HotelDsk and Guesty
Guesty is for short-term rental operators — people running listings, often across several addresses, on Airbnb and Vrbo. If your business is listings, keep it; it does that job properly. The pairing question only arises when one of those addresses stops behaving like a listing and starts behaving like a small hotel.
The short answer
Keep Guesty. This is not a choice between two things. It is a property management system: it sells the room, holds the reservation and issues the bill. HotelDsk is not one, and is not becoming one — no channel manager, no rate sync, no guest folio, no card payments, and none of them on a roadmap. It runs the other half of the day, the half that begins once a room is sold: what is ready, who is cleaning it, what the kitchen is cooking, what the store has run out of, what was spent at the market this morning. So there is nothing here to win — you already have the first layer, and the only question is whether the second one is worth an afternoon. The case for running both, in full →
Thirteen features, two columns
Every Guesty cell follows their own published material — a dash means it is not in it, which is not the same as no. Of the thirteen: HotelDsk 11 ✓, Guesty 2 ✓ · 1 ~. The rows they cover are the booking machine; the rows we cover are the property running underneath it — who is on shift, what got cleaned and inspected, what the kitchen is cooking, what is left on the shelf, and what was bought and paid for.
| Feature | HotelDsk | Guesty |
|---|---|---|
| Channel manager & OTA sync | HotelDsk✗ no | Guesty✓ yes |
| Booking engine, folios & card payments | HotelDsk✗ no | Guesty✓ yes |
| Live room status & housekeeping | HotelDsk✓ yes | Guesty~ partly |
| Cleaning checklists with inspection sign-off | HotelDsk✓ yes | Guesty— not published |
| Maintenance tickets & preventive service on assets | HotelDsk✓ yes | Guesty— not published |
| Tasks that assign themselves to whoever is on shift | HotelDsk✓ yes | Guesty— not published |
| Staff clock in / clock out | HotelDsk✓ yes | Guesty— not published |
| Leave requests & approvals | HotelDsk✓ yes | Guesty— not published |
| Kitchen meal planning & what was served | HotelDsk✓ yes | Guesty— not published |
| Inventory — stock ledger, counts, audits & low-stock alerts | HotelDsk✓ yes | Guesty— not published |
| Petty cash & market purchases | HotelDsk✓ yes | Guesty— not published |
| Vendor invoices & purchasing | HotelDsk✓ yes | Guesty— not published |
| Each staff member picks their own language | HotelDsk✓ yes | Guesty— not published |
✓ in their published material · ~ partly, or via an add-on · ✗ they say no · — not in their published material. The full ten-product grid is on the compare page.
What you get by adding HotelDsk to Guesty
Guesty coordinates the listings, the messages and the channels. HotelDsk runs the building — and the difference shows the moment a property has a kitchen, a store cupboard, a gate and staff who turn up to it rather than a cleaner who visits between guests. Per-listing pricing stops describing you at about the same point.
Nothing to disconnect
You are not migrating anything. Your booking system keeps taking bookings and issuing bills exactly as it does today; HotelDsk starts empty and fills up as your staff use it.
No integration to wait for
The two do not talk to each other, and do not need to. Our room board changes when a housekeeper marks a job done — a person, not a feed. That is also why it works for a walk-in guest and a phone booking, not just an OTA one.
The half a PMS was never built for
Stock counts by store, market purchases, petty cash, meal planning, the visitor gate log, a nightly closing that someone has to actually file. These are not missing features in your PMS; they are a different job.
A price that does not need a meeting
Free to five rooms, then published. If it turns out you did not need it, you have spent an afternoon rather than a procurement cycle.
Four things HotelDsk will never do — and Guesty already does
These are refusals, not gaps, and there is no roadmap behind them. Each one is a job Guesty already does for you, and doing it worse alongside them would help nobody. Why the line is drawn there →
No channel manager, and no OTA rate sync
Whatever pushes your rates and availability today keeps doing it. Distribution is a solved, crowded, expensive job, and doing it badly next to somebody who does it well helps nobody.
No guest folio, and no card payments
We never touch the money a guest owes you. HotelDsk records what a guest used — the dinner, the mini-bar, the late checkout — so whoever bills them has the numbers, and the bill stays where it is.
No booking engine, and no commission
Your website, your direct bookings and your commission arrangements are unchanged. We do not sit between you and a guest.
No migration, and nothing to import
There is nothing here to move your history into. HotelDsk starts empty on the day you start using it, and fills up from the work your staff do.
Roughly what you would pay
Both of these are published figures, which makes this the easiest comparison on the page — and the least like-for-like, so read the note underneath.
$19.99≈ €19₹999a month at 10 rooms; free to 5
- Free forever up to 5 rooms, no card
- No contract, no setup fee, no implementation
- Decide tonight without speaking to anyone
from $9≈ from €8≈ from ₹800per listing / month
- Published as starting from $9 per listing per month, scaling with listing count; Pro and Enterprise by quote.
- No free tier published.
Source: guesty.com/pricing
Currency conversions are ours, at rough August 2026 rates, and are marked with a ≈ — the vendor quoted only the currency their figure is shown in when you first land here.
Eight of the ten publish no price at all, so most of the figures above are third-party estimates from named review sites, gathered in August 2026. Sources disagree with each other — sometimes by a factor of three — and none of them is the vendor speaking. The only figure that binds anybody is the one on the quote you are given.
They are also not like-for-like, and we would rather say so than let the table imply otherwise. Most of these bundle a property management system, a channel manager and a booking engine. HotelDsk sells none of those at any price. If you need them, the right comparison is between those products, and we are not in it.
What the numbers do show is the thing we can stand behind: the operations layer does not have to cost what a platform costs, and you should not have to book a sales call to find out what it costs at all.
What each one covers
Not a scorecard — a map of where one stops and the other starts. Everything in the Guesty column comes from their own published material, or, where they publish nothing, from named review sources. Where we could not verify something, it says so rather than guessing.
| What | HotelDsk | Guesty |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | HotelDskThe operations layer for a small property — the whole working day, on top of whatever books your rooms. Not a PMS, deliberately. | GuestyShort-term rental property management platform. |
| Built for | HotelDskIndependent hotels, guesthouses, homestays and villas — roughly 3 to 30 rooms. | GuestyPriced by listings: 1–3, 4–199, and 200+. Vacation rentals, B&Bs and guesthouses, urban rentals, aparthotels. |
| Channel manager / OTA sync | HotelDskNo, and not planned. Whatever takes your bookings today keeps doing it — we read the arrivals and run the floor underneath. Competing on distribution would make us a worse version of the system you already pay for. | GuestyYes — channel sync across booking platforms, with a unified inbox. |
| Guest bill & payments | HotelDskNo, and not planned. Your bills stay where they are. HotelDsk records what a guest used — dinner, the minibar, a late checkout — so whoever bills them has the numbers, and never touches the money itself. | GuestyReservations and financial operations for listings. |
| Housekeeping & room status | HotelDskThe core of the product: room board, checklists, inspection, re-clean, do-not-disturb. | GuestyTask management, oriented around turnovers between guests. |
| Staff languages | HotelDskEnglish, Hindi and Hinglish, chosen per person rather than per property. | GuestyNot published as a per-staff-member setting. |
| Staff without an email address | HotelDskYes — they open a shared login link on their phone. No email account needed. | GuestyNot published. |
| Published price | HotelDskPublished. Free to 5 rooms, then $19.99 / ₹999 a month. | GuestyPublished as starting from $9 per listing per month, scaling with listing count; Pro and Enterprise by quote. |
| Free plan | HotelDskYes, free forever up to 5 rooms — the full app. No card. | GuestyNo free tier published. |
Who does what
Keep Guesty for…
- Units spread across addresses, where the job is coordinating listings.
- Guest messaging volume across several booking platforms.
- Growth by adding listings rather than by adding staff.
Add HotelDsk for…
- One address with a team on it: shifts, attendance, briefings and handovers.
- Stock counting, meal planning, petty cash and a nightly closing — none of which is a listings problem.
- A visitor gate log, which a listing does not have and a guesthouse does.
No booking system at all? Plenty of small properties run on a notebook and a WhatsApp group, and HotelDsk works exactly the same way for them — add a booking system whenever you need one, and nothing here changes. How HotelDsk sits on top of whatever you run →
Is a cleaning board any use if it is not wired to your bookings?
This is the question we get most, and it deserves a straight answer: yes, and the reason is that room status has nothing to do with where the booking came from. Whether a guest walked in, phoned you, or arrived through an OTA, the same physical room still has to be stripped, cleaned, checked and released.
What a connected PMS adds is that a checkout flips the room to dirty by itself. That is a real convenience and we do not have it. What it does not do is any of the work afterwards — and the work afterwards is where small properties actually lose the morning.
No more front-desk blindness
Whoever is on the desk can see which rooms are ready without phoning the cleaning crew. In HotelDsk the status changes when the housekeeper marks the job done, which is a person rather than a feed — and a person is what you have.
The clipboard stops going stale
A printed room list is out of date the moment a guest asks for a late checkout. A shared board is not, and your housekeeper updates it from the phone already in her hand.
Faults and mini-bar caught in the room
A broken light or a used mini-bar gets logged where it is noticed, before the guest has left. That is revenue and maintenance you were previously losing to memory.
Nothing to lose by trying
Five rooms are free and there is no card field in the product. If it does not fit your house, you have spent an afternoon.
Checked August 2026 against guesty.com/pricing. Products move and prices change — if anything here is out of date or unfair, tell us and we will correct it. We would rather be accurate than flattering: a comparison page you cannot trust is worth less than no comparison page at all.
Add it alongside Guesty
Nothing to disconnect and nothing to migrate — Guesty carries on exactly as it does today. Five rooms are free, so finding out costs you an afternoon.
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