Hotel management software (PMS) built around how your hotel runs
Most small hotels run well on Mews, Cloudbeds, Little Hotelier or eviivo. This page shows what those systems cover, where one built for your property would do more, and what it would cost against your subscription. A first release with the four core features typically costs £3,500–£5,000 and goes live within a month.
£495 for a working prototype in 5 days. It comes off the build.
Next First Gear slot: w/c 19 Oct · 2 of 3 builds booked this month
Is custom worth it for you?
Three questions, and a straight answer.
What hotel property management systems do, and who offers them
These are the jobs a PMS usually covers, and which of five systems sold to UK hotels offer each one. Press “Need it” on the ones your property needs. If your current system already does them all, you may not need me; if it doesn't, the estimate below follows your picks.
| Feature | Mews | Cloudbeds | Little Hotelier | eviivo | Guestline | Your hotel |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| First release | ||||||
| Room calendar and rate plansBookings by room and night, seasonal rates, minimum stays | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
| Check-in and check-outArrivals list, room moves, guest register details | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
| Folios and paymentsDeposits, card on file, split bills, company accounts | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
| Guest profilesStay history, preferences and notes for the next visit | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
| Booking engineCommission-free bookings on your own website | Yes | One+ | Yes | Yes | Add-on | |
| Channel manager linkRates and rooms kept in step on Booking.com, Expedia and Airbnb | Yes | One+ | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
| Housekeeping boardClean, dirty and out-of-order status from a phone | Yes | Yes | Yes | Add-on | Yes | |
| Phase two | ||||||
| Pre-arrival and online check-inEmails before the stay, details and payment taken in advance | Yes | Yes | Add-on | Add-on | Yes | |
| Restaurant and bar to the roomCharges from the till land on the guest's folio | Add-on | Partner | Not listed | Partner | Yes | |
| Occupancy, ADR and RevPARDaily figures and booking source without a spreadsheet | Pro | Yes | Yes | Add-on | Yes | |
| Groups and eventsRoom blocks, weddings, function rooms and one master bill | Pro | Yes | Not listed | Yes | Yes | |
| Several propertiesShared guests and rates, figures for each hotel and the group | Yes | Yes | Not listed | Yes | Yes | |
From each product's own site, checked Oct 2026: Mews, Cloudbeds, Little Hotelier, eviivo, Guestline. A plan name means that plan and up. Add-on means a paid extra module; Partner means through a third-party system. Guestline's site blocked my checks, so its marks come from its own pages as shown in search results. A dash means the product's site doesn't list it.
Next: the tools it connects to ↓What I’d build first, and what waits
A first release covers a stay from booking to checkout: the room calendar with your rate plans, check-in and check-out at the desk, the guest’s folio with deposits and payments, and the guest record that remembers them next time. That’s where your revenue and your guest register live, which is why they’re ticked already.
A direct booking engine, the channel manager link and a housekeeping board can go live alongside them when your website and the booking sites can’t wait. Pre-arrival messages, restaurant charges to the room, reports, group bookings and multi-property views make up phase two, each with its own fixed price.
What AI can do here
- Answer guest emails. It drafts replies to “Can we check in early?” or “Is parking included?” from your own policies, and front desk sends or edits them.
- Read the arrivals list. It flags returning guests, anniversaries and notes from past stays, so the welcome is personal without anyone searching.
- Check the OTA statement. It reads Booking.com’s commission invoice and flags reservations where the commission doesn’t match the stay you recorded.
No passport number or card detail is ever sent to a language model. AI work is a separate quote of £1.5k to £5k, best done once the front desk has had a season on the first release.
The tools it should talk to
Tick the accounts package, payment service and hardware your PMS should send to or take from. Each connection is priced into the first release.
Switching from your current system
What I move. Guest profiles and stay history, every future reservation with its rate and deposit, room types and rate plans, open folios and company accounts. Past folios and invoices come too, as records where your PMS exports them as data and as attached PDFs where it doesn’t.
The order of work. Everything loads into a trial copy first, and you compare the next month’s arrivals, deposits included, with your current system. Go-live is planned for a quiet night: the channel manager is pointed at the new PMS, availability is checked on each booking site, and the old system stays read-only for a month.
What your current system lets you take
From each vendor's own help pages, checked Oct 2026. Where a page doesn't say, I've written what I'd ask their support.
I'm on Mews
- The reservation report exports to Excel, and guest profiles export from the Profiles screen.
- Mews's Connector API has an exports operation, which I'd use for anything the reports leave out.
- Their data terms let you download your personal data when the contract ends, then delete it. I'd ask support for open bills and rate plans, which the help pages don't cover.
I'm on Cloudbeds
- Reservations export with the fields you choose, and reports download as PDF, Excel, CSV or JSON.
- You lose your login once cancellation goes through, so past and future reservations need exporting before you give notice.
- I'd ask Cloudbeds for guest profiles, folios and rate plans as CSV, which their pages don't describe.
I'm on Little Hotelier
- Past and future reservations export to CSV, a year at a time. Phone numbers are left out of the file.
- Booking-engine reports mask guest details 180 days after check-out, and final invoices export to your accounts package.
- Closing needs 30 days' notice. I'd ask support for a full guest list with phone numbers before then.
I'm on eviivo
- Report Writer builds custom reports from more than 130 fields and exports them to Excel or CSV. It's part of the Performance Manager add-on.
- eviivo publishes APIs for guest check-in data, invoicing and accounting.
- Their terms don't say what happens to your data when you leave, so I'd ask them in writing before giving notice.
I'm on Guestline
- Reports export to Excel, CSV or PDF, and Guestline runs an API portal for approved partners.
- Guest profiles can be set to delete after a period you choose, so check that setting before you export.
- I'd ask Guestline for future reservations, guest profiles, ledger balances and rate plans as files, and how long they keep data after the contract ends.
What you pay now, and what a build would cost
I've filled this in from your ticks and a 20-room hotel on Sirvoy. Put in your own rooms and properties and compare the two over three to five years.
£92 a month ex VAT
What a subscription can't give you
- Packages, events and restaurant charges on one folio, with nothing typed twice.
- No fee per room or per booking, so adding rooms or a second property doesn't raise the bill.
- Visitor levies and the guest register handled the way your council and the 1972 Order ask.
- The code and the guest data are yours, so you can change supplier without starting again.
The build is the middle of your estimate (£4,250), paid up front. The first month's hosting is free, so the plan starts in month two, and one plan covers every hotel. Subscription prices are list prices ex VAT and leave out set-up fees and price rises.
What hotel software costs
List prices ex VAT, from each vendor's pricing page, checked Oct 2026.
| Product | Price | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|
| eviivo | £7 a room a month, minimum £35, up to 10 rooms. Larger hotels are quoted. Multi-property from £95 a month. | Payment, guest and reporting modules are £1–£2 a room extra, plus £0.50 a booking if you use their payments or messaging. |
| Sirvoy | Starter £10–£50 and Pro £37–£165 a month, from 2 to 100 rooms. A second property is £18 a month on Pro. | The channel manager is on Pro. No commission. The page doesn't say whether prices include VAT. |
| Little Hotelier | A calculator by rooms and properties; no list price shown. | Built on SiteMinder's channel manager. |
| Mews | Core, Pro and Enterprise plans, quoted per room. | Housekeeping in full, group bookings and BI reports need Pro. |
| Cloudbeds | Flex, One, Experience and Enterprise plans, quote-based. | Booking engine and channel manager start on One. |
| Guestline | Quote-based. | Own restaurant till and conference and banqueting module. |
When off-the-shelf is enough
A single hotel, inn or B&B with standard room types, seasonal rates and the usual booking sites is well served by a subscription PMS, which at that size is cheaper than building. Keep paying the subscription as well when:
- the property is new and you can’t yet say how much comes direct and how much through Booking.com;
- you need dozens of integrations (door locks, revenue tools, kiosks) on day one;
- the front desk is happy and the night audit balances.
Owning the system pays off once you run more than one property, where per-room and per-property fees add up, or when packages, event bookings or a restaurant leave your team re-keying charges between systems. The same goes for places a hotel PMS wasn’t designed around: a pub with rooms where the bar till and the bedrooms need one bill, serviced apartments billed weekly or monthly, or a hostel selling beds rather than rooms.
Open-source software you could run instead
A third route is free software you host yourself and can change. These three are real hotel systems with recent releases, each checked Oct 2026. None of them includes a UK visitor levy or a ready channel connection.
- QloApps OSL-3.0
Good for: A PMS, booking engine and hotel website in one, with rooms, rates, bookings and invoices.
Missing for you: No channel manager in the open-source code, and invoices and taxes would need setting up for the UK.
- HotelDruid AGPL
Good for: Small B&Bs to larger hotels: rates, invoices, a bar and restaurant till and occupancy figures.
Missing for you: Channel and booking-engine sync are paid add-on modules, and running several properties isn't described.
- Odoo Community with OCA PMS AGPL-3.0
Good for: Several properties, a link to Odoo's till, and Odoo's accounting and contacts alongside.
Missing for you: Maintained on Odoo 16 only, with Spanish tax and police-report modules rather than UK ones.
If you'd rather go open source, I can set it up, host it, connect it to your channel manager and accounts, and build the hotel pieces it's missing.
Your plan, ready to keep or send
Everything you ticked, split into a first release and phase two, with a price range for each. Email it to yourself or send it to me.
First release
The first month after kickoff
- Room calendar and rate plans
- Check-in and check-out
- Folios and payments
- Guest profiles
Phase two
About a month, after the first release is in use
Nothing picked yet
- First release estimate
- £3,500–£5,000
- Phase two estimate
- None picked
- After launch
- Cruise, £199/mo
Estimates, not quotes: First Gear ends with a fixed price for the first release.
How the estimate works
Each phase starts at £1,500 for what every system needs: logins, hosting, backups and your data imported. Each feature and connection adds £250 to £1,000 depending on its size, and the range is 15% either side of the total. The break-even uses the middle of both phases.
A Saturday, before and after
An example for a 30-room hotel with a restaurant, not a record of any one property’s day.
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| 8am | Housekeeping get a printed list. Rooms ready for early arrivals are shouted down the stairs. | Housekeepers mark rooms clean on a phone, and the desk sees them turn green. |
| Midday | A wedding party’s 12 rooms sit on a spreadsheet, and someone blocks them on each booking site by hand. | The group is one booking with 12 rooms, and availability closes everywhere at once. |
| Evening | Dinner bills are printed and typed onto room folios after service. | The restaurant posts charges straight to the room. |
| Checkout | A guest disputes a minibar charge. Nobody knows who added it. | Every folio line shows who posted it and when. |
The rules your system has to follow
- Guest register. The Immigration (Hotel Records) Order 1972 requires a record of every guest aged 16 or over: full name and nationality for everyone. Guests who are not British, Irish or Commonwealth citizens (“aliens” in the Order, as defined in the British Nationality Act 1981) also give their passport number and place of issue, and on departure their next destination and, if they know it, the address there. Records are kept for at least 12 months and open to the police.
- Visitor levies. Edinburgh charges a 5% visitor levy on up to five consecutive nights, for stays from 24 July 2026, and other Scottish councils can set their own, so check with yours. In Wales, every accommodation provider must register with the Welsh Revenue Authority by 31 March 2027, even where the council doesn’t charge, and councils can charge a levy per person per night from 1 April 2027 at the earliest. Your PMS has to put the levy on the folio and produce the return.
- UK GDPR. Guest records, passport details and preferences are personal data. The ICO’s guidance sets out what you need: a reason to keep each field, a retention period, and an answer to a guest’s subject access request within one month.
- Card payments. Anyone who stores, processes or transmits card data falls under PCI DSS, the card industry’s security standard, which your payment provider will expect you to meet. A PMS that sends card details to the payment provider and keeps only a token keeps most of them away from your systems.
Is my data safe?
Logins are split by job: housekeeping see room status, not guest details, and only managers see passport numbers. Every change to a booking, rate or folio is logged with who and when. Card numbers stay with the payment provider. Guest records live on UK or EU servers, encrypted, and a fresh backup is taken every night.
Will my staff use it?
The front desk uses three screens: arrivals, a guest’s folio and the room calendar. I design them for a desk with a queue in front of it. During First Gear a receptionist runs a few real check-ins on the prototype, and anything that holds up the queue is reworked before I write the real thing.
Other ways to solve it
| Option | Cost | Best for | Where it breaks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hotel PMS subscription | A monthly fee per property or per room, sometimes plus booking fees | One property with standard rates | Packages, groups and restaurant charges end up re-keyed |
| Custom build | First Gear at £495, a build priced before work starts, then Idle, Cruise or Overdrive, or self-hosting | More than one property, packages and events, a restaurant to bill to rooms | Half the build is paid before a single guest checks in, and extras such as online check-in wait for a later phase |
| Open source (QloApps, HotelDruid) | Free to download; you pay for a server and for installing and patching it | A hotel that wants its booking engine and PMS on its own server | Channel sync is missing or a paid module, and security updates are your job |
| Spreadsheet and a booking-site extranet | Free | A guest house with three or four rooms | Double bookings once you’re on more than one site |
| Channel manager alone | A monthly fee | Small properties that mainly need OTA sync | No folios, housekeeping or guest history |
Four guarantees, in writing.
They're written into the terms you accept when you pay.
Every build also comes with a 30-day fix guarantee. If something I built doesn't work as the plan describes, I fix it free.
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See it first
You click through a working prototype before you commit to the build, and you keep it either way.
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Fixed price
You pay the price in the build plan. New ideas go into a later phase with its own fixed price. Nothing is billed by the hour.
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On time
If I miss the go-live date in your build plan because of a delay on my side, you get 3 months of Cruise free (£597). If your data, feedback or sign-off is late, the date moves by the same number of days.
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Yours to keep
Code, data and accounts are in your name from day one. Export your data or cancel a plan whenever you like, and ask for a full handover pack.
You'll talk to me
I've built software for over ten years and started ByteGears in 2020. The person on your kickoff call is the person who writes the code. Recent work includes quoting automation for a renewable-energy installer and a cask whisky auction platform with ID and anti-money-laundering checks.
Questions about a hotel build
Is hotel management software the same as a PMS?
Mostly, yes. The PMS is the core: rooms, rates, bookings, check-in and the guest's bill. Hotel management software usually means the PMS plus what sits around it, such as the booking engine on your website, the channel manager, housekeeping, the restaurant till and the link to your accounts. Some products sell all of that as one subscription and others sell the pieces separately, which is why the comparison on this page goes job by job.
Should I build a PMS or use Mews, Cloudbeds or Little Hotelier?
For one hotel with standard room types and the usual booking sites, use one of them. A build makes sense when your rates, packages or group of properties don't fit, or when you're paying per room across several sites. The questions at the top of this page give you an answer in under a minute.
How much does a hotel PMS cost?
Published prices start at £10 a month for a two-room guest house on Sirvoy, and Mews, Cloudbeds and Guestline quote. Step 3 lists the prices I could verify and compares them with a build. A first release here usually lands between £2k and £10k at a fixed price.
Will it connect to Booking.com and Expedia?
Yes, through a channel manager such as SiteMinder, which already holds the connections to the booking sites. Rates and availability go out from the PMS and reservations come back in, so a room sold on one site closes on the others. If an update to a booking site fails, the desk sees it on screen straight away instead of finding out when two guests arrive for one room.
What happens to our future bookings when we switch?
They come across with the guest, room type, rate, deposit paid and any notes, and I check them against your current system before go-live. I'd plan the switch for a quiet night, with the old system kept read-only for a month.
What happens after it goes live?
Anything that breaks in the first 30 days I fix at no cost, and the first month's hosting is free. Then you choose a monthly plan (Idle £79, Cruise £199 or Overdrive £449) or host it yourself. Payment for the build is 50/50, with the £495 for First Gear taken off the deposit.
Let's get the gears turning.
Send me your plan. If First Gear is the right start, I'll reply with a payment link that holds your slot. If an off-the-shelf product would serve you better, I'll name it.