10 Best Short-Term & Vacation Rental Management Software

Thinking about getting into the short-term rentals and vacation market? Smart call!

The U.S. vacation rental industry alone is worth around $15 billion, and with 10% year-over-year growth, it’s expected to attain an impressive $21 billion value by 2026, making short-term rentals a lucrative investment vehicle.

But making money in this short-term rental business is no piece of cake. With an estimated 1.3 million vacation rentals, the competition is intense. To set yourself up for success from the get-go, you should invest in software that streamlines investing.

But with new software popping up every day, which even is the best? Scratch your head not, for we’ve researched for you and compiled the ten best short-term & vacation rental management software options in 2024.

• Airbnb
• Hostaway
• Lodgify
• Escapia
• Guesty
• Avantio
• Smoobu
• Hospitable
• OwnerRez
• LiveRez

Airbnb

Airbnb is one of the most popular short-term & vacation rental platforms. Established in 2008, it’s one of the platforms that catapulted short-term & vacation rentals to popularity.

With over 7 million listings across 100,000 cities and towns spanning over 200 countries worldwide, hosting your short-term rental on Airbnb guarantees exposure to a global audience.

Beyond its extensive reach, Airbnb offers hosts great flexibility in listing options; they can rent out entire places, private rooms, or shared spaces. This flexibility allows even investors with limited capital to participate.

Additionally, Airbnb hosts have the autonomy to set their rates, plus the platform provides various protective policies to safeguard the investor’s space and earnings, including:

• Airbnb host guarantee program: Provides hosts with up to $1,000,000 in property damage protection.
• Host protection insurance: Offers up to $1,000,000 host coverage against third-party claims for bodily injuries or property damage.
• Income loss: Airbnb compensates hosts for lost income when they’ve no option but to cancel future bookings due to damages caused by previous guests for lost income.
• The pet damage policy: Reimburses hosts for the damages caused by a guest’s pet
• Deep cleaning: Airbnb reimburses hosts for the deep cleaning services needed after a guest’s stay, for instance, professional carpet cleaning.

In addition to the above policies, Airbnb offers hosts and guests a 24-hour safety line manned by specially-trained safety agents. The platform also allows hosts access to occupancy and rates performance data, allowing for data-driven decision-making. Ultimately, Airbnb is among the best vacation rental property management software. However, keep in mind that competition on the platform is quite intense, so you’ll need to do your part as an investor to stand out. Moreover, it lacks online signature tools and a vendor payments feature.

Read Also: Airbnb Investing For Beginners: Start Your Rental Business In 5 Steps

Hostaway

If you host short-term & vacation rentals on multiple platforms, including Airbnb and VRBO, or own multiple vacation rental properties, consider adding Hostaway to your list of the best vacation rental management software providers.

Launched in 2015, Hostaway is a property management software (PMS) with features that cover everything from marketing, guest communications, sales, and daily operations, to reporting and accounting. In other words, Hostaway has tools to automate and streamline everything you need in short-term rental property management.

For instance, it offers a reservations manager and CRM to automate and efficiently handle inquiries, reservations, and guest communication via a mobile app. The platform also includes a vacation rental channel manager that allows hosts listing on multiple platforms, including Airbnb, VRBO, Expedia, and Booking.com, to sync and manage all their listings under one unified platform. This not only simplifies listing management cross-platform but also prevents errors like double bookings.

Hostaway also boasts analytics and financial reporting capabilities, allowing investors and property managers to generate reports on factors like occupancy rates, pricing, and expenses. This gives them valuable insights into their listings’ performance and fuels data-driven decision-making, leading to better future outcomes.

Additionally, Hostaway offers automated payment processing, customizable websites for direct bookings, calendar management, and many other features that simplify listing and property management for short-term rental owners. Moreover, it integrates with over 2000 software and apps, further enhancing its all-in-one platform capabilities.

In essence, although Hostaway doesn’t publicly disclose its pricing information, it’s undoubtedly one of the most comprehensive property management software for vacation rentals.

Read also: Property Management Companies: The Ultimate Guide

Lodgify

If you’d like better control of your guest experiences and pricing or skip hosting commissions on sites like Airbnb, Lodgify could be the best PMS for short-term rental management needs. The platform offers user-friendly website templates that you can leverage to build a direct booking management website, thus side-stepping the drawbacks of listing on sites like Airbnb.

However, if you’d still like to enjoy exposure from listing on these sites, Lodgify offers a two-way API integration system to sync your direct website with leading booking sites, including HomeAway, Expedia, and Booking.com. Managing listings across these platforms is also guaranteed to be effortless, thanks to Lodgify’s channel manager.

Additionally, Lodgify offers listing management, a guest module for streamlined guest communications, task management features, payment processing, and a centralized calendar that syncs and updates across all your listing platforms when a change occurs on one platform.

In addition to the mentioned booking sites, Lodgify integrates with 28 other platforms, including Zapier and MailChimp, allowing users to consolidate the features they need under one cohesive platform.

Anything to be aware of? Overall, customer reviews paint a positive picture, but a few complain of poor customer service. Additionally, the platform’s pricing information isn’t quite straightforward, so you might want to contact the sales team for clarity.

Escapia

Escapia, a subsidiary of Expedia Group, is a cloud-based vacation rental software designed to make managing large short-term rental portfolios easy.

One of its standout features for large short-term rental portfolio management is its trust accounting module. Through tools in this module, property managers handling many vacation rentals can merge account statements for multiple property owners, split account statements for properties with shared ownership, automate recurring owner expenses management, and even create custom commission and revenue structures for each owner. Furthermore, they can also generate monthly and year-over-year(YoY) performance reports, allowing them to not only keep up with the performance of the vacation rentals they manage but also easily share progress with the property owners.

Escapia further simplifies large portfolio management for property owners with its housekeeping and maintenance management module. It empowers property managers with tools to automatically generate work orders for nearly any maintenance task, including cleaning and repairs. This saves the time and effort they’d spend creating these orders from scratch. They can also assign these orders to specific staff and even schedule them based on priority or the staff’s availability.

Escapia also features a performance dashboard. It displays each property’s real-time performance against its historical performance and the general vacation market. Even with minimal accounting skills, this dashboard allows property managers and individual owners to assess if their portfolios are performing as expected seamlessly.

Other features on Escapia include an opportunities hub with suggestions, tips on rate optimization, short-term rental improvement tips, a reservation calendar, and an owner portal.

Escapia is undoubtedly one of the best property management software for short-term rentals. It’s ideal for property managers or owners with over three short-term rentals. However, it’s not all perfect. It lacks API with Airbnb and Bookings.com and has no two-way short message service feature. Additionally, its range of features is tailored for those with large portfolios, creating a steep learning curve, especially for new users, or property managers with a small portfolio.

Guesty

If you’re specifically seeking short-term rental property management software to integrate your listings across platforms, Guesty is an excellent option. Launched in 2013, Guest offers a channel manager and Open API, allowing investors to integrate as many booking platforms as they need, including leading ones like Expedia, Airbnb, and VRBO. Consequently, any change they make on one platform is automatically applied across all pertinent listing sites, saving time, and effort.

However, Guesty offers more than cross-platform integration. It provides accounting tools and lead management solutions, including CRM, a user-friendly website builder, and visualized guest workflows.

Guesty also features a range of automation features that streamline a short-term rental owner's daily operations. For instance, it has templates for task automation, and users can set up smart rules for seamless price adjustments. Guesty users can also automate payment collection, guest reviews, and nearly every aspect of their vacation rental business.

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Avantio

Avantio is an award-winning property management software designed by a vacation rental property owner to address the unique needs of the vacation rental industry.

The platform offers a channel manager and multi-calendar capabilities, allowing individual owners and property managers to manage all guest, owner, and vendor correspondence on a unified platform. Users also get an easy-to-use custom website builder they can leverage to build direct booking websites.

Additionally, Avantio features revenue management functionality that helps vacation rental owners and managers automatically detect gaps in their calendars and adjust prices and occupancy rules as needed. The platform also includes trust accounting capabilities, allowing property managers to easily generate and share commission contracts and automate owner payment calculations.

Smoobu

Like all the best short-term rental management software solutions on our list, Smoobu is pretty comprehensive. The site offers tools and solutions covering nearly every range of the vacation rental management process.

These include Integration tools like the channel manager, rates synchronization, and open API for integrations with leading payment, online check-in, luggage, cleaning, and maintenance software apps. These integrations allow users to manage all their vacation rentals on one platform.

Smoobu also has features to streamline booking and guest communication, such as a reservation manager, a booking system, an availability calendar, message templates, and a unified guest inbox.

However, what we found most noteworthy about Smoobu is its guest guide features. From a location map, online check-in forms, instructions, and Wi-Fi credentials to weather widgets and even smart lock codes, this tool lets you create a guide for your guests featuring all the information they need regarding their reservation, consequently easing their check-ins, check-outs, and overall stays.

Another notable feature is shared accounts. This feature is particularly handy for property managers as it allows them to set up shared accounts with owners thus allowing them to easily keep up with what’s happening with their vacation rental business.

Besides owners, users can also set up Smoobu shared accounts with the maintenance crew, and other relevant parties. Even more impressive is that they can define access permissions, ensuring each party only accesses information pertinent to them. Furthermore, Smoobu offers statistics & KPIs for vacation rentals, allowing property managers to stay on top of their business’s performance. Ultimately, Smoobu is pretty comprehensive.

Hospitable

Timely responses to guest inquiries and messages significantly contribute to short-term rental bookings and overall occupancy rates. Therefore, property managers and individual vacation rental owners need to keep up with all guest messages and inquiries. However, doing so singlehandedly can prove quite overwhelming. That’s where Hospitable comes in. This software features an incredible messaging system.

It enables users to integrate multiple listing sites, thus creating a unified inbox for guest messages and insights. Additionally, Hospitable’s messaging system features artificial intelligence capabilities. It can recognize up to 29 languages, as well as questions on over 20 common topics. Consequently, it can automatically process, and instantly respond to guest messages ensuring no bookings slip through the cracks.

In addition to automated messaging, Hospitable offers e-signature tools, direct booking websites, task management automation, double-booking protection, and a range of other amazing features for short-term rental property owners and managers.

Read Also: Managing Rental Properties: A Real Estate Investor's Guide

OwnerRez

If you’d like to improve accounting for your short-term rentals or specifically use Quickbooks for accounting, OwnerRez is the PMS software you need. The platform directly integrates with Quickbooks, allowing users to view all their financial data on a single dashboard instead of switching between tabs endlessly.

OwnerRez also offers channel management, a booking engine, messaging automation tools, a website builder, payment processing features, CRM, and reporting tools.

LiveRez

Are you looking to replace multiple vacation management software with one? Consider LiveRez.

LiveRez is a comprehensive software with features geared towards property managers. These include a reservation manager that allows property managers and their staff to instantly generate and share booking quotes, or links for a specific, or multiple homes with guests via email. The reservation manager also features LiveScore, a tool that when enabled, automatically filters through guest reviews, collects the positive ones, and uploads them to the user’s website, thus getting the legwork out of such processes while ensuring only positive customer experiences are publicly displayed.

LiveRez also offers a channel manager that allows property managers with listings on multiple booking sites to sync and manage them under one platform in real time. This platform also features a trust accounting module for property managers to easily generate, save, and share property-based and income statements, tax authority reports, and even vendor payment receipts with vacation rental owners.

Property managers and individual investors managing their short-term vacation rentals will also appreciate the operations management module, which allows them to easily generate work orders, automate housekeeping and maintenance task assignments, and streamline vendor and team management.

Furthermore, LiveRez has an integrated eSignature and digital contract platform, meaning users can automatically create, share, and sign guest agreements and other relevant documents online! Even more impressive, LiveRez integrates with a long list of industry-leading PMS, allowing users to unify multiple tools under one platform.

How We Chose the Best Short-Term Rental Software

There are tons of property management software for short-term rentals in the real estate market, each claiming to be the best. So, to ensure we provide our readers with a list of the cream of the crop in STR platforms, we prioritized the following factors:

• Short-term rental management features: We evaluated each software on our list to ensure it offers features that simplify listing, marketing, and overall short-term rental property management. Some of the features we looked out for on booking software include how easy it is to list on the platform, and for PMS systems, we evaluated features like reservations calendar, rates management, cross-platform listing management, and API integration features.
• Pricing: We selected short-term software based on overall cost structure and personalized pricing options
• Vacation renter communication: We also evaluated each software on our list to ensure it offers guest communication features that are varied and user-friendly, such as renter portals, online payment processing, and e-signature tools
• User experience: Our team also made sure to review whether each software shortlisted features a user-friendly interface and hassle-free payment processing
• Customer reviews: User feedback is essential as it offers a sneak peek into the software based on actual user experiences. That’s why our team also made sure to evaluate user reviews, testimonials, and ratings while short-listing the best short-term and vacation rental software
• Customer support: We also considered how easy it is to get to the customer service team for technical, onboarding, and training support.

Final Thoughts: Best Short-Term & Vacation Rental Management Software

The short-term & vacation rental industry is pretty profitable, but profits don’t come on a silver platter. To achieve maximum profitability and overall success, individual owners and property managers must stay on top of guest experiences while managing marketing, bookings, accounting tasks, and performance. This makes having the best property management software incredibly critical.

From platforms that simplify hosting, like Airbnb, and those that allow cross-platform integration, like Hostaway and Smoobu, to software that automates messaging, thus streamlining guest communications, our list features some of the best options in the market. So, which one will you adapt for your vacation rental business? As you ponder on that, click this link to sign up for our free real estate training course to discover valuable investing strategies.