Which one can your own booking page build on?
OwnerRez is the one to build on, because of a single option on the quote it creates for a guest. A quote hold is the system putting a temporary block on the nights a guest is in the middle of paying for, so nobody else can take them while the card clears, and the block falls away by itself if the money never arrives. OwnerRez's own page for creating a quote lists exactly that: a hold on the quoted dates, switched off unless you ask for it, with an expiry that falls back to whatever you set for that property. Hostaway's own technical guides describe nothing equivalent, and the one calendar-blocking waiting status it does document, for a guest who still has a required step to finish, applies only to Airbnb bookings.
Here's what that difference means when a card gets declined. On OwnerRez, the hold just expires and the nights go back on sale on their own, nobody has to touch anything. On Hostaway, the reservation already exists before the card is even charged, so a decline becomes yours to clean up by hand. If you have not settled on a property system at all yet, Choosing a property system for a small hotel, inn or serviced apartment: what it actually lets you build prices about a dozen of them for a property your size.
What does Hostaway cost compared to OwnerRez?
You can get OwnerRez's price without talking to anyone, while Hostaway won't give you a number until you've gotten on a call with sales. OwnerRez publishes the whole scale: a $40 a month minimum you pay even if every property on the account is disabled, with properties 5 to 9 billed at $8 each and properties 10 to 19 at $7 each. Hostaway's pricing page asks how many listings you manage and shows no number on any of its three steps.
|
Hostaway |
OwnerRez |
| Published price |
None. The pricing page is a three-step form ending in a quote |
$40 a month minimum; properties 5 to 9 at $8 each, 10 to 19 at $7 each |
| Can your checkout hold the dates while the guest pays |
No hold documented: create the booking, then charge |
Yes, with its own expiry on the hold |
| Its own booking website |
Free with a subscription. Pro is $49 a month plus 0.5% of what it books, and Hostaway charges guests 1.8% directly in the US |
Unlimited bookings, no setup fees, no booking fees, no contracts, 14-day free trial |
| Platform connections |
Preferred and premier partner status with Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com and Expedia; a change is usually out within seconds |
Direct connections to Vrbo, Airbnb, Booking.com and Google Vacation Rentals, inside the base price |
| Identical units under one name |
One multi-unit listing with sub-units, billed per unit rather than per listing |
No pooled count. Each unit is its own billed property, tied to the rest by Mutual Blocking |
| Showing an owner only their own unit |
Not possible below listing level: the parent listing carries every sub-unit's calendar and financials |
Already separate, since each unit is its own property record |
| What its comparison page says about the other |
OwnerRez's cheaper entry price costs you features, reliability and support |
Hostaway charges the guest 1.8% per booking through its booking engine, plus a 1% application fee off the host (OwnerRez's claim about Hostaway, not confirmed on Hostaway's own site) |
Every row read off the two companies' own pages, checked on October 2026: Hostaway pricing, direct booking, channel manager, multi-unit listings; OwnerRez costs and fees, pricing, combined properties; and the last row from Hostaway's and OwnerRez's comparison pages.
One correction before you use that last row. The 1.8% guest fee is real and Hostaway states it itself on its own direct booking page, next to the $49 Pro add-on and the 0.5% reservation fee. The 1% application fee is OwnerRez's reading of a rival and appears nowhere on Hostaway's site, so ask about it directly on the sales call before you put a number on it.
Count the units. Ten identical rooms cost the same on Hostaway whether you file them as one multi-unit listing or ten separate ones, because the billing follows units. On OwnerRez those ten rooms are ten billed properties even when Mutual Blocking makes them behave as one.
How many identical rooms does your calendar say are left?
Hostaway keeps one availability count for a room type and spreads it across the units underneath it. OwnerRez doesn't have that kind of count built in: instead, it links each unit's calendar to the others, so booking one blocks the rest. Pooled inventory is what you have when several identical rooms sell under one name and your calendar owes you a number: how many of them are still free on a given night.
- A multi-unit listing on Hostaway is one parent listing with its units underneath, and charges land per unit, so ten rooms under one listing bill as ten.
- Mutual Blocking on OwnerRez ties separate property records together so a booking on one closes the others, and each stays billed individually.
- For a house you sell whole, by the room and by the bed, OwnerRez wants a record for the house, one per room and one per bed.
We hit this at our own property. Maxine and I own MINT @Naschmarkt in Vienna, where our 18 serviced apartments are grouped into five apartment types, and for part of last year the booking page was turning guests away on nights we had free. 5 of 30 nights looked bookable before the fix; 26 of 30 after. Pooled multi-unit availability had been reporting a whole apartment type unavailable if any one physical unit inside it was booked. We rebuilt the count from the reservations instead of trusting the flag the property system handed us, and the pooled-inventory fix we ran at MINT is written up with its caveats.
Nobody reports this kind of error. A double booking gets noticed fast because the guest who shows up calls you, but a guest your calendar wrongly turns away just quietly books somewhere else instead of ever calling to tell you. A pooled-count error like this can run for months, and it's easy to blame a slow season instead of the real cause. Test it this week on whatever you run now:
- Pick a type you sell two or more of, and take one unit of it off sale for a midweek night about a month out.
- Ask your own booking page for that type on that night, the way a guest would.
- If the page still offers it, your count works. If the page says you are full, you have been turning money away for as long as that type has been pooled.
Then ask the vendor the question I now put to all of them before signing: list every status a booking or an inquiry can sit in, and say which of them block a unit. Inquiries, unconfirmed holds, pending payments and owner stays all behave differently, and guessing at that list is how operators produce overbookings. If you are weighing a different pair of names instead, Lodgify vs OwnerRez: what twelve units cost on each, and which to buy walks through the same questions.
Which one do you start with at 8 units, and which at 25?
| Your property |
Where I would start |
| 8 to 15 units, nearly everything arriving through the platforms, nobody technical on the payroll |
Hostaway. Preferred and premier status across Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com and Expedia, with a change out within seconds, is worth more than a hold you have no plans to use |
| 15 to 25 units, some money already landing on your own domain |
OwnerRez. Your checkout can hold the nights while the card clears, the price list is public, and no booking fee rides on top |
| Already running one of the two |
Stay, unless the thing you are missing is published on the other one and on no plan of yours |
The review pools are not the same size either. On Software Advice's comparison of the two, checked on October 2026, Hostaway carries 1,623 verified reviews against OwnerRez's 271, and one reviewer there, Marco R., writes that "for my company High Estate the multi-calendar synchronization is flawless, seamlessly connecting Airbnb, VRBO, and Booking.com into one interface." With a review pool six times the size, far more operators have already run into whatever you are about to run into, and said so where you can read it. The sharpest line against OwnerRez is one Hostaway quotes on its own comparison page, from a reviewer named Guillermo: "Onboarding with OwnerRez is pretty much non-existent. 5 double-bookings and days of waiting for answers," and even coming from a page built to sell against OwnerRez, that complaint holds up.
Switching also costs more than the gap between two subscriptions. When we modeled moving our own property onto a different system, it came out to 4 to 6 weeks of a developer's time to build the new connection, plus another 2 to 4 weeks running both systems side by side before we trusted the new one enough to cut over. An earlier estimate had put the whole migration at 3 to 4 months end to end. On OwnerRez's forum, a manager who moved across said the Hostaway app was glitchy enough that the calendar usually needed closing and reopening before it refreshed, and that Hostaway charged $8 per lock for smart lock integration where OwnerRez charged half. If Hostaway is where you land anyway, Hostaway vs Lodgify: the prices, and which one fits a small property covers it against the other name small operators keep shortlisting.
If you are still not sure
What most operators want settled is whether today's choice blocks the booking page they want in two years. It doesn't, on either system, but Hostaway makes the checkout harder to build, since it creates the reservation before the money is in and you end up designing the whole flow around that order. We do the direct booking side ourselves, over whichever system you keep running, and the first booking usually arrives on the property's own domain about three weeks in. Under roughly $350,000 a year of bookings the commission we save does not cover what the work costs, and I would rather say that here than on a quote.
Bring the one you are leaning toward to the call and we will tell you where it stops and what that costs you. Twenty minutes, prepared for your property. Book a call.
