HotelDsk and Little Hotelier
This is the pairing we see most, and the one this page is really written for. Little Hotelier is built for exactly our size of property — SiteMinder says 1 to 30 rooms — but it is a booking and distribution product: calendar, channel manager, booking engine. It is not trying to run your floor, and we are not trying to sell your rooms.
The short answer
Keep Little Hotelier. 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 Little Hotelier 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 ✓, Little Hotelier 2 ✓. 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 | Little Hotelier |
|---|---|---|
| Channel manager & OTA sync | HotelDsk✗ no | Little Hotelier✓ yes |
| Booking engine, folios & card payments | HotelDsk✗ no | Little Hotelier✓ yes |
| Live room status & housekeeping | HotelDsk✓ yes | Little Hotelier— not published |
| Cleaning checklists with inspection sign-off | HotelDsk✓ yes | Little Hotelier— not published |
| Maintenance tickets & preventive service on assets | HotelDsk✓ yes | Little Hotelier— not published |
| Tasks that assign themselves to whoever is on shift | HotelDsk✓ yes | Little Hotelier— not published |
| Staff clock in / clock out | HotelDsk✓ yes | Little Hotelier— not published |
| Leave requests & approvals | HotelDsk✓ yes | Little Hotelier— not published |
| Kitchen meal planning & what was served | HotelDsk✓ yes | Little Hotelier— not published |
| Inventory — stock ledger, counts, audits & low-stock alerts | HotelDsk✓ yes | Little Hotelier— not published |
| Petty cash & market purchases | HotelDsk✓ yes | Little Hotelier— not published |
| Vendor invoices & purchasing | HotelDsk✓ yes | Little Hotelier— not published |
| Each staff member picks their own language | HotelDsk✓ yes | Little Hotelier— 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 Little Hotelier
Little Hotelier fills the calendar and stops the double bookings. HotelDsk takes it from there: the room that needs turning over before the 3pm arrival, the checklist attached to it, the inspection, the linen that is running low, the cook who needs a headcount, the cash that left the tin this morning. Two subscriptions, no integration, and neither one waiting on the other.
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 Little Hotelier already does
These are refusals, not gaps, and there is no roadmap behind them. Each one is a job Little Hotelier 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
$29–$109≈ €27–€100≈ ₹2,500–₹9,500a month + 1% booking fee
- Published as a "from" monthly figure, plus a stated 1% booking fee on gross reservation profit. Monthly with no contract, annual discount, 30-day free trial, no setup fee for self-service onboarding.
- No, but a 30-day free trial.
Source: their own pricing page publishes a from-figure; review sites cite $29–$39 for Basics and $109 for Pro, 2026
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 Little Hotelier 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 | Little Hotelier |
|---|---|---|
| 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. | Little HotelierSmall-property front desk and distribution system. |
| Built for | HotelDskIndependent hotels, guesthouses, homestays and villas — roughly 3 to 30 rooms. | Little HotelierStated plainly on their site: small accommodation providers with 1–30 rooms — hotels, B&Bs, guesthouses, motels, apartments, campgrounds. |
| 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. | Little HotelierYes — this is the core of it, from SiteMinder. |
| 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. | Little HotelierReservations and payments; payments included on Pro, an add-on on Basics. |
| Housekeeping & room status | HotelDskThe core of the product: room board, checklists, inspection, re-clean, do-not-disturb. | Little HotelierNot a headline module. The product is built around the booking calendar. |
| Staff languages | HotelDskEnglish, Hindi and Hinglish, chosen per person rather than per property. | Little HotelierNot 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. | Little HotelierNot published. |
| Published price | HotelDskPublished. Free to 5 rooms, then $19.99 / ₹999 a month. | Little HotelierPublished as a "from" monthly figure, plus a stated 1% booking fee on gross reservation profit. Monthly with no contract, annual discount, 30-day free trial, no setup fee for self-service onboarding. |
| Free plan | HotelDskYes, free forever up to 5 rooms — the full app. No card. | Little HotelierNo, but a 30-day free trial. |
Who does what
Keep Little Hotelier for…
- OTA rate and availability sync — the thing that stops double bookings.
- A direct booking engine on your own website.
- One calendar for reservations, from a company that only does this.
Add HotelDsk for…
- Everything after the booking lands — which is most of the working day at a small property.
- The moment cleaning becomes somebody else’s job, a calendar stops being enough to coordinate from.
- Stock, meals, maintenance, the gate log and petty cash, none of which a distribution product touches.
- Staff screens in Hindi or Hinglish, and login links for staff with no email.
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 littlehotelier.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 Little Hotelier
Nothing to disconnect and nothing to migrate — Little Hotelier carries on exactly as it does today. Five rooms are free, so finding out costs you an afternoon.
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