Lodgify

Avantages

Website templates offer a good range of choice, good functionality overall, payment setup is easy.

Inconvénients

Having said the pros above, I am not sure it is particularly better than other vacation rental software out there. I did a bit of research and chose Lodgify which has so far been good. I am still hopeful for other functionality to come in including:
Main big issue for us is the Channel Manager is not comprehensive enough. I have been waiting on HomeAway for over a year but no word on this one as yet. I have my fingers crossed as it is probably second biggest player in our market.
There has been some consistent problems with connection to booking.com which hasn't been explained to me why and i probably dont need to know the exact reason, but i just want it to go smoother than it has of late.
Delay in getting answers from support team due to time difference has been a problem.
Cleaner management would be a great asset and I keep hoping this will come along as offered by other software.
Reporting is quite limited. reports to owners would be handy as some other software has.The interface with Zapier to extract data is pretty basic.
Owner setup for each property is a bit restrictive. I would like more flexibility as to what owners can or cannot do/see.
Pretty annoying that new subscribers get discount incentives to join up but loyal current subscribers dont. Look after your current subscribers the same.

Avantages

The software has choices such as having a calendar that tells consumers if the dates are available they are interested in. This allows them to make their plans and arrange their trip around the availability of our vacation spot. It had templates to use to initially set the site up. It also has prices for extras you may supply at an extra fee like our boat or kayak service. There is a photo gallery that allows you to get the true picture of a thousand words before your perspective clients. You can add discounts and local attractions to let future guests know they will have a full vacation experience including all the bells and whistles. You can also add in discounts that can be automatically figured into their quote. Unlike other sites, it allows you to give your phone number so coustomers can deal directly with you. You have the opportunity to have coustomers book directly or contact you at an email address. This is also something that other sites do not allow until payment and fees have been collected by their company.

Inconvénients

The main problem I have is that I am located in Texas. The company is there to walk me through any issues I have but there is a time change difference. This is better now with representation texting messages on the bottom of the screen in real time.

Avantages

After 4 years of research we finally found Lodgify. (If not we would probably hired a Indian hacker team to create it)

It provides nearly everything we need to run our apartment house in the digital world.

After some time in customizing it to our needs, it works fine for our apartment house.
Since we have swiched from Seekda/Kognitiv we have increased our sale with more than 300% through using the booking engine of Lodgify. An answer to that could be the user friendly and responsive 3 step process. But we dont use the website function of Lodgify (see Cons)

It works perfectly with booking.com and runs without any problem so far . (not any single issue since 1 year)

Lodgify extended our demo for free to get to know each detail of its software by heart before going live with our 6 Apartments on 4 channels. (booking, airbnb, homeaway, website)

If you know your business processes, prices, cancellation policy and you have your pictures and descriptions ready, you can set up Lodgify as your PMS and channel manager within a day. (after you know the software)

The credit card payment process via Stripe or Paypal are expensive but are working without any issue.

Inconvénients

There is only a limited number of global OTAs provided in the channelmanager of Lodgify. Of course booking.com (Priceline) as the biggest player is on board, but we are missing Expedia second player on the market.

Support is good but sometimes doesnt get your point what you are requesting. (maybe language issues)

We requested a new channel which is probably the most important one in Austria (Feratel) and customer support and Feratel support told us in July that there are testing and providing the channel until the end of summer. Now it is 2018 and new people at Lodgify support tell us, that they never worked on a channel manager with Feratel! Very confusing and hard to argue all the time.

It would be great to have some kind of WYSIWYG Editor to customize the Email communication with customers, since this is very hard to understand if your are not into HTML/PHP and working with variables.

Bookings via Airbnb need sometimes more than 5 hours prior that they are blocked in the calendar. If someone else would book in the same period of time, you really have a problem. (never happend to us, but if?)

We dont use the website cause there are some big SEO issues with image-titles etc. where the customer support did not understand the problem.
So we prefer to have our own website and use the Lodgify booking engine just for the booking process itself.

After saying all that little issues, where we hope Lodgify will optimize within the next years, we are very happy.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

Easy to use web building templates with a beautiful design which are the perfect base to create one own professional website. We always get good critics about the looks of our website of Villa d'Arnaud! Besides that the features in the booking system are easy to use and mostly adequate. The calender with het overall view is highly appreciated and now that you can easily click on the booking and acces the booking information, we love it even more. With the auto mails and easy adding bookings to the system, we save ourselves a lot of time. To create a offer or a bill is very easy. The CCV files with all booking information comes in handy for bookkeeping. And what we value is the customer support. They always respond quickly and we noticed that they're open to suggestions for improvement of certain features. Apart from the software a openminded, young, dynamic organisation, that values the relations with their customers and always try to improve their services and product, is the right partner for us. This is exactly how we operate and like our partners to operate. And that's exactly what it feels like: that we're partners. Please never loose that Lodgify team: that's what distinguishes you from the rest. We carefully choose you around 5 years ago and we never regretted our choice. If you ever want to brainstorm about new features or want to test things, we gladly would help you. It's in this perspective that we wrote down 5 points of improvement. ;)

Inconvénients

We have got some tips for you guys:
1. Please don't give us so many language possibilities for the automatic emails. Every time a obscure language is added I have to replace your suggested text with ours. And because there are so many different type of emails, one extra language costs me at least 2 hours of boring labor. Or at least give us the opportunity to choose in which languages people can get a response by email.
2. Please add the possibility of a secured environment for guests to leave their credit card information including CVC code, so that we can debit the card for payments. For us this would be the real step forward!
3. Ad a column to the CVC files with the payment method (comes in very handy with bookkeeping).
4. When marking a booking as payed, instead of adding the payment manualy, at the moment it's not possible to add the payment method. I solve the problem by adding a note. But when downloading the CVC-file a have to add the payment method manualy. It takes a lot of work, which can be solved by adding the column Payment Method in the options for the CVC-file in combination with the possibility of adding the payment method as an option, when marking the booking as payed.
5. Can there be a rainbow flag icon added, so that we can easily show on the homepage that we're gay friendly? This weekend we're gonna try for the second time to ad one ourselves. Fingers crossed that we will succeed this time. ;))