Contents9
- The real difference is not size. It is how many hands are on the diary.
- Mixed rooms are the second problem, and they break most software
- Long stays, contractors and the invoice that is not a card
- Meals, bar and everything that is not the room
- Phone bookings and walk-ins still exist
- When you genuinely do not need a guest house reservation system yet
- What to ask on the demo call
- Where Stayvieo fits
- FAQ
A guest house reservation system holds your rooms, rates and bookings in one place and keeps every site you sell on in step with it. The useful question at guest house size is not which one has the most features — it is which one survives more than one person touching the diary. That is the line a guest house crosses and a bed and breakfast usually does not, and almost nothing sold as accommodation software is described in those terms.
The real difference is not size. It is how many hands are on the diary.
A four-room B&B is one person, or two. Whoever takes the booking is the person who knows about it, and a paper diary works because there is only one copy and only one pair of hands reaching for it.
A guest house is where that stops being true. There is someone covering reception on a Saturday, a cleaner who needs to know what is turning over, an owner who takes a phone call while out, and possibly a partner who also answers the phone. The moment two people can accept a booking, a single diary is not a record any more — it is a race.
This is worth being precise about, because it is not a gradual thing that gets slowly worse. It is a step change. With one person, the diary is always right, because nothing enters it except through them. With two, it is right only when both of them happen to be standing in the same room, and every booking taken away from that room is a gap until someone writes it down. The failure does not announce itself either: you find out three weeks later when two people arrive for the same twin.
So the first thing to test on any system is not a feature. It is whether your part-time receptionist can see and take a booking from wherever she is, without ringing you to check.
Mixed rooms are the second problem, and they break most software
Guest houses accumulate. A Victorian house gets converted, then extended, then a room in the loft becomes ensuite while the one next to it still shares a bathroom. The result is a room list that no software designer has ever imagined: two ensuite doubles, a twin that can also be a double, a single with a shared bathroom, and a family room that sleeps four but is often sold to two.
Hotel software assumes room types: a block of identical rooms sold as one product. Yours are nearly all one of a kind, and the ones that are not are the ones that cause trouble. Two identical twins is the specific case where free calendar sync stops being available to you at all — we have set that out in detail in our guide to what a small B&B actually needs, and it applies here with more force, because a guest house is more likely to have a pair of anything.
Test this on the demo. Ask them to set up a room that sells as a double or a twin, a single with a shared bathroom priced per person, and a family room with a different rate for two people than for four. If the answer involves creating extra room types as a workaround, your availability count will be wrong on every channel you are mapped to, and you will find out the expensive way.
Long stays, contractors and the invoice that is not a card
This one barely exists for B&Bs and matters a great deal for guest houses.
A meaningful share of guest house business is not leisure. It is a contractor on a four-week job, a nurse on a placement, a family between houses, a company booking three rooms every Tuesday to Thursday. That business is steady, it fills the weeks that leisure does not, and it is worth protecting.
It also does not behave like a weekend booking. It needs a weekly or monthly rate rather than a nightly one, it often needs invoicing to a company at the end of the month rather than a card taken at booking, and it needs a purchase order number on the invoice or the company will not pay it.
Most accommodation software handles this badly, because it was designed around a card and a two-night stay. Ask specifically: can I set a rate that changes at seven nights and again at twenty-eight? Can I raise an invoice to a company rather than charge a card? Can I put a reference number on it? If the salesperson starts talking about exporting to a spreadsheet, that is a no.
Meals, bar and everything that is not the room
Guest houses are much more likely than B&Bs to serve an evening meal, hold a licence, or run a small bar. That creates a second kind of money: charges that accrue during the stay and settle at the end.
Run that on a separate till and you get two problems. The obvious one is reconciliation — somebody matching till receipts to rooms at the end of the week. The less obvious one is that the guest experiences it as two businesses: they settle the bar separately, or worse, you chase them at checkout for a bottle of wine three nights ago that nobody wrote down.
What you want is for a drink or a dinner to go onto the room and appear on one bill at the end. That is a till that posts to the folio rather than a till that sits beside it — the distinction is worth asking about directly, because plenty of systems claim both and integrate neither.
Phone bookings and walk-ins still exist
Every piece of software in this category is sold on its channel manager, and that is fair enough — the listing sites are where the volume is. But a guest house still takes a meaningful number of bookings by phone, by email, and occasionally from someone standing in the hall with a bag.
The test is whether those land in the same place as everything else, immediately, without a second step. If a phone booking has to be typed in later, later is where double bookings live. If your system makes direct bookings feel like more work than channel bookings, you will quietly start preferring the channels — and the channels charge commission, which is the most expensive habit in the business.
When you genuinely do not need a guest house reservation system yet
The honest answer for some readers is not yet.
If you have five or six rooms, all different, one person takes every booking, you sell on one channel plus the phone, and everyone pays by card on arrival, a diary and a calendar link will hold. There is no prize for buying software early.
You have crossed the line when any one of these is true:
More than one person can take a booking — this is the real one;
you have two or more rooms of the same type, so free calendar sync is not available to you;
you sell on three or more channels;
you take long stays that need weekly rates or company invoices;
you serve meals or drinks that should go on the room bill;
you have had one double booking, or one near miss you caught by luck.
That last one is the honest trigger for most people. Care and vigilance work right up until the Saturday they do not.
What to ask on the demo call
Set up a room that sells as a double or a twin, and a single priced per person. Watch them do it live.
Show me two identical rooms staying in step across Booking.com and Airbnb at once.
Set a weekly rate for a four-week contractor booking, and raise an invoice to a company with a reference number on it.
Put a bar tab on a room and show me the guest's bill at checkout.
Two staff, two devices — show me a booking taken on one appearing on the other.
What is the total first-year cost, including setup, migration, training and per-channel fees?
Who answers when something breaks at eight on a Saturday morning?
Get the answers to six and seven in writing. The rest you should watch them do rather than hear them describe. On cost, the charges that appear after signing are the ones worth pinning down before you commit, not after.
Where Stayvieo fits
We should declare an interest: we make one of these systems, and we run properties on it ourselves, which is why this piece is about contractors and bar tabs rather than about dashboards.
Start with the test this whole piece turns on. Everyone who needs the diary gets their own login on their own device — you, whoever is covering reception on a Saturday, the cleaner who only needs to see what is turning over — and you decide what each of them can see. A booking taken at the desk is on your phone before the guest has finished spelling their name. The Thanington Hotel in Canterbury has not had a double booking since the day they went live.
Then the boring part, done properly. Pricing is on rooms rather than on features: £29 a month up to ten rooms, £39 up to twenty, which is where most guest houses sit — every module included, no commission on your bookings, no fee per booking. Setup and onboarding are included and we move your existing bookings across for you, so the first-year total you were told to ask for further up this page is twelve months of that and nothing else from us. Card payments settle through Stripe directly into your own account, so your money never passes through us at any point.
The honest way to test any of this is to stop reading and go and do it. There is a 14-day free trial, with no card to start — long enough to build your actual room list, twin-that-is-also-a-double included, put a bar tab on a room, and find out whether it survives a Saturday. If it does not, you have lost a fortnight and nothing else.
If you would rather read first, the guest house software page sets out what it does, pricing shows the whole cost on one page, and the channel manager page covers how the listing sites stay in step.
FAQ
What is a guest house reservation system? Software that holds your rooms, rates and bookings in one place and keeps every site you sell on in step with it, so the same room cannot be sold twice. At guest house size the part that matters most is shared access — more than one person can see and take a booking without ringing anyone to check.
Do I need a booking system for a guest house? Not always. With five or six rooms, one person taking every booking and one sales channel, a diary will hold. You need a system once more than one person can take a booking, or you have two rooms of the same type, or you are selling on three or more channels.
What is the difference between a guest house and a B&B? In practice, size and service rather than anything legal. Guest houses tend to be larger, are more likely to serve evening meals or hold a licence, and are more likely to have staff. That last point is the one that changes what software you need.
Can a guest house system handle rooms that are all different? It should. Ask to see a room set up that sells as either a double or a twin, and a single priced per person. Systems built for larger hotels assume blocks of identical rooms and force you into workarounds that corrupt your availability count.
Can I take long-stay and contractor bookings? You should be able to set a rate that changes at seven and twenty-eight nights, and raise an invoice to a company with a reference number rather than taking a card. Ask about this specifically — it is common guest house business and it is handled poorly by software designed around weekend leisure stays.
How much should a guest house booking system cost? Small properties are commonly quoted per room per month, which is what makes the sums awkward in the six-to-twenty range. Compare on total first-year cost including setup, migration and per-channel fees. Stayvieo starts at £29 a month with everything included.
Can staff use it as well as me? They should be able to, on their own login and their own device, with you deciding what each person can see. This is the single most useful thing a system does at guest house size and it is worth testing on the demo rather than taking on trust.
