Hotel software (PMS) for a small hotel: a comparison of software, prices and ESTI

For a family-run hotel with a person at the reception, ready-made software covers the reception. Vladovsoft Hotel costs 139 € per year. Microinvest Hotel Pro costs 999 EUR one-off or 69 EUR per month excluding VAT, which comes to 2 484 EUR over three years on the subscription plan. Capella is free as long as there is one hotel and one user. Orion 3 Hotel costs €15 per room per month, so 15 rooms cost 225 € per month, or 8 100 € for three years, including the locks.

Microinvest and Capella connect to a fiscal device, while Clock, Hotelify, Orion and HotelRunner connect to Booking.com, Airbnb and Expedia. A room-selection website, commission-free payments and door codes are separate products or unavailable with them; with Saitami, they are all in one system.

Foreign cloud systems are also an option. Mews and Cloudbeds do not publish prices and provide a quote, Little Hotelier shows a price after you enter the number of rooms, and eviivo starts at $50 per month for one property, excluding taxes. Their pricing pages do not mention ESTI, so ask how you will submit the guest register before you sign.

Since 1 October 2019, all accommodation establishments, including rooms, guest houses and guest apartments, have been required to submit information to the Unified Tourist Information System under Art. 116, para. 5 of the Tourism Act. The data is entered on the ESTI website or uploaded as a file, for which the ministry publishes an Excel register template. The ministry also describes automated submission from the hotel system through a system-to-system channel, for which an application must be submitted.

According to the manufacturers' websites: Microinvest writes about ESTI integration; Vladovsoft generates CSV files for import; Capella exports guest data to ESTI; and Clock's help centre says the export is a CSV file created and uploaded to ESTI every day. In other words, the file is the standard, while fully automated submission without human involvement is the exception. You need to ask the supplier about it by name.

With us, the register of accommodated guests is filled in from the data the guest enters once during the reservation, and the system creates the ESTI file with one click. We have included automated submission in the contract as the next step, after the hotel's certificate is issued. We do not have a separate connection to the NRA and do not promise one: the receipt is issued by the hotel's fiscal device.

We built the “Hotel Without a Receptionist” demo at the request of a hotel in Bansko: the guest chooses the exact room from the floor plan, pays by card, receives a door code and lets themselves in. A small hotel near Pazardzhik asked for the same setup, and we are at the contract stage: reservations from the website and platforms, card payments, a door code and no staff on site.

That is where a custom system makes sense, because the locks are already installed. The hotel uses TTLock locks and will not replace them: the system generates a separate code for each reservation, valid from check-in until check-out and then automatically deactivated; if the SMS fails, the code is sent by email and displayed on a secure page. The guest enters the details from their identity document themselves, without scanning. An emergency mode is provided for an internet outage, an offline lock or an undelivered SMS, while the master lock profile, domain, Stripe account and platform accounts are all in the hotel's name.

The owner also asked us about a quote he had received from another provider: Microinvest Hotel Pro with an identity-document reader. For a hotel with someone at reception, this is the cheaper and more sensible route. For a hotel with no one on site, the ready-made program solves half the problem; the other half is the doors. If the locks still need to be purchased, Orion 3 Hotel provides the software and locks together for a per-room price.

The second case is a hotel with a restaurant and event rooms, where tasks for the kitchen, housekeepers and waiters are passed on verbally. There, the system links tasks to the room and date, manages covers and assigns people by role, while reporting separates the restaurant from the hotel. We did not find this kind of functionality described on the ready-made programs' websites above.

The most common question hoteliers ask is whether the software keeps the same availability on the website and across the platforms, so there are no double bookings. With the ready-made systems, this is handled by a channel manager: in Clock, the native connection to Booking.com is free, while the other channels through RoomCloud cost €10 per channel per month; in HotelRunner, the channel manager is included in the Essential Sell plan for a percentage of revenue; with Capella, the channel manager connection is included in the paid subscription; Hotelify and Orion 3 Hotel include it. Microinvest Hotel Pro connects to the Quendoo channel manager and booking engine, which is a separate platform with pricing available on request (as stated in the program's change log, version 1.00.030); Vladovsoft does not mention it on its website.

Our answer is honest: we have specified two-way availability calendar integration, with no separate fee, in a quote and contract for a hotel without a receptionist, but we have not yet connected it in a live system. That is why we list it in the quote as a separate line after verification, not as a promise. Reservations from the hotel's own website work without a platform or commission, as on the Eli & Eli Berlin website for holiday apartments.

The hotel near Pazardzhik asked for all of this in the contract before we discussed price, and its list is useful for any hotelier, whether they choose us or an off-the-shelf product:

1. All fees after purchase, by name: monthly, annual, licences, SMS, SIM cards, support, channels. 2. Confirmation that there is nothing else to buy outside the offer. 3. The guest journey from end to end: they book through Booking.com, Expedia or the website, pay, receive a code and check in themselves. 4. How ESTI is submitted: as a file you upload or automatically. 5. What happens if the internet goes down or a channel stops working, and how many days it takes to fix it. 6. What you receive if you stop: the data, domain, access to the locks and, with a custom-built system, the code.

A woman who manages holiday properties for several owners gave us another condition: she does not want a recurring cost that grows with every new property. If that applies to you too, compare the per-room prices with the one-off price and optional support €100-€350 per month we offer.