Bookerville

Bookerville is well-designed, intuitive and straightfoward. If you have even a rudimentary exposure to vacation rental software, Bookerville is a snap to learn and set up with an effective wizard to step you through. There is also thorough online user help text. The hands-on training required with other software vendors to set up and learn how to use is not really even needed here.

None of the functions is overly-elaborate or fussy, yet it's simplicity allows for powerful custom usage to support odd, one-off reservations that you can still support in the system.

Compared to other vendors, I found very few bugs in the software, everything appears to work. And if you do need help, the customer service has been top-notch.

For time zone reasons, it was important to select a North American-based software company. I also felt that in these times of companies having their computers hacked, American companies are held to a higher security standard to ensure my data stays safe.

No critical issues, but:

The guest booking calendar does not automatically switch between desktop and mobile views (one workaround is to have a "change to mobile view" button).

Bookerville's flexibility has a price, requiring extra time for data maintenance:
* On other vendor software, to change the nightly rate for a range of dates, you simply change the rate on a line in the rate table. Bookerville allows mass-assigning nightly rates for a date range and it is assigned to each night, but the rate range is not remembered: If you have higher rates during a summer festival for example, you have to remember why the rates are higher for those nights. And if you apply new rates for a period but have rate exceptions within that period (July 4th in summer for instance) those rates are overwritten and have to be re-entered
* Assigning min/max night stays works like assigning nightly rates
* Managing guest data is only for each reservation. I cannot import a list of previous guests from my old software to keep their contact info in one place.
* You can't flag guests who did not pay their bill or were rough on your property. And you can't categorize guests and market to them (email all military guests for Pearl Harbor Day for example)
* You can specify other services to sell along with a night's stay, but you can't sell things without a room reservation and there is no "qty" field to sell more than one, so you can't sell logo products or gift cards.

While Bookerville also works with larger vacation rental concerns they continue to offer a space for us smaller vacation rental proprietors. I have determined that Channel Managers are not yet able to handle proprietors who only manage one property. Bookerville however, continues to take care of our needs.

Most important to me in that regard is the integration/synchronization with Airbnb. While Airbnb is a great advertising platform I have yet to see that their ability to coordinate all emails with cleaning staff and to some extent, guests, is comparable to what I am able to do with Bookerville.

Customer support also continues to be solid with Bookerville. I have yet to submit an issue that has not been dealt with fairly quickly and to my satisfaction.

At this point I cannot think of another feature that could be added to Bookerville. Some times the year end reports do not seem to answer a question I might have for tax purposes. Perhaps I should submit a request!

It's web based, and affordable, exports to accounting programs, links to vacation rental listing site calendars. Has automated emails to guests, owners, and staff.

Very little. The size of email template preview doesn't allow size change.