Step 1: Understand your needs
1. Do you rent by the night, week, or month?
Most hospitality software support only nights, which is often an issue.
If your average stay is days or weeks, you are looking for a booking software similar to that used by hotels or vacation rentals.
If your guests stay for months, you probably need something designed for the residential market that has features like contracts, deposits, and recurring payments.
2. What integrations do you need?
- How are you going to handle payments, deposits, contracts, and IDs online?
- Do you have to collect tourist tax and you expect the software to handle it?
- What about accounting - do need to connect to your local account software?
- Do you offer your coliving on Airbnb or Booking? Do you want to sync rates and availability?
- Do you need to integrate with other 3rd party services?
3. What do you use now?
I used a simple Google Spreadsheet when I started my coliving. It worked pretty well.
Do you already use some software? People typically want to switch because of:
- Costs: most hospitality softwares are too expensive for small businesses
- Confusing user interface: too many feature, complex, no logic behind it
- Lack of features: Doesn't support a popular payment method or some integration
Too many question, but we are getting there...
“OK, now I have more questions than answers”
And that’s normal, amigo.
I'm a big fan of Google sheets and Airtable. If you start from scratch, these 2 are good options.
Definitely avoid pen and paper, it will create a lot of mess.
You can design your own custom solution in Google Sheets. That will help you to move to the next step and understand what software do you need.
Or you might end up using Google Sheets forever. You won't the the only one 😀
With Google Sheets it will start to get tricky at some point (You are maybe already there, if you are reading this)
- You want to accept direct bookings on your website and show availability
- You want to send automated emails asking to send you a deposit by a bank transfer
- You want to play with prices for different dates, days, months, and seasons
- You want to accept payments maybe and synchronize your rates with Airbnb
So you need these basic features:
- Calendar & availability management
- Online booking form
- Automated emails
- Flexible pricing options
- Invoicing & payment processing
- Channel management (sync with Airbnb/Booking/Expedia)
Bonus points: Affordable and easy to use
I missed such booking tool, so I decided to build one. It’s called Pingotel and I wish it existed in 2014, when I started my coliving.
Pingotel is super flexible. You can use it to rent bikes, camper vans, rooms, cabins, meeting spaces, whatever.
To make it flexible and simple, it doesn't have unique features designed only for colivings. For instance, an app for your community. Use Whatsapp 🤠
But has all the important features you need and well, it’s free.
What are other alternatives?
Enough of Pingotel ads from Peter "Horst" Fabor. Let's look on some alternatives.
💡 Tip: I recommend thinking if your coliving is more a hotel, vacation rental or residential property. Based on that, search for software designed for one of those categories.
Here are a few that I’ve heard over the years colivings use:
- BookingLayer
- Complex, allows you to create unique packages, I really like the team
- Starts at $279/month
- Sirvoy
- Popular among colivings because of the price, has plenty of features, user interface is not my cup of tea
- Starts at $28/month for 10 rooms
- Mangobeds
- Nice user interface, designed for colivings, relatively new player
- $29 per month for 10 rooms
Final thoughts
- Choosing the right solution is not easy - take your time
- Switching is quite painful - so I really recommend to try a couple of them and see what works for you
- Keep it simple - especially if you don't have many rooms
- Be ready to compromise on features, unless you have a large budget (you probably don't)
This article is part of the guide where I'm sharing tips on starting a coliving business.
Are you building a hospitality business? Then you might like my newsletter 👇
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