Guesty vs Hostfully
This article examines Guesty vs Hostfully by concentrating on the main features that a hospitality management software should offer. The data has been collected from Guesty’s and Hostfully’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, Hostfully has a rating of 4.3, with the highest score for Customer Service.
Trustpilot introduces Hostfully as an Excellent tool with a 4.3 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.
Hostfully can completely automate your booking process, no matter if the booking is coming from OTAs or direct through your website.
Through the Hostfully dashboard, you can see all received bookings and from there, you can manually or automatically assign the reservation to an agent that will be responsible for it.
Once assigned, the booking moves over Hostfully’s Pipeline management, which gives you a general overview of all bookings. This includes the booking’s origin, the guest’s current stage within the process, and their payment status. Through the Pipeline, you can also take actions on these bookings, such as send a quote, place a hold, mark as booked, show alternative options, change payment status, send messages, close the lead, and more.
Guest Information
A pre-arrival form can be automatically sent to collect information about all your guests, including their names, real email, phone numbers, information about their trip, and government IDs. You can also customise this form to request any additional information you might need.
Agreement
Rental agreements can be automated and digitally signed with Hostfully proprietary digital signature features, no matter if the booking is coming from an OTA or directly.
Upsells and Payments
Hostfully direct booking system also allows you to automatically offer upsell services such as early check-ins, or late check-outs, mid-stay cleanings, and any other services you’d like to offer.
Payment can also be automated through Stripe, Paypal or VacationRentPayment, and Hostfully allows you to set a rate multiplier on a channel-basis, so you can offset OTA commissions and make sure you’re getting paid what you want.
If the guest pays in an alternative form, i.e. wire transfer, venmo, cheque or cash), the host can manually mark the reservation as paid and keep total control of payments.
It is also quite clear whether the guests have paid or not in the software. The Pipeline will colour code each reservation based on payment status. If you need to collect additional payment from the guest, the PMS will trigger an automated message to the guest with a secure payment form, allowing the guest to complete the remainder payment. You can also manually click to trigger “Payment Balance Request” reminders to the guest.
Security Deposit
Security deposits can be fully automated, and refunds can also be provided directly from the Hostfully platform.
Hostfully has tools in place within the Pipeline to show whether the guest has completed the pre-arrival form, as well as provided an electronic signature on the hosts rental agreement.
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.
Hostfully has built its channel manager allowing hosts to connect with many OTAs directly without the use of third-party channel managers. Among Hostfully’s direct API integrations are Airbnb, Vrbo (Preferred Partner), Booking.com (Premier Partner), TripAdvisor, HomeToGo, Tripvillas, Yonder, GoLightly, and more.
Hostfully also integrates with channel managers such as Rentals United and NextPax.
By using Hostfully, you can:
- Import all your listings from Airbnb and avoid manual work.
- List your properties on the Hostfully channel to increase direct bookings.
- Use the rate multiplier feature to offset commissions.
- Sync pictures, description, amenities, prices, and real-time availability.
- Automatically create listings on OTAs.
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.
By using Hostfully, you can choose between their own cleaning/task portal or use the cleaning/management integrated partners:
- Breezeway
- Properly
- VRscheduler
- EZcare
- TurnoverBNB
Hostfully cleaning/task portal can help you:
- Automate the creation of tasks, such as greeting or check-out cleanings for every booking.
- Automate emails or text messages to all your cleaners and maintenance staff.
- Provide access to a service provider portal with a calendar, tasks, and notes per property.
- Get to know when a task is completed directly on the Hostfully main calendar.
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.
Hostfully is fully integrated with home automation software, such as PointCentral, RemoteLock, Lynx, and Operto.
By using these integrations, door codes can be automatically generated for all bookings and automatically sent to guests upon different parameters set in the trigger’s section.
If you’d like to share the door codes in a more elegant way, the Hostfully Digital Guidebooks are fully integrated with Hostfully PMS, allowing you to generate a secured link guidebook for each of your reservations, including guest’s first and last name, check-in and check-out dates, and of course, the door code they will need to use to get into the property.
- 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.
- Hostfully offers free direct booking websites to all PMS clients.
- Hostfully direct booking website provides a search bar, so guests can find their perfect property.
- Property pages are completely synced with the Hostfully platform and will auto-populate your property information with pictures, descriptions, amenities, pricing, availability, and reviews.
- You can add customisable header, footer, and Meta using HTML and CSS.
- Hostfully enables you to white-label the website with your logo, domain, and headlines.
- You can track your performance on Google Analytics.
- Their website offers an upselling feature.
- Hostfully provides search widgets, booking widgets, and calendar widgets which can be integrated with any platform, including WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, and others.
- Hostfully also provides a discount code feature, which allows you to create codes to offer discounts, track marketing campaigns, or even create special promotions.
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.
Hostfully is designed for short-term rentals and can accommodate long stays including two payments from the guest, as well as discounts for longer stays. Hostfully does not support automatic recurring monthly payments or lease management.
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.
Hostfully is widely known for its digital guidebooks, providing one of the leading guidebooks in the industry.
Completely integrated with the Hostfully PMS, Hostfully guidebooks allow you to pull name, check-in and check-out dates and door codes automatically, providing a seamless experience to the guest.
In Hostfully Guidebooks, you can add pictures of the property, welcome messages, check-in essentials, access information, directions, parking information, house manuals, amenities, and local attractions/ recommendations.
Setting up a guidebook is a 30-minute process, and the hosts can build the guidebooks up incrementally over time.
Besides the Guidebooks, Hostfully PMS has a lot of ready-to-use email templates, SMS templates, and trigger rules. The link to the property guidebook can also be automatically included in the templates. To see example guidebooks, click here.
You craft automated guest messages triggered by preset dates/times/events, such as check-in, during stay, and check-out.
All Hostfully communications are GDPR-compliant.
Guesty offers a built-in feature called Guesty CRM that enables you to consolidate all guest and lead data in one place.
Hostfully’s Property Management Platform also has a built-in CRM, separated in two different sections:
- Pipeline: The Pipeline was designed to allow you to manage all your leads, enquiries, current bookings and past bookings. Through the Pipeline, you can visually see payment status, source, check-in and check-out dates, guest name, price, and number of people in each reservation. Besides that, the Pipeline can tell you where the guest is in the booking process. Stages are: Quote, Hold, Booked, and Staying. From the Pipeline, you can also open a reservation and easily manage it. Lastly, the Pipeline allows you to filter reservations by Status, Channels, Properties, Agents, and also sort them by the most recent or arrival date. A search option is also provided, making it easy to find any specific details on any reservations.
- Customers: The customer section was designed to allow the property manager to find all past, current, and future guests, and all reservations related to them.
In addition, Hostfully has an integration with MailChimp to export all guest details for re-marketing purposes.
Guesty’s task management can be used to set up recurring tasks for regular maintenance activities.
Most of the clients on Hostfully are using one of the integrated partners to manage cleaning/maintenance. Hostfully PMS also provides you with a maintenance portal.
Each service provider will receive access to their own service portal, where they can see all jobs assigned to them and either decline or accept those jobs within their portal, which is then communicated to the platform. They can also access a maintenance calendar and notes.
Through the templates and triggers section, property managers can send automated emails and text messages to all service providers.
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.
Hostfully has provided a mobile app for hosts.
With this mobile app, you can:
- View all your reservations at a glance on a single screen.
- Access detailed information on pricing, occupancy specifics, payment confirmations, and more by simply clicking on any reservation.
- Gain a comprehensive overview of upcoming check-ins and check-outs, and efficiently handle incoming leads.
- Track requested properties, stay durations, and revenue earned.
- Read and respond to guest messages using either the system’s predefined templates or your personalised quotes.
- Stay updated with timely notifications, whether it’s task updates or messages from your guests.
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.
Using Hostfully, you can manage properties in different countries and currencies.
You can also group properties by tags, making it easy for you to filter or retrieve these properties using the Hostfully open API.
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.
Hostfully defines user “roles” to provide access control to particular parts of the system for the people managing a specific area of your business.
Hostfully also empowers you to send all your check-in information through their template and triggers section, based on the status of a reservation, or payment status.
Once a booking is created, Hostfully can automate the creation of cleanings, maintenance, or any other order you’d like to set up.
You also can create a profile for each of the service providers and give them access to the Hostfully service providers portal. That way, they will have access to all pending and completed orders and real-time calendar view of all properties they’re assigned to.
Hostfully integrates with Zapier, an online automation tool that connects Hostfully to 400+ software such as Gmail, Trello, Slack, Mailchimp, Salesforce, Hubspot, Google Sheet, and many more.
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.
Hostfully provides vacation rental management companies (VRMCs) with a way to manage calendars collaboratively with the property owners they represent. It allows each property owner to access the “Owner Portal.” This is a part of Hostfully’s site where owners can co-manage the availability of their rental and get informed about the status of their calendars. VRMCs can also publish financial statements to owners, to keep owners informed about the monthly revenue, expenses, commissions, taxes, and more.
Some key features include the ability to:
- Notify owners of every new booking.
- Provide multiple email addresses for the above notifications.
- Allow/disallow the owner to block dates on their calendar.
- Decide whether the Agency or the Owner will collect and remit tax(es). This will affect the Due Agency and Due Owner amounts in the financial report accordingly.
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.
Hostfully can completely streamline your payment process with different payment processors:
- Stripe
- PayPal
- VRP (VacationRentPayment)
These payment processors can be used for direct bookings and channels that allow you to be the merchant of record.
As part of the check-out process, Hostfully can offer:
- Split payments
- Upsells
- Digital rental agreement signing
- Payment collection
- Payments processing with custom security deposits
You can also take payments outside the system (back transfer, Venmo, Cash, Zelle, etc, and easily add a new payment record in the order).
- 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.
Hostfully reports can be created based on dates, properties, and owners.
You can create reports for:
- Bookings
- Payments
- Check-ins and check-outs
Hostfully has also launched the Extended Data Report, which allows you to export all the data you have related to all bookings, properties, channels, etc., to an Excel Spreadsheet. This way, you can have all your data in one single report.
All reports can be exported to PDF and Excel.
Guesty’s Yield Management feature sets custom rate strategies to adjust rates and minimum night stay rules and offers rate plans.
Hostfully has integration with the top three dynamic pricing companies in the vacation rental industry:
- PriceLabs
- Wheelhouse
- Beyond
All dynamic prices can be synced with your direct booking website, as well as any other channels you’re integrated to.
You can also set pricing periods and apply them to specific seasons, holidays, conferences, or special events.
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.
If you already have properties created on Airbnb, Hostfully is able to import all your listings to the system, avoiding any manual work.
Every Hostfully client has access to an onboarding manager that will be able to schedule 1:1 meetings.
During your onboarding process, your designated onboarding manager will assist you with:
- Importing your properties from other channels to which Hostfully is connected
- Configuring pricing
- Setting up your payment processor
- Adding your calendar Reservations
- Automating messaging
- Setting up the booking channels
Additionally, Hostfully provides unlimited customer support 24/7.
Additional training and onboarding sessions are also available upon request and might be charged separately.
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.
Hostfully has a direct integration with Quickbooks.
Besides that, Hostfully also integrates with Zapier and allows you to connect with many other accounting software.
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
With Hostfully’s Unified Inbox, you can stay in touch with your guests without the need to log in and out of various OTAs. You can chat with them via SMS, WhatsApp, email, or messaging platforms. Additionally, you can create pre-written templates and set triggers to automatically send them to your guests.
You’ll be able to filter your messages by date, guest name, and other parameters.
Hostfully does not do any web scraping, but rather only builds its connection via their approved partner API.
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.
Hostfully has three different pricing plans: Starter, Pro, and Premium. On monthly subscriptions, Hostfully charges a one-time implementation fee of 315 GBP, which is automatically waived on annual subscriptions. There is also a 10% discount for annual payments.
Team Access Roles, and Digital Signature features are not included in the Starter plan. The Starter plan supports up to four properties and costs 86 GBP on a monthly basis. The Pro plan supports up to 19 properties and costs 157 GBP on a monthly basis. The Premium plan starts from 205 GBP for 20 properties, and you pay additionally for additional properties. The 21st property costs 10 GBP and the price goes down as you increase the number of properties. Additional properties can cost as low as 5 GBP if you have more than 100, or even 2.5 GBP if you have more than 1000.
Guesty vs Hostfully: 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. However, Guesty is famous for having one of the most user-friendly platforms in the industry.
Hostfully is currently recognised as one of the best PMSes in the industry. Their PMS product won the VRMB All-Around Vacation Rental Software, and their digital guidebook was also recognised by Software Advice (sister company to Gartner’s magic quadrant). Hostfully is known for its clear interface, pipeline management, reliable direct integration with OTAs, many integrations with best-in-class vacation rental systems, and also its affordability when compared to top PMSes.
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.
