Tired of juggling multiple tasks when managing your short-term rental properties? If so, you might want to read this Guesty review – they’ve got an “all-in-one” platform that promises to make rental management a breeze.
But, with stiff competition from other applications and two near-identical products, does Guesty have what it takes to stay competitive?
Compare vacation rental software options with our spreadsheet.
View spreadsheetThat’s why we’ve put together this comprehensive review. We’ll cover everything from Guesty’s features to its pricing structure, so you can make an informed decision about whether or not it’s right for you and your rental properties. So, let’s dive in!
What Is Guesty?
Guesty is an all-in-one platform designed to simplify the process of managing short-term rental properties. With it, hosts can manage multiple rental properties from a single dashboard. Hosts can synchronize their listings across multiple booking sites, like Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com, so they don’t have to manually update each one. They also provide tools for automating tasks such as guest communication, cleaning, and maintenance.
Who created Guesty?
Guesty was founded by twin brothers Amiad and Koby Soto in 2013. The brothers had experience managing their own short-term rental properties and recognized a need for a platform that could simplify the day-to-day process.
Ten years later, Guesty has grown rapidly, attracting thousands of users and securing millions in funding. And today, it’s considered one of the top rental management platforms on the market, rubbing elbows with the likes of companies like Uplisting and Lodgify.
Guesty Features
Here is a short list of some of Guesty’s most popular and unique features:
- Multi-platform integration – Guesty allows hosts to manage their listings across multiple booking platforms, including Airbnb, Booking.com, and more.
- Automation – Tools to automate tasks such as guest communication, cleaning, and maintenance, helping hosts save time and reduce the risk of errors.
- Unified inbox: With a unified inbox, hosts can manage all of their guest communication in one place, making it easy to stay organized and responsive.
- Multi-Calendar – Comprehensive view of all upcoming bookings and synchronization across multiple booking platforms, which can help hosts avoid double bookings and stay on top of availability.
- Accounting tools – Manage invoices, track expenses, and generate financial reports all in one place. This can be a huge time-saver if you’re managing multiple properties and must keep track of a lot of financial data.
- Mobile app – Allows hosts to manage their properties remotely – especially useful for hosts with properties in multiple locations.
Whether you’re managing a single property or multiple listings across multiple platforms, Guesty offers a comprehensive suite of features.
But which features are unique? Which features separate Guesty’s platform from its competitors?
We’ve cherry-picked the three features that come up most frequently in user reviews, features that aren’t necessarily unique — but features that have become synonymous with Guesty.
Multi-Calendar
Guesty’s multi-calendar is the most highly praised tool amongst users because it allows them to manage all of their reservations from a single location. It’s highly customizable, and you can see all of your upcoming bookings across all of your listings. And it updates itself as bookings come in! This means that you can effectively avoid awkward double bookings, keep availability up-to-date, and stay on top of your portfolio with ease.
Moreover, the multi-calendar synchronizes across multiple booking platforms (e.g., Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com). And it comes with a surprising level of customization, letting you tweak display options and only see the information you want to see at any given time — a nice feature if you manage a large portfolio of properties.
Note: We’ve seen several cases where hosts complain about Guesty’s integration with Vrbo, but we had no issue connecting with the listing site. We’reI’m not sure if we were just lucky or if Guesty’s team has fixed whatever issue hosts were running into.
Unified Inbox
The unified inbox is a feature designed to help users stay organized and respond to guest messages more efficiently. This tool combines all of a host’s communication channels, including listing sites, email, and text, into one centralized inbox. Hosts can easily respond to guest inquiries, messages, and reviews from one location without switching between different platforms.
This feature could easily be boxed and sold on its own. If you have any experience with CRM (customer relationship management) software, you’ll recognize the huge value of a one-stop shop for communicating with customers.
The unified inbox also includes various features to help hosts manage their guest communications effectively, such as message templates, automated responses, and message tagging.
Accounting Tools
Guesty’s accounting tools are simple if you’re used to high-end accounting software (like Freshbooks), but compared to the low-budget, “freemium” accounting software being peddled to vacation rental owners, Guesty stands head-and-shoulders above the competition. These built-in tools can help hosts track their rental income and expenses accurately, generate financial reports, and automate accounting tasks.
One practical example of how Guesty’s accounting tools are actually useful to hosts is that they allow users to generate monthly statements automatically. These statements can help you keep track of your rental income and expenses, giving you an easy way to monitor your cash flow and identify areas where you can cut costs or increase revenue.
All else fails, Guesty integrates with popular accounting software like QuickBooks, Freshbooks, and Xero. This means that you can easily sync your financial data with their accounting software, effectively eliminating the need for manual data entry and minimizing the risk of errors.
Guesty Pricing
Guesty has two offers as of March 2023:
- Guesty For Pros – which was originally just Guesty, is their premium offer for hosts with four or more properties. If you’re interested in managing a larger portfolio, this is your best bet, and you’ll receive a custom pricing quote after you submit your information.
- Guesty For Hosts – which was originally YourMy Porter App, until they were acquired by Guesty, is their more affordable offering for hosts with 1-3 properties. Prices for this range from $34-$69 per month.
Guesty Pros and Cons
Now we’ll weigh the positive and negative aspects of Guesty’s platform, using both our first-hand experience with the product and syndicated reviews from several online review platforms:
Guesty Pros
- Premium features
- Easy to integrate with other software (booking engines, pricing tools, etc.)
- Built-in accounting tools
- Direct-booking website builder
- Great customer service
- Loads of automation that helps reduce workload
Guesty Cons
- No Free Trial
- Confusing pricing structure for new users
Guesty Alternatives
Not convinced Guesty is the best fit for you? Here is a brief overview of two of their main competitors:
Lodgify
Lodgify is property management software done right. And it’s gaining a reputation for its easy-to-use channel manager and direct booking website builder. It is easily one of the strongest contenders against Guesty for the best vacation rental management software and boasts a price tag most anyone can afford.
- Affordably Priced – Lodgify’s minimum plan starts at $32/month, compared to Guesty’s premium pricing.
- Best Website Builder – Lodgify takes the top spot on our list of best vacation rental website builders. There isn’t any competitor (right now) that can hold a candle to Lodgify’s website builder — that’s the bottom line.
Uplisting
Uplisting is the perfect software for property management companies or ambitious owners with large portfolios.
- Scalable Pricing – Uplisting tries to fit their pricing to their customer. Hosts with 1-5 properties can expect to pay $100/mo, but if you decide to scale your portfolio, they’re happy to customize pricing to fit your business.
- Best-In-Class Automation – Tools for messaging guests, automating tasks, updating listings, etc. — the list of things Uplisting does behind the scenes is staggering.
Compare vacation rental software options with our spreadsheet.
View spreadsheetWe wrote an article breaking down all nine of Guesty’s main competitors – read it here.
Our Experience With Guesty
Guesty is a premium product, you’ll experience that the first time you log in. The software feels polished, almost like using an Apple product — well, maybe not that polished — but really good either way.
For our trial, we logged in on one of our dear reader’s accounts to get a feel for its use in an actual, operational business. Sadly, this meant we couldn’t experience the onboarding process, but that didn’t stop us from finding our way around the various dashboards and features.
The unified inbox was especially helpful. After a few minutes poking around, we couldn’t help but feel like a spider sitting comfortably at the center of a web of communication. We could see incoming and outgoing correspondence from Airbnb and Vrbo guests all organized tidily in one place. This is a game changer in our world of constant communication.
Guesty’s built-in website builder reminded us of well-known drag-and-drop websites builders like Squarespace or Wix. If you were so inclined, you’d have no problem building a halfway decent direct booking website within a few hours.
We were especially keen to see Guesty’s take on the multi-calendar. While this kind of shared booking calendar feature isn’t new to the scene, Guesty’s has the benefit of incredible integration support and a long list of software and websites that connect with the software seamlessly. Yes — software that plays nice with other software is a big deal, even in 2023, and Guesty does just that.
Overall, Guesty is a summation of great features and years of experience, so it’s hard to find anything to nitpick. When you reach a level like this software company has reached, the gap between good and bad features is largely subjective. We do wish they had a free trial, though.
Should You Use Guesty? Our Recommendation
Guesty is a long-standing software that caters to hosts and short-term vacation rental owners — it’s very niche, very polished, and demands a premium price because of that.Our recommendation: Yes, you should use Guesty. If you can afford it and want your wishlist of property management features all in one place, it’s a great pick.
