Cabin booking software holds your calendar, keeps your cabins in step with Airbnb and Vrbo, and takes a card on your own website. Published prices for one small property start at nothing with Sirvoy, then 15.50 euros a month at Beds24, $14 at Lodgify billed yearly, $29 at Hospitable, $37 at ReservationKey for four cabins and $40 at OwnerRez, rising to about $150 at innRoad and $236 at RoomRaccoon. ResNexus and Hostaway publish no figure anywhere and quote you on a call.
The shortlist, priced
| System | Published price at one small property | Who it suits |
|---|---|---|
| ReservationKey | $37 a month at 4 units, $44 at 10, $52 at 15 | Cabin and resort owners who want one bill. The subscription carries the booking engine, a website that is hosted and secured for you, payments and automated emails, with no long term contract, no booking commission and no per user fee. The channel manager is a $25 a month extra |
| OwnerRez | $40 for the first property, then $15 each for the second and third and $10 for the fourth | Anyone selling by the week in summer and by the night in October. An OwnerRez season rule overrides the property's own minimum nights and changeover days. Payment schedules split 50% at booking and 50% thirty days out |
| Lodgify | $14 to $62 a month at one property billed yearly, against $18 to $77 billed monthly | A handful of cabins and a website you want the software to build. The cheapest plan covers one property and the next covers two, so count your cabins before you read the $14 |
| Hospitable | $29, $59 and $99 a month, with a free tier below them | Cabins that live or die on Airbnb and Vrbo. Every plan carries every channel, including the free one |
| Beds24 | From 15.50 euros a month, with each channel link charged at 0.55 euros | Owners who enjoy configuring things. The Beds24 Stripe setup takes a deposit at booking and the balance before check in, using 30% in the worked example |
| Hostfully | From $15 a property, $25 on the Pro plan | Cabins with a weekend pattern. Hostfully carries a minimum weekend stay field plus a separate two night rule for a Friday arrival. Card processing and direct booking fees apply on its Growth plan |
| Guesty | $9 a month plus 1% of each reservation on Lite, which stops at three listings | Three cabins at most on that price. Four or more puts you on Guesty Pro, quoted on a call |
| Hostaway | Nothing published. The pricing page opens a quote form | Bigger cabin operations. Hostaway sets minimum night rules against specific dates, so a seven night holiday week syncs out to Airbnb and Vrbo. The auto payment guidance suggests 50% at reservation with the balance fourteen days out |
| Sirvoy | $0 for a single unit, with 0% commission and no fees on any plan | One cabin, or a trial before you commit. Only the Pro plan connects Booking.com and Expedia, so a growing property moves up quickly |
| Lodgix | From $79.99 a month covering one to seven properties | Seven cabins on one bill. It charges 0.5% on Airbnb and Vrbo bookings and nothing at all on the ones your own website brings in |
| innRoad | About $150 a month on its own estimate, adjusted per property | A lodge with a front desk, or cabins attached to a campground, which is the market it names on its own page |
| RoomRaccoon | $236 a month at entry, or $197 billed annually | Owners who want payments inside the subscription and will accept that the card and terminal fees are billed separately with no rate published |
| ResNexus | Nothing published. Priced on your unit count and your season | Cabin and glamping operators who want one supplier for everything. The subscription includes a commission free booking engine |
Every figure above comes from the vendor's own page, checked on August 2026, with Beds24, Guesty, Lodgify, OwnerRez and ReservationKey checked again in September 2026.
Two of the thirteen will not give you a number until you talk to them, and one of those two, ResNexus, is built for exactly your kind of property. Book that call early, because the rest of your comparison waits on it.
Card processing sits on top of every row. Stripe publishes 2.9% plus 30 cents on a successful domestic card payment, and any bundled payment product should be measured against that number before you agree to it.
Some of these systems want to process the cards themselves, and the rate is where the published price stops. RoomRaccoon calls every plan commission free and then states in its own pricing questions that payment and card machine fees are billed separately, with no percentage attached. Hostfully applies 1% card processing and 0.85% on direct bookings, on its Growth plan only. Lodgix charges 0.5% on Airbnb and Vrbo bookings and nothing on the ones your website brings in. Ask any vendor for the card rate in writing, ask whose account holds the money until it reaches your bank, and ask whether you can keep your own Stripe account.
What a cabin needs that a hotel system never thinks about
Every vendor demonstrates the calendar and the booking page. Nobody will show you what sits underneath unless you ask, so arrive with your own questions.
A minimum stay that changes with the season
Your calendar has to carry a seven night Saturday to Saturday rule for July and a two night rule for late October, plus the day of the week on which a stay is allowed to start. A booking calendar holding one minimum for the whole year will let a guest put three nights into a week you only sell whole. Most of the time that guest is refused at the last step and goes somewhere else. Occasionally the booking goes through and somebody has to unpick it the next morning.
Saving the rule on the admin screen does not always change the dates that are already on sale. Hostaway's own documentation says a changed default leaves dates that are already open exactly as they were, and the new policy only reaches them after a bulk update across the next two years of calendar. An operator on OwnerRez's forum, working through a seven night summer minimum, a separate holiday minimum and a Sunday to Sunday changeover, finished the thread with "This was more difficult than it had to be."
Beyond Pricing's Q2 2026 report on the US short term rental market ties long minimums to the swings in booking lead time: "Longer minimum length of stay requirements are compounding the lead time fluctuation problem." A seven night rule left running through a shoulder week will leave the cabin empty for the whole of it.
A deposit now and the balance before they arrive
Cabins get booked months ahead, so the deposit and balance split is the standard shape here. OwnerRez schedules 50% at booking and the rest thirty days before arrival, Hostaway's guidance is 50% at reservation with the balance fourteen days out, and Beds24's worked example uses 30% up front. No vendor page we read recommends a percentage for cabins specifically, so treat those scheduling defaults as a starting point you can move. If some of your guests still pay by check or in cash, ask whether the system can record a payment it never took, and whether the booking then counts as paid.
Stripe's documentation on holding funds puts an online card authorization at roughly seven days, after which it expires and the money goes back to the guest. On a cabin booked in March for a stay in July, the hold is gone months before anyone arrives. Capture the deposit as a real payment, then take the balance from the stored card when its date comes round.
The months you are closed
Most cabin operations shut for part of the year, whether for snow, mud season or maintenance. Blocking those months needs a calendar that can take a long stretch off sale on every channel at once. When it cannot, a guest books a week you are closed and somebody has to call and cancel them. Make the demo block three months across every channel at once while you watch, then try to book inside the block from the public page.
Check-in when there is no phone signal
A guest arriving at a cabin after dark, at the end of a dirt road, with one bar of reception, cannot load a web page to find the door code. Send the arrival details the day before, in a message they can read without opening anything, so the directions and the door code are already sitting on the phone by the time reception drops out on the last few miles. Send yourself the arrival message the system produces, open it on a phone with the data turned off, and see whether the directions and the code are still in front of you. Ask the demo who produces that door code, too. Some systems generate it and put it into the message themselves. In others somebody at your end types it in by hand, which starts costing real time as the cabin count climbs.
Cleaning cabins that are not in one building
Cleaning twelve cabins spread over forty acres means driving between them in some order, and getting that order wrong costs your housekeeper most of a day. The software has to produce a cleaning list arranged in an order somebody can actually drive, with the turnovers marked on it. Ask the demo to put tomorrow morning's list on the screen and watch how long it takes them to find it.
Damage deposits
Hot tubs, fireplaces, boats and pets all make a damage deposit worth having, and the mechanics differ system to system. A system may place a hold on the card, charge the amount and refund it after the stay, or sell the guest an insurance product. The hold route runs into the same seven day authorization window as the deposit, so on a long lead time booking the hold has to be placed within days of arrival. Ask which of the three a system actually does, and when the hold is taken.
The whole place, for a wedding
A family reunion or a wedding party takes every cabin you have, and the whole thing needs handling as one booking, carrying a deposit and an invoice of its own. Ask how the software handles it. If the answer is that you enter nine bookings by hand and keep them in step yourself, find that out before you sign the contract.
What the platforms take before the money reaches you
Vrbo publishes its fee as a 3% payment processing fee plus a 5% commission fee. Airbnb has moved most hosts onto a single host fee of 15.5%, taken out of the payout, according to its own help page. Booking.com publishes no percentage at all, since the rate depends on your country, your property type and the agreement you signed.
Checked on September 2026.
Commission at that level is the entire argument for a booking page of your own. Read your platform contracts before you advertise a lower price on it, because several of them restrict what you are allowed to show in public. Lodging tax is the other thing that changes when the booking comes to you instead of a platform, because some channels collect and remit it for you in some places and hand it back to you in others. Who collects the occupancy tax works through that one channel by channel. None of the thirteen says anything useful about county lodging tax on its pricing page, so make the demo add your own county's rate to a test booking and show you the invoice it produces.
The charge that never fired at our own property
We do not run cabins. MINT @Naschmarkt is 18 serviced apartments in Vienna, and its deposit schedule works the way a cabin's does: some of the money when the guest books, the rest charged to the card they left before they arrive. Long lead times and split payments put a city apartment and a cabin in the same position, with the money arriving in two pieces weeks or months apart.
For a stretch of the summer the second charge simply did not happen. No error was raised anywhere, which meant nothing appeared in the payments list for anybody to notice. The card had never been stored for future use during the first payment, so when the time came for the balance there was nothing on file to charge. One field in the deposit step fixed it. We only found it by going looking for bookings that should have been paid in full and were not, which took an afternoon and should have taken a fortnightly ten minutes all along.
A cabin business is more exposed to that failure than most, because the whole schedule depends on a charge that fires weeks after the guest has stopped paying attention. Pull the last ten bookings that have passed their balance date and check that each one is actually paid. Do that before you trust the schedule, and again every month afterwards.
Which one, for which kind of cabin operation
Two or three cabins, and you would rather not think about software. Sirvoy's free single unit tier or Hospitable's free plan will get you to a real calendar for nothing, and Lodgify at $14 a month billed yearly will build you a website as well. Watch the property counts on the cheap plans.
Four to fifteen cabins on one site, sold by the week in season. ReservationKey at $44 a month for ten units and OwnerRez at $40 for the first property are the two that publish a price and handle seasonal minimums and split payments without an argument. ReservationKey includes the website; OwnerRez expects you to have one or to buy its hosted site.
Cabins attached to a campground or an RV park. innRoad names that market on its own page and prices at about $150 a month. ResNexus covers cabins, lodges and glamping and will quote you. Get both on a call in the same week so you can compare like for like.
A lodge with a front desk, a restaurant and cabins in the grounds. You are shopping for a hotel system that also handles cabins. RoomRaccoon at $236 and innRoad at about $150 are the published prices in that shape, and ResNexus is the specialist worth the call.
You are already on something that works. Keeping it usually wins. Changing systems in the middle of a season costs weeks of your attention, and a smaller subscription will not repay them. If the only thing missing is the platform connections, thirty one channel managers priced for a small property covers buying that piece on its own.
Below about $350,000 a year of bookings we do not take on a direct booking build, because the commission you would save will not cover what the work costs in the first year, and who we build for says so plainly. Under that line, fix the booking page and the deposit schedule yourself and make sure the balance charges are firing. None of that costs money.
Five things to make a demo prove
- Set a seven night minimum with a Saturday changeover for July, leave October at two nights, then open a July date that was already on sale and show me what a guest sees.
- Take a booking nine months out with a deposit now, then show me exactly when and how the balance gets charged, and what happens if that charge fails.
- Block three months for the off season across every channel at once, then try to book inside it from the public page.
- Put tomorrow morning's cleaning list on the screen, showing which cabins are turning over and which guests are staying on.
- Send me a year of cost for my number of cabins with every transaction fee included, by email, before the follow up call.
Finding out whether your own booking page enforces any of this takes about twenty minutes, and the Book Now test walks through it. If you do not have a page worth testing yet, the website builders compared for small operators covers what it takes to get one.
If you would rather somebody sat with your shortlist and pushed on the seasonal calendar and the balance charge with you, book a call. Twenty minutes, about your property, with no slide deck.
