We move you off your current PMS. Free.
Host Tools is a channel manager for short-term rental hosts. One calendar across Airbnb, VRBO and Booking.com, automated guest messaging, and pricing rules that run without you.
Listings, calendars, message rules, smart locks, past reservations. We do the whole switch for you, usually in under an hour, and mostly without you.
Your current tool keeps running the whole time we set up. The switch itself happens on a call, with you watching.
30 minutes. No commitment, and no card needed to start a 14 day trial.
- 4.8 180+ Reviews
- Partnered with major channels
What the others charge to let you switch
These are their own published numbers. Hostaway puts its own onboarding at $500 and Guesty’s at $1,500. Hospitable charges about $500 for Rapid Rollout, its guided onboarding. iGMS scales its fee with your portfolio, from $199 up to $499 once you pass ten properties. That is money out before a single listing moves, on top of the monthly bill.
Guesty and Hostaway figures are Hostaway’s own, from its Guesty comparison page at hostaway.com/blog/guesty-alternatives, updated June 2026. Hospitable prices Rapid Rollout, its optional guided onboarding, at about $500 in its own help centre. iGMS lists one-time onboarding packages priced by property count, from $199 for one or two properties to $499 for ten or more, at try.igms.com/onboarding.
We charge nothing for the migration, and we do the work rather than handing you a checklist. Book a call, we build the account, you watch it go live. There is no tier above this one.
And what they take once you are on
Host Tools takes no cut of your booking revenue. You pay per listing per month and nothing else. No commissions, no per-booking fees, no percentage of what your guests pay. On a direct booking the guest pays into your own Stripe account and we deduct nothing from it.
Others price differently. Hospitable charges 1% on a direct booking on its Basic tier, and 4% commission plus 3% processing on Premium. On VRBO it offers to act as merchant of record for 3.9%. Hostaway adds a 1.8% fee on bookings through its booking website, passed to the guest by default. Guesty publishes $9 per listing per month plus 1% per reservation on its entry plan, and quotes privately above that.
A percentage grows every time you raise your rates. A per-listing price does not.
Hospitable: hospitable.com/pricing and hospitable.com/vrbo-payment-options. Hostaway: support.hostaway.com, “Booking Website: Booking Engine Fee”, which applies to US listings on Stripe, with 0.5% elsewhere. Guesty: guesty.com pricing, Guesty Lite; Pro and Enterprise are quote-only. Accessed September 2026.
You already know your software isn’t good enough.
That isn’t why you stay. You stay because every listing is connected, the message rules took a weekend to get right, and doing all of it again somewhere else is a project you keep moving to next month.
So we do the move for you. At no cost, whether or not you stay with us afterward.
What we actually do for you
Five things that would otherwise be your weekend.
- Connect your Airbnb, VRBO, and Booking.com accounts
- Import every listing and calendar
- Rebuild your message rules and automated guest messaging
- Set up your smart locks if you use them
- Walk through all of it live with you once it is running
What actually happens, in order
How long it takes
The planning call is 30 minutes. Building the account takes us 20 to 60 minutes for a handful of listings, longer for dozens. Across accounts that went on to run more than one listing, half had their first listing live within 15 minutes of connecting a channel. Message rules are the slow part. There is no bulk import for them in Host Tools, and we have not found one in the tools people leave, so we write them one at a time.
Which systems we move you from
We copy your settings across from any major PMS. Guesty, Guesty Pro, Hospitable, iGMS, Lodgify, Hostfully and Uplisting are the ones we see most. Invite us as a sub-user on your existing account during onboarding and we do the copying for you.
What moves, and what does not
Listings come from the channel rather than from your old software. Airbnb, VRBO, Booking.com and Houfy hand over the listing content, address and photos, so what lands is what guests see today. Calendars arrive with them, and two channels at the same address become one listing.
If you give us sub-user access we bring your message rules and pricing rules across with the rest of your settings. If you have not written any yet, or you would rather start clean, a new account comes with 16 message rules already written and switched off. You edit the ones you want and turn them on.
Your past reservations
Reservations arrive with the channel connection, so your upcoming stays are in place before go-live. Any scheduled rule we build afterwards picks them up, which means a booking already on your calendar still gets its check-in message.
You keep your older history too. If your current PMS can export its past reservations, send us the export and we import it.
Locks and the rest of your settings
We support all the major smart lock brands. Link your lock account once and every lock on it is found automatically, then each gets attached to a listing with its own buffers. Connected locks are $3 each per month. You do not need to clear the codes your old system wrote. A code does not reach the lock until 72 hours before check-in, so the first day or two after a switch looks empty.
PriceLabs reconnects from the PriceLabs side with a Host Tools API token. Stripe reconnects if you run a direct booking site. iCal feeds and webhooks get re-added. We do all of it on the call.
What you have to do yourself
A few steps have to come from your own accounts, because Airbnb and VRBO only accept them from the account holder. None of it is homework you do before we start. We are on the call with you for all of it.
If your VRBO listings are API connected to another software, VRBO has to decommission that connection first. You email them your account address and the listing IDs, and we give you the wording. VRBO usually turns it around in about 24 hours, and everything else on those listings keeps working while you wait.
Hand over your message rules whenever suits you, or give us sub-user access and we pull them ourselves.
The Airbnb disconnect happens at the very end, on the go-live call. Airbnb allows one property management app per account, so when you say go you disconnect the old one on Airbnb.com under Account, Privacy and Sharing, Services, and reconnect Host Tools. Nobody else can do that for you, which is why we stay on the line and walk you through it. It takes a few minutes.
Switching sync on clears the custom prices and availability rules sitting on that listing’s Airbnb calendar and removes iCal feeds imported there, because Host Tools takes over setting them. Instant Book switches on and you can switch it back off. Reservations, reviews and listing content are untouched. Co-hosted listings have to come in from the owner’s account.
When your old tool gets switched off
You decide, on the go-live call, with us on the line.
On Airbnb, setup mode lets us build your whole account while your current PMS stays connected and keeps running your listings. Availability and pricing sync stay blocked the whole time, which is the point of it. Messaging still works. When you switch, the real downtime is the few minutes Airbnb takes to re-authorise.
Cancel the old subscription whenever suits you. Most people ride out the billing cycle.
How it works
Planning call, 30 minutes
Tell us what you’re using now and how many listings you have. We connect your Airbnb and VRBO accounts, and every listing comes in switched off. Nothing writes to your calendar and nothing reaches your guests until you switch a listing on. Your current tool carries on exactly as it was.
We build it out
Listings, calendars, message rules, locks. Usually under an hour of our time, and you don’t need to be there for it. Your current tool is still running your business the whole time.
Go-live call
We go through everything together. When you say go, your old tool comes off and Host Tools takes over. You watch it happen. For most accounts it’s done in minutes.
Two systems are never writing to your calendar at the same time. That’s what causes double bookings, and this process rules it out.
If you look at what we have built and decide to stay where you are, that is a fine outcome. You keep the plan. It costs you nothing and we do not chase you afterwards.
Why hosts switch to us
Our VRBO connection is better than the standard one
Most channel managers plug into VRBO in a way that makes you the merchant of record. That means the guest’s payment runs through you, so if that guest disputes the charge months later, the chargeback comes out of your pocket.
Ours doesn’t work that way. You’re not the merchant of record, so there’s no chargeback exposure. If you have VRBO listings, that’s the reason to move.
Rated 4.8 on Capterra by more than 180 hosts
Airbnb made us a Preferred Software Partner, and Airbnb has since stopped accepting new applications to that programme, so that list is now closed. Our VRBO connection does not make you the merchant of record either, which decides whether a guest chargeback lands on VRBO or on you.
Founder, Host Tools
You talk to the founder
Write in and the reply comes from the person who builds the product. There’s no ticket queue and no support tier you have to pay to reach. It’s the one thing a bigger, better funded competitor can’t copy.
Connected to every channel you sell on
We connect through each channel’s official API. Nothing here is scraped, so nothing breaks the week a page changes. That matters more than any feature: a channel manager that drops a booking has cost you more than it saves.
See it for yourself
Pricing
Per listing, billed monthly. 14 day free trial, no credit card. The migration is free regardless of how many listings you have. See the full rate card.
Questions hosts ask us
Yes. No setup fee, no onboarding tier. That holds even if you look at what we’ve built, decide it isn’t for you, and stay where you are.
Airbnb, VRBO and Booking.com through official APIs. We also publish your listings to Google Vacation Rentals, and you can run your own direct booking site, with iCal for anything else.
The standard integration makes you the merchant of record, so guest chargebacks land on you. Ours doesn’t, so that exposure goes away.
On Airbnb and VRBO, yes. Airbnb has a setup mode that lets us build your whole account while your current software stays connected and keeps running your listings. On VRBO your old connection stays live until VRBO removes it, and we import and configure everything in the meantime. Everywhere else, listings import switched off, so nothing of ours writes anywhere until you say go.
We will move you over for free, and you can keep your old tool running while we do it.
One call, under an hour of setup, and nothing to cancel before you start.