Lodgify

Relatively simple to use. I was able to set up my site and reservation system in less than a week. Site works extremely well on mobile devices (which is huge). I am starting to get a lot of direct online bookings which is amazing. The customer service is very good - I have asked several detailed how-to questions. In one case, I wanted to do something that is not part of the Lodgify product. The service rep researched other ways to accomplish the task and integrate into my site. She sent me detailed instructions and even links to assist me. Not many companies will take the time to do that!

Finally, the workflow aspect of the reservation system is a huge time saver. It is so nice to be able to set up automatic payment reminders, send rental agreements and canned emails automatically! Gives me time to worry about running my business and expanding the website instead of doing all the manual processes associated with bookings.

Some of the widgets are a little restrictive. I have managed to work around most of them.

My only other complaint is that if you respond to an inquiry with a quote, the system automatically blocks the dates with a tentative booking. I sync my HomeAway, VRBO etc calendars with my Lodgify calendar, so the tentative block causes those calendars to show unavailable. In this business, the conversion rate on inquiries is not high enough to block dates simply because someone sent an inquiry.

User friendly. It looks great and, when it's working, the site is intuitive and easy for new site visitors to figure out. Searching the calendar is simple so guests can see overall availability. Having a full photo gallery is great- you are not limited with images.

You can not add custom pages beyond the template that is already there. We connect it to our already existing website so we can lead people to our page that sells gift certificates etc and to our faqs. The website crashes frequently. So far we have been using the website for 8 weeks and in that time we have experienced 4 major crashes (2 on weekends when there is no tech support) that have lasted all day and prevented anyone from being able to book or see our site listings. I'd estimate this has cost us lost revenue from bookings. No small number as our website does. We have reached out to lodgify each time and though nice, they never seem to know what the problem could be and when it works again they just say "well it's working now!"...until the next system fail.

If you have a two night minimum there is no way to make the search default to two nights- it defaults to one night and if someone clicks search it just looks like you have absolutely no availability. for example if they put in July 6th as the check in date then July 7th is automatically entered as the checkout date (even if you have a two night minimum. There is no way to let the people know they have to enter in two dates on the mobile version (where most of our users come from) so many of our users just give up and think we are completely booked all the time. The only place to write that we require two nights is in the site descriptions and we have to go through a paragraph explaining that guests must search for two nights in order to see availability. This might not sound like a big deal but if it automatically defaulted to two nights then we'd see a 20% increase in bookings as people would not give up before reading the site descriptions. People might want to only pay for one night, but they would book for two if they realized there was a two night minimum.

They also lied to us when we signed up in order to get our payment and assured us that there would be a mobile app within a week of when we signed up. We let the sales agent know this was very important to us and she guaranteed it. When I contacted someone a month later asking about the status of their mobile app the person I spoke to said he had no knowledge of any mobile app and there were no plans for one and tried to tell me I had misunderstood (nope- had it in writing over an email).