What is the most popular vacation rental management software?

[fr33d0santana]

Which short-term rental management software is the best for managing bookings on Airbnb, Booking and Expedia that has a live phone support? Guesty, Hosty, Tokeet, Lodgify, Smoobu, Hostaway, AirGMS, Kigo, iRoomi and Uplisting all neglect support.

[gigachad]

Below there are few aspects, which you have to consider before choosing appropriate channel manager.

A country/city, where your property is located. There are an OTA/vacation rental portals, which are leading at any markets; Southeast Asia and U.S. have a different leaders, except worldwide platforms such as Airbnb, Booking, etc. The same situation with vacation rental software; overall the local players (channel manager’s developers) are better understand what their local clients need and which channels are most important for them.
How many channels do you plan to use/sync via channel manager. If you are using just 2–3 leading OTA like Airbnb, Booking.com, Tripadvisor (Flipkey, HolidayLettings), likely, you discover a plenty of channel managers, which solve your problems. If, from the other hand, you'd like to promote your accommodation at least at 4–10 portals, the corridor of your variants has significantly decreased.
Which data would you like to sync. Today channel managers use 2 main ways of synchronization: API (also called 2 ways, push&pull) and Ical. The first one allows to transfer different data like inventory, bookings, photos, etc and do it rather fast. The second one is calendar-basic format, which use for synchronization only inventory and a delay in synchronization can be 30–60–90 minutes. Every channel manager has own priorities and own level of developing; for clients that's means that there is no only one standard. You need to wonder and study every potential channel manager - is it match to your inquiries, preferable OTA and expectations or not.