Contents13
- Start with your week, not the feature list
- The seven things worth checking properly
- 1. How fast does availability sync — and what happens when it fails?
- 2. The calendar you'll actually live in
- 3. Payments, deposits and the awkward no-show
- 4. The bookings that break systems
- 5. Rate plans and restrictions
- 6. What it does with your guest data
- 7. Getting in — and getting out
- The costs that aren't on the pricing page
- Five questions vendors don't expect
- How to run a trial that tells you something
- What "fit" actually means
Choose a hotel PMS by working out which three or four jobs it has to do brilliantly for your property, then testing candidates on exactly those — not on feature lists. For most independent hotels, B&Bs and guest houses, those jobs are: keeping availability accurate across booking sites, making the daily front-desk routine fast, taking payments cleanly, and showing you what the business is actually doing. Everything else is negotiable.
Below is the checklist we'd use if we were on your side of the table.
Start with your week, not the feature list
Before looking at any software, write down what actually consumes your time. Not what a hotel should need — what yours does.
Where do bookings come from, and in what proportion?
What do you re-key by hand, and how often?
What went wrong in the last three months, and what caused it?
Who else touches the system — housekeeping, a part-time weekend person, a co-owner?
What do you check on your phone at 9pm?
That list is your specification. A system that handles it well and lacks nine features you'll never open is a better fit than one that does everything adequately.
It's worth being honest about the last question in particular. If the thing you check at 9pm is tomorrow's arrivals, then the arrivals screen matters more than the analytics dashboard you'll open twice a year. Most demos are structured around the dashboard.
The seven things worth checking properly
1. How fast does availability sync — and what happens when it fails?
Every channel manager claims two-way sync. The question isn't whether it syncs; it's what happens on the day a booking site's API has a bad afternoon.
Ask to see the error log. A good system tells you loudly when an update didn't land — a visible alert, not a silent retry that leaves you sold out on your own website and available on Booking.com. Ask specifically:
How long between a booking landing and every other channel closing?
If a rate push fails, does anyone find out? Who, and how?
Can I see a log of what was sent, when, and whether it was accepted?
Then ask which connections are direct certified connections and which are routed through a third party. It changes both reliability and who you call when something breaks.
2. The calendar you'll actually live in
You will spend more hours in this one screen than in every other part of the system combined. Judge it the way you'd judge a kitchen — by whether the things you do forty times a day are one movement or four.
On the demo, ask to do these yourself rather than watch:
Move a booking to a different room for the same dates
Extend a stay by one night
Split a five-night stay across two rooms
Find a guest by surname when you can't remember the date
Take a walk-in and get them checked in
If any of those takes more than a few seconds once you know where things are, multiply that friction by every day for the next five years.
3. Payments, deposits and the awkward no-show
Card handling is where small properties lose money quietly. Three things to press on:
Card details never touching your own systems. Cards should live in the provider's vault as tokens, with the payment form hosted by them. This isn't only a security question — it determines how much PCI paperwork lands on your desk each year. Ask which PCI SAQ your properties end up completing. A vendor who can answer that question crisply has thought about it; one who says "we're PCI compliant" and stops has not.
OTA virtual cards. If you take bookings through Booking.com, Expedia or Agoda on their virtual card model, the system should show you the card's activation date and available balance against the reservation, and prompt you on the right day. Charging early fails; charging late risks the card expiring. This is one of the most common sources of unrecovered revenue at properties under fifty rooms, and it's rarely mentioned on a features page.
What happens on a no-show. Ask how the system records a retained deposit when the guest doesn't arrive. VAT is due on a deposit when you receive it, and a prepayment you keep can't simply be reclassified as an out-of-scope cancellation charge afterwards — HMRC's position in Notice 709/3 is that the VAT you've accounted for only reduces to the extent you actually refund. Plenty of systems post no-shows in a way that quietly understates VAT. It's a dull question that will save you an unpleasant conversation.
4. The bookings that break systems
Standard bookings are easy. What separates a system that fits a real property from one that doesn't is how it handles the messy ones:
Groups and blocks. Can you hold six rooms for a wedding under one reference, with a release date, a rooming list, and the choice of billing to one master account or to each room? If you take weddings, tours or corporate blocks, this alone will decide the shortlist.
Long stays. A contractor staying six weeks is taxed differently from day 29 under the reduced-value rule. Does the system know that, or will you be adjusting invoices by hand?
Split and moved stays mid-booking, without cancelling and re-creating.
Extras with their own VAT treatment — breakfast, dinner, parking, a bottle of wine — and capacity limits on them, so you don't sell nine 8am breakfasts when the kitchen does six.
5. Rate plans and restrictions
Ask whether you can build rate plans from one master rate — a non-refundable at minus ten percent, a bed-and-breakfast rate, a winter midweek offer — and change them all by changing the parent.
Then check the restrictions list properly. Minimum length of stay and stop-sell are universal. The two that are often missing are maximum length of stay and closed to departure, and they're the ones you need on a bank holiday weekend when you're trying not to lose a three-night stay to a one-nighter landing in the middle of it.
6. What it does with your guest data
Two obligations pull in opposite directions here, and a system that only understands one of them will put you in the wrong.
The Immigration (Hotel Records) Order 1972 requires you to record the name and nationality of every guest aged sixteen or over — not just the person who booked. For guests who aren't British, Irish or Commonwealth citizens, you also need passport or identity document details, and their next destination before they leave. Those records must be kept for at least twelve months and be available for inspection. It applies to any premises providing lodging for reward, so guest houses and B&Bs are covered too, not just hotels.
Meanwhile UK GDPR gives guests the right to ask for their data, and to ask you to erase it. Erasure doesn't override the 1972 Order — but a system with a single blunt "delete guest" button will happily destroy records you're legally required to hold.
So the question for a vendor is specific: can it capture details per guest rather than per booking, and can it honour an erasure request while preserving the statutory register? A surprising number of systems built for a global market can't do the first one at all.
7. Getting in — and getting out
The single biggest reason properties stay on software they dislike is fear of losing the forward book. Ask, before you sign:
Who does the migration, what exactly comes across (forward bookings, guest history, rates, notes), and what doesn't?
How long does the changeover take, and what do you do about bookings that land during it?
Can you export everything yourself, at any time, without asking support?
That last one is the tell. A vendor comfortable with you leaving is a vendor confident you won't want to.
The costs that aren't on the pricing page
Headline subscription is increasingly not the whole bill. When you compare, work out the annual total including:
Per-booking fees. A one percent fee on a property turning over £12,000 a month is £120 — often more than the subscription itself.
Setup, onboarding and migration charges, which range from nothing to four figures.
Per-channel connection fees, charged either once or monthly.
Payment processing, and whether you can bring your own provider or must use theirs.
Modules priced per room per month — these compound quickly at thirty rooms.
Contract length and notice period. Ask how you cancel. If the answer involves booking a call with someone, take it as information.
We've written a fuller breakdown of what this comes to in practice in What Does a Hotel PMS Actually Cost in the UK?.
Five questions vendors don't expect
Demos are rehearsed. These aren't:
"Can I have the login of a property like mine and call them?" Not a curated case study — an actual owner, at an actual property, at your size.
"What's your average first-response time on support, and who answers at 8am on a Saturday?" Across every mid-market system, the most consistent complaint in user reviews isn't missing features — it's support quality after onboarding. Features get copied; service doesn't.
"Show me something the system doesn't do well." Anyone who can't answer this either doesn't know the product or isn't being straight with you.
"What broke last month?" Every system has incidents. What matters is whether they'll tell you and whether there's a status page you can check yourself.
"Who owns the company, and where is it registered?" You're handing over your guest data and your forward book. It's a reasonable thing to know.
How to run a trial that tells you something
A fortnight of clicking around teaches you very little. Do this instead:
Load one real week. Take a busy week from last year and rebuild it — the group, the split stay, the OTA booking with a virtual card, the guest who extended. If the system handles your worst week, it'll handle the rest.
Let someone else use it. Give it to whoever covers the desk on your day off, with no training, and watch. You are not the hardest user to satisfy — the part-time weekend person is.
Test it on your phone, standing up. That's where half of it gets used.
Send one support ticket during the trial and time the reply. You are buying a relationship, not a screen.
What "fit" actually means
Nobody wins at choosing a PMS by finding the one with the most features. You win by finding the one that makes your particular week shorter, and then by not having to think about it again.
If that turns out to be someone else's software, that's a good outcome — a property running the right system is better for everyone, including us. But if you're a hotel, B&B, guest house or holiday let running the place yourself, and the list above sounds like it was written about your Tuesday, we'd be glad to walk you through how Stayvieo handles it on your own property, with your own rooms and rates loaded in.
No commission on your bookings, no lock-in, and a person on the end of the phone. You can see what it costs before you talk to anyone.
