Our company Mountain Holiday Rentals started using Rental wise around 3 months ago. In the past we have used a couple of other channel managers, we tried Lodgify however there were a few things that really annoyed us about using their system mainly the fact that they take 1% of you bookings, that may not seem much but our average booking is 7k per week so it soon adds up. We then switched to Beds24, there system was extremely customisable and that was something that was very appealing however in my opinion their platform is dated and very hard to use, they have no onboarding help unless you want to pay €70 per hour and no live chat so if your stuck you stay stuck until they reply to an email, needless to say we stayed with them around 2 months and gave up.
Now we are using Rental wise and so far we are really happy, the platform looks and feels slick and it’s really user friendly, it’s taken us time to get our heads around the different setting however the team at Rental wise are so helpful and with you throughout, the live chat is incredibly helpful, if you need to fix something you can get done fast and that’s really important to us.
A few things we like about the free website tool
1: The booking property calendar is interactive so you can see booked dates and click on dates to make a booking
2: The booking pages are very clean a simple, easy to see the property details, calendars, prices and the image layout is brilliant.
3: Getting the website up and running pretty easy, a little bit of time needed to learn where everything is but that’s normal.
A few things we like about the back end system
1: User friendly interface, not cluttered and pretty easy to see where information is added.
2: Email inbox is nice, shows emails and bookings in one place so it’s easy to chat to guests before and after they book
3: The multi property booking calendar is nice, really simple to see all the bookings across all your properties, it shows the prices and you can click on a booking for further information on that booking
4: The dashboard, shows a really nice overview of your bookings in a monthly chart so it’s really easy to see which months are doing best, plus a occupancy pie chart that show how full you are (or empty!!)
One small negative issue I would add is that the website builder is a bit basic, you can’t really customise the website to your own brand colours so it’s very clear to guests they are leaving your website to make the booking. I’m told that can be changed if you use a website developer however we are not so keen on doing that right now. Being able to add some colours and a few features would be really good but not a deal breaker for us right now.
The system offers some great features at a pretty fair price and the team are always on hand to help. If you’re looking for a channel manager we would highly recommend Rental wise.