and/or weekly rates.
Extending your guest stay for your direct bookings can be done manually by changing the dates, the charges, and payment collection.
If a booking is coming from an OTA and the guests stay longer in your properties, the change should be made on the OTA webpage directly, even if you use API integration.
Guesty’s 24/7 Guest Communication Services:
- Respond to your guests’ enquiries based on the urgency of incoming messages.
- Answer incoming enquiries during your team’s off-hours.
- Can adjust bookings at your multi-calendar based on availability, price and location.
- Prioritise your reviews, escalating the most urgent ones to your attention.
Through filled detailed questionnaires and brief onboarding phases, Guesty users hand over their guest communications to Guesty’s team of experts.
OwnerRez has an option in their check-out process called renter agreement. A signing link can also follow this agreement, which is highly recommended for bookings that come from different OTAs.
There is a suggested renter agreement, but you can create as many agreements as you want and customise them as a host.
After the signature link is used, you can ask your guests or a particular group of them to verify their contact information for you. This way, you will restore your guests’ details even when the booking comes from a listing site.
OwnerRez’s integration with Besty AI automates guest messaging and interactions.
Guesty offers a built-in feature called Guesty CRM that enables you to consolidate all guest and lead data in one place.
OwnerRez creates a profile for each of your guests regardless of the sources or channels they come from.
To have an organised CRM, you have the option to merge your contacts or team them up.
OwnerRez’s guest CRM shows you the guests’ history, including the number of their previous bookings with a summary, payments, contact information, and some tags.
By creating different tags, you can highlight some characteristics or ideas about the guests, such as great, never again, breakfast, extra bed, and rental boats. The reason for having tags on the CRM level and booking level is to help the owner. The owner will keep in mind the key points that may seem minor but have a considerable impact on their hosting quality to turn the guests into loyal ones or prevent an annoying person from returning to the property again.
Guesty’s task management can be used to set up recurring tasks for regular maintenance activities.
OwnerRez does not seem to have a particular feature dedicated to your maintenance issues. You can create manual tasks if needed.
Guesty has its native mobile app, which enables its users to manage their business on-the-go by offering:
- Unified Inbox
- Multi-Calendar
- Task Management Tools
Employees will be notified through the access they have to the Task Management feature of your native mobile app. The employee’s task management software is included in the main app with a limited portion of information accessible.
OwnerRez supports mobile phones and tablets. Their web version is mobile responsive, meaning that you can work with the system the same way you do from your PC. It can also be installed as an app on your mobile devices.
Guesty’s Multi-Unit feature allows you to group similar listings together. In this way, you can group your multi-units and single units to create a hotel complex and connect with SiteMinder and Booking.com. It also streamlines tasks and increases occupancy.
You can use OwnerRez internationally. They allow for multiple currencies, which can be set per property. You can have multiple different credit card processors to accept different currencies, as well.
Guesty enables task management by:
- Creating tasks after specific triggering events such as check-ins, check-outs, planned arrivals or departures and reservation confirmations. Triggers might be related to property availability such as first availability in a row or end of rentals.
After completion of certain tasks, other actions are activated automatically similar to the domino effect.
- Creating manual tasks and notifying the assignee.
- Using the Task Management feature of the Guesty mobile app.
OwnerRez can help you manage your housekeeping to some extent, but it needs manual interference and supervision (it will not be done automatically).
However, it is clear that some more extensive operations with more complex scheduling involved, including housekeeping, maintenance, and other support staff, need an advanced solution. To meet this, OwnerRez has partnered with ResortCleaning and VRScheduler.
Guesty’s Owner Portal brings transparency for the owners and is compatible with 15+ different languages.
It provides reports that detail each property’s yearly and monthly revenues, compare their performances to one another and highlight notable trends.
Guesty’s Owner Portal allows the owners to reserve a stay at their properties directly from the portal.
OwnerRez’s PM (Property Management) area gives you a wide variety of options, provided that you use the Premium plan. You can configure owners and assign the properties that you manage for those owners, including some settings like your commission.
You can grant portal access to owners to see your calendar. You can also generate monthly owner statements so that owners can see their booking earnings and the expenses you have charged them. In addition, your grand total for the month will be calculated.
Guesty’s online payment processor accumulates guests’ charges under their reservation, facilitates payments, and sends receipts to guests.
The auto-payments feature allows Guesty to charge guests according to your specified policies.
The auto-payments feature allows collecting each payment at the stage of your choice. However, one person on Capterra has mentioned the deficiency of this feature and Guesty’s inability to split payment.
Guesty’s payment processing feature collects all payment-related information, adding them automatically to the data on your dashboard, which is useful for charging repeat guests.
- You can directly collect payments. You can configure payment methods in the financial settings to accept credit cards, cheques, or PayPal.
- You have integration with Quickbooks for your accounting. All the invoices will get generated automatically using Quickbooks’s integration with all the data needed, such as taxes, add-ons, etc.
- You can generate partial payment links, meaning the system generates two invoices for you. It is also possible to set reminders for the guests, which will be sent to them via email.
- Regarding security deposits, OwnerRez offers its optional Damage Protection programme with an insurer called RentalGuardian. The other possible ways are either to hold a security deposit or to have a Refundable Damage Deposit or “RDD.” These can be created manually in the system.
- They offer API integrations with Payeezy, Authorize.net, Bambora, Lynnbrook, Stripe, and more payment processors for payment collection. You can check them out on their website.
- Guesty Reporting Tools create reports on specific aspects of your business from over 65 parameters, including check-in time, addresses, revenue and many more.
- You can add filters for more customised views and mark your most frequently used reports as favourites in a dedicated folder.
- You can export data as a CSV or create a dynamic link for live data updates.
- You can schedule when a report should be sent and to whom.
- OwnerRez offers various reports which can be exported to Excel/CSV files.
- The booking summary report helps you compare your booking percentage over different periods. You can also compare property by property.
- You can apply other filters like Airbnb or channel bookings only.
- You can also have a Line Item Pivot report where you have the list of all your bookings on a list with all the information you may want to check.
Guesty’s Yield Management feature sets custom rate strategies to adjust rates and minimum night stay rules and offers rate plans.
Using OwnerRez, you can define seasonal rates and spot rates. You can have the rates applied to only random days in a month, certain days repeatedly, or the entire month. The rate plans from one property can also be batch copied to a destination property.
Under rate rules, you can create last-minute discounts.
OwnerRez also offers integration with Beyond and PriceLabs for dynamic pricing.
The main way to reach Guesty is through live chat, accessible on all pages of their website. They are committed to being available 24/7 and responding to messages in a timely manner. Moreover, you can contact the partnerships and press team by email in five different languages. There is also a 5-week onboarding process which comes at an additional cost and is separate from the month-to-month subscription fee.
Once you sign up, the OwnerRez’s support team will reach out to schedule a free 1-hour 1:1 call.
OwnerRez has a ProConnect (Concierge) Setup apart from support documents and asking for help.
The OwnerRez team will go through your account’s onboarding process entirely by themselves based on the information you provide for them. At some points, like the part for website setup, your presence will be needed.
There would be a charge for this service based on the number of your properties. The service will only be available for your existing listings, not the ones you add later on. It is also good to know that Concierge Setup is not an express service, and it might take 3 to 6 weeks to complete.
Guesty is integrated with Quickbooks and Xero for facilitating trust accounting.
Sage Intacct is another integration you need to have if your vacation rental business is considered an enterprise-size company.
Guesty does not include a built-in accounting module.
OwnerRez offers a Line Item Pivot where you have the list of all your bookings on a list with all the information you may want to check. You can see your booking data, rent price, cleaning, surcharges and discounts, taxes, host fees, charge totals, transaction totals, and PM totals. You can export these to Excel, as well.
Remember that this information will be generated for each booking, not for your organisation, like the monthly profit report in total.
However, OwnerRez can generate monthly owner statements to see their booking earnings and the expenses you have charged them. In addition, the total of the month will be calculated.
OwnerRez integrates with Quickbooks for your bookkeeping tasks.
Having PM services (calculating commissions, generating owner statements and recording expenses) and integrating QuickBooks require an extra fee to be paid to OwnerRez on your base plan.
Guesty’s unified inbox lets you receive emails and enquiries through booking channels.
Archiving and filtering capabilities, and also Saved Views are useful. The most effective Saved Views suggested by Guesty are:
- Potential guests
- Guests checking in that day
- Assignee
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OwnerRez does not have a Unified Inbox beyond Airbnb messaging. However, you can have your Airbnb and Vrbo messages sent to OwnerRez automatically, and you can answer them back from your OwnerRez account directly.
You can have your enquiries forwarded into OwnerRez from Vrbo or TripAdvisor, but your replies will be sent out as a traditional email to the guest.
Some pre-set email templates can be sent out to guests automatically using the triggers. They can be turned off for the bookings that you may choose from your list. You can also create your email templates based on your needs.
Pricing
Guesty’s pricing strategy is different from most of its competitors, and the pricing information is not publicly available. However, it is a commission-based pricing model, so you will be charged for bookings made through the software. If you want to have a more accurate estimation of how much your costs would be, you may schedule a conversation with the Guesty sales team.
OwnerRez pricing starts from $40 (31 GBP) per month. The more properties you have, the less you will pay. However, the default plan only includes Channel Management and Digital Signatures. If you want to have the Property Management feature (to calculate commissions, generate owner statements, and record expenses), QuickBooks integration, hosted website, and SMS messaging, you need to include them in your base plan and pay extra for each. OwnerRez does not have a free version, but they offer a 14-day free trial.
Guesty vs OwnerRez: Which Property Management System to Choose?
Guesty is one of the most popular PMS providers in the vacation rental industry. It is an established brand with many branches all around the world. Guesty has a different pricing strategy compared to most of its competitors. The pricing model is commission-based, which means you will be charged on the bookings made through the software. This naturally increases the amount of commission you have to pay to Guesty while managing and scaling your short-term rental business. There are also other charges such as the initial set-up fee. Guesty lacks built-in trust accounting, cleaning management, and maintenance management. Guesty does not have any specific module to accumulate guest’s data in a guest CRM. However, Guesty is famous for having one of the most user-friendly platforms in the industry.
OwnerRez will help you manage your properties as there are lots of features available for each aspect of managing a short-rental business. There are also so many integrations that can be used. However, you need to keep in mind that, to have some of the features, you need to pay an extra amount per property to have them activated. OwnerRez can be an excellent solution for small and large multi-location companies and those who work with Vrbo, Booking.com, and Airbnb.
We are committed to ensuring that all our comparison articles are factually entirely correct and accurate. If you have spotted anything that you feel is wrong or misleading in this article, we’d appreciate hearing from you.
