Hostfully app is among the most popular property management platforms and a great option to consider. They claim to serve over 40,000 clients with 62,000 properties managed globally. While Hostfully reviews vary from “Excellent tool and excellent customer service” to “It’s the worst PMS I have ever used,” we must know the truth.
Find an honest overview of Hostfully, including its main features, pros and cons, use cases, pricing, and other key details, below. It should help you understand whether this tool is what you’re looking for.
What is Hostfully?
Hostfully is a business management platform started by David Jacoby and Stephan Osmont, two vacation rental managers who wanted to simplify routine tasks. It automates management and communication processes across multiple listings within one tool.
You can check the reservation calendar, automate messaging, sync listing changes across multiple channels, and use a built-in out-of-the-box booking site to get more direct bookings.
Hostfully is a combination of two products — Property Management Platform and Digital Guidebooks. A Property Management Platform automates repetitive rental management tasks.
The Guidebooks tool offers what you probably expect from its name — custom guidebooks. You can build, manage, and use online guides without any technical skills. Sharing with guests is super easy through a custom link or QR code.
Who should use Hostfully?
According to Hostfully’s website, the platform is intended for short-term rental, vacation rental, and corporate housing property managers. It’s also suitable for boutique hotels, people hosting events or guests, and hosts who want to create a property guide and communicate more effectively.
Hostfully has something to offer for everyone, whether you’re listing on Airbnb or have dozens of listings across multiple platforms.
Still, the platform is mainly focused on small to midsize property managers. The coverage is impressive, with over 80 countries supported.
The platform is available in English and allows users to localize automated guest messaging in many languages, including:
- French
- Spanish
- Chinese (Complex and Simplified)
- German
- Portuguese
- Italian
- Polish
- Dutch
- Hebrew
- Greek
- Arabic
- Russian
- Japanese
Rental channels supported by Hostfully
Hostfully has an extensive network of integrations, making it a universal tool for various channels.
It partners with core popular platforms, including Airbnb, Vrbo, and booking.com, and integrates through API with many others.
Overall, you can use Hostfully with:
- Partner online travel agencies (OTAs). Hostfully is a direct integration partner for Airbnb, a premier partner for booking.com, and a preferred connectivity partner for Vrbo.
- Additional platforms connected through the API. The Hostfully app enables integration with less common short-term rental platforms, such as TripAdvisor, GoLightly for female travelers, and HomeToGo, among others.
- Direct bookings. Hostfully offers a website builder for hosts who want to avoid OTA charges and connect directly with potential guests. You get a no-code website for quick launch of direct bookings. Find helpful tips on how to build a direct booking website in our guide.
The Hostfully app supports most rental channels. The choice mainly depends on how you view your business model and what platforms are more suitable.
Some people believe Airbnb or Vrbo is enough and like their policies. Others prefer direct bookings because they offer more freedom and a higher margin.
Hostfully platform features
In this review, we focus on the features of the Hostfully property management platform since it’s the core product. Digital Guidebooks offer custom guest guides and have pretty obvious functionality.
Repetitive task automation
You can automate up to 70% of messaging by creating templates and setting up a sequence of messages triggered at different stages of the booking process.
Guests can receive messages via booking platforms, SMS, or email. Besides messaging, Hostfully also enables you to automate payments, including security deposit collection, refunds, and split payments.
Another thing to automate with Hostfully is pricing. The platform integrates with dynamic pricing tools to automatically adjust nightly rates based on demand, seasonality, events, historical pricing, and other relevant factors.
Additionally, you can automate the check-in flow, reminders to guests about reviews, and booking reporting — basically, most operations related to short-term rentals.
“The automation of everything had us sold, the system is super easy as well.” (Warren D.)
Channel manager
Sync rates, availability, and booking restrictions across platforms where you list. Channel manager prevents double bookings and allows you to avoid manual updates. You can update all content in bulk, including property descriptions, photos, house rules, amenities, etc.
Booking pipeline
A pipeline visualizing what is going on with a specific booking makes the guest experience smooth and trackable.
You can use the Pipeline dashboard section to find specific booking filtering records by date, guest names, income, and other characteristics.
It also allows you to see the current guest’s status to upsell additional services, request payment, or send a pre-arrival form.
Website building tool for direct bookings
The complexity of setting up bookings is one of the direct rental myths. You can easily do it with the Hostfully website-building tool.
Build a custom website for direct bookings to receive more bookings and increase revenue. It’s SEO-friendly, customizable, and responsive.
The website will show availability and pricing to help potential guests plan their trip and enhance their experience with your property.
You can even implement automated guest screening and verification by integrating the Hostfully website with Truvi.
It will sieve out suspicious guests who may commit fraud or damage the property.
Unified inbox
This feature gives you one centralized location to view all messages.
You can easily find a communication thread, filter messages, and detect unread ones.
The Unified inbox also supports marketing & communication templates to configure trigger-based communications.
Dashboard and analytics
The dashboard provides quick access to all Hostfully app features in one place. You can view high-level business metrics, check unprocessed leads and assign them to team members, learn key channels that generate bookings, and manage current bookings.
The dashboard also allows you to hide property and analytics info from other users if you have a property management team and want to limit access to specific information.
“Love the one place to rule them all approach. The ability to create all our FRB Rentals listings in one place, manage pricing and bookings and push it out to direct bookings as well as the OTAs (Airbnb, VRBO, etc.) is so central to a successful short-term rentals business.” (Rich)
Centralized calendar
You can view all reservations color-coded by the booking platform in one calendar. The calendar indicates which properties are rented or available and shows planned arrivals to help hosts manage cleaning and occupancy.
It also enables you to adjust prices manually and do bulk price edits.
Note that many of these features are also available in the Hostfully app for mobile.
Available for iOS and Android, it enables hosts to view reservations, track who checks in or out, communicate with guests, and accept or decline bookings.
Pros and cons of Hostfully
Hostfully is a time-tested property management platform for short-term rentals.
It automates the majority of routine tasks, has reliable support, and provides a bunch of educational materials.
People often complain about its inbox feature and complicated setup, but many still stay loyal to the platform despite its flaws.
Hostfully, like any software app, isn’t perfect, BUT their support and development teams take feedback and fix issues and implement new features requested by the user base. I personally have had many new features I’ve suggested implemented.” (Rich)
More Hostfully reviews and practical tips from hosts
Most hosts praise the responsiveness of Hostfully’s support team and educational content that makes using the system much simpler.
“Great team to onboard with and open office hours to answer questions between scheduled meetings with a dedicated specialist. There are so many great educational help articles and videos to learn the platform.” (Kelsey)
“The follow-up and customer service after my initial contact with Hostfully were outstanding, responsive, supportive, and genuinely helpful. Beyond that, the platform struck a great balance between functionality, pricing, and user experience, making it a smart choice for managing my short-term rentals efficiently.” (Alexa)
As to the negatives, some people running mid-term rentals believe Hostfully is not the best choice for this type of rental:
“It does not work very well for mid-term rentals – it was very complicated to use and caused quite a few problems.” (Kaitlyn)
Bugs and glitches are another common complaint:
“Channel Manager and Hostfully sometimes didn’t sync which led to overbookings. When this occurs a tedious manual search is then required to fix the issue. (John A.)”
“There are a number of bugs and system update requests which I wish were much better. Most notably, I would like for ACH/E-Check to be implemented with VRP (who does already support that payment option). I would also like for it to be easier to manage/download an “order” for a reservation instead of having to monkey with some weird custom print settings just to get the order to fit properly on a page (or take an awkward zoomed-out screen shot) (Andrew).”
Besides, many users admit starting with Hostfully may be challenging. It takes time to figure out how the platform works:
“Initially, there is a learning curve to setting up the more advanced automation using templates and triggers. Highly suggest you write it all down and map out how you want timing to happen on a booking through review, then implement it and test one step at a time. The formatting on communications should be tested with each OTA to ensure it looks good to the guest receiving it. (Rich)”
Yet, the overall Hostfully rating at Software Advice is 4.2, and 4.2 at Carpterra, which is pretty high. There are many users who give the platform five stars.
Hostfully vs. Hospitable vs. Lodgify
Hostfully is one of many PMS options available in the market. We have already published blog posts on Hospitable reviews and Lodgify. The table below summarizes the strengths and weaknesses of Hostfully vs. Hospitable vs. Lodgify.
| Hostfully | Hospitable | Lodgify | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | Property managers with 4+ listings | Independent hosts & co-hosts | Hosts and small-to-midsize businesses |
| Unified Inbox | + | + | + |
| Automation | Advanced | High | Average |
| Integration | Advanced | High | Average |
| Direct Booking Website | + | + | + |
| Mobile app | + | + | + |
| Ease of use | Low | High | Average |
| Digital Guidebooks | + | – | – |
| Pricing (month) | High ($129) | Average ($29) | Low ($20) |
Hostfully pricing
Hostfully offers three plans for its property management platform: Starter, Pro & Pro Plus, and Premium. Annual subscribers get a 10% discount for their readiness to commit. Let’s review Hostfully pricing and what’s inside:
Starter
The plan has entry-level functionality for new hosts or property managers with a few listings. It allows for basic channel management and automating repetitive tasks like messaging and calendar syncing. You also gain access to a Hostfully mobile app and can have live onboarding via a 1:1 call.
Best for: New hosts or managers that just started scaling from one to multiple listings
Number of listings: Up to 4 listings
Hostfully pricing: $129/month
Pro & Pro Plus
The plan includes all the Starter features plus automated guest messaging with InboxAI, SMS & Whatsapp and private labeling. You also get a personal Customer Success Manager to assist with growing your business.
Best for: Medium-size rental businesses that are rapidly growing
Number of listings: Up to 11 listings for Pro and up to 19 listings for Pro Plus
Hostfully pricing: $229/month for Pro and $285/month for Pro Plus
Premium
The premium plan offers all Pro Plus features plus full API access, unlimited in-app support, and customized pricing. You can also negotiate custom engineering services.
Best for: Advanced property management and companies with dozens of listings
Number of listings: 20+ listings
Hostfully pricing: Custom quote
Hostfully integrations
Based on Hostfully reviews and what their website offers, the selection of integrations is remarkable. The platform has many exclusive partnerships and enables property managers to connect even more tools through an API.
You can connect Hostfully with various tools, including OTA platforms, accounting tools, cleaning and turnover management software, dynamic pricing solutions, marketing automation platforms, and more. In particular, Hostfully and Truvi is a useful integration to eliminate rental risks and implement direct bookings.
Hostfully + Truvi integration for direct bookings
The integration of Hostfully with Truvi is particularly beneficial for users who manage direct rentals. Such hosts face increased risks since they become fully responsible for property protection and managing rentals.
While Hostfully substitutes the features of booking platforms by providing a customizable website to promote your property, Truvi adds powerful damage protection services with up to $5 million coverage. You get reimbursed in case of property damage in days. Truvi integration also provides automated guest screening as part of damage protection. It allows you to reject bookings made with fake names, burner phones, and disposable emails. As a result, the risks related to direct bookings are minimized.
