Smoobu Review: From Our Team of Superhosts

Our team here at BNBCalc manages vacation rentals ourselves, it’s actually one of the main reasons that led to the creation of our property analysis tool. So, we know firsthand how crucial finding the right vacation rental management software for your rental properties can be. The right PMS can take your managing duties from a strenuous and dreaded task to a quick and delightful experience.

For today, we’ll be reviewing the Smoobu property management system and checking out its features, pricing, and public reviews. Let’s see how it stacks up and how it can help with automation, guest communication, revenue management, and more.

Best Smoobu Features and How Property Managers Can Use Them for Their Rentals

Smoobu offers no shortage of features and tools to assist in the daily tasks of your vacation rental business. Here are some of the tools that we believe will help you the most if you do decide to use Smoobu as your property management system.

Channel Manager: The Channel Manager is a must-have for hosts managing listings across multiple booking platforms. It allows you to synchronize your listings on Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo, and over 100 other channels, ensuring consistent availability and reducing the risk of double bookings. As hosts, we know how time-consuming it can be to manually update each platform. Smoobu's Channel Manager eliminates this hassle, saving valuable time and effort. Any decent PMS worth considering should always have a hefty channel manager within its toolset.

Rates Synchronisation: In tandem with the Channel Manager, the Rates Synchronisation feature ensures uniform pricing across all platforms. You can set your base price, adapt rates per day or period, and even add a markup per booking portal. This flexibility allows hosts to optimize their pricing strategy and stay competitive in the market without the need for manual adjustments. Think of it as Smoobu’s own dynamic pricing tool. But, we still recommend getting a dedicated dynamic pricing tool, our team personally uses PriceLabs in our rentals, but we also like Wheelhouse as an alternative.

Reservation System (PMS): Reservation System, or Property Management System (PMS), centralizes all your reservations, guest information, and property details in one place. As hosts, having a clear overview of bookings is crucial for smooth operations. The PMS includes a central calendar that stores aggregated booking information, making it easy to track guest details and special requests. We like having all of the important information being readily available, allowing for quick strategizing and proper monitoring.

Free Website: One particular feature we really liked was the free website builder. We can’t stress how important it is for vacation rental owners to have their own website. Using the tool, hosts can create a professional, fully responsive website for their vacation rental without any additional costs. This is particularly beneficial for those looking to establish their own brand and generate direct bookings. The website integrates seamlessly with Smoobu's booking engine, allowing guests to make reservations commission-free, dodging fees from the booking platforms and earning you more revenue.

Guest Communication: Our team firmly believes that effective guest communication is key to providing a great guest experience. Smoobu improves this process by centralizing all guest communication in one place. You can access messages from various booking portals, respond directly from Smoobu, and keep a record of the conversation history. The unified inbox saves time and ensures no message goes unnoticed. You can also access it via their mobile app, making it great for responding to messages, regardless of where you are.

Automated Templates: We know how busy hosts and property managers can get, especially during peak seasons. This is why we really liked the automated templates that Smoobu provides, covering a repetitive yet essential task with customized messages. You can create personalized templates for booking confirmations, check-in instructions, and post-stay feedback requests. These templates can be automatically sent based on trigger events, such as a certain number of days before check-in. As hosts, we find this feature invaluable for maintaining consistent communication with guests while saving time in the long run.

Online Check-In: The rise of popularity in online check-in features has been undeniable in recent years. More and more guests want the convenience and privacy that online check-in brings. Smoobu allows your vacation rental business to keep up with the times and provide contactless check-in options. Through it, guests can provide all necessary information, such as contact details and arrival times, through a dedicated online form.

Guest Guide: The Guest Guide is a fantastic tool for providing guests with all the information they need for a comfortable stay. Hosts can create a guide that includes check-in instructions, house rules, local recommendations, and everything else that guests need to know. The guide is generated uniquely for each booking and can be sent automatically to guests. It improves the overall guest experience and reduces the possibility of additional questions.

Statistics & KPIs: We constantly monitor valuable statistics about our rentals to ensure that everything is working correctly. Smoobu allows you to track key performance indicators such as revenue, occupancy rates, booking sources, and cancellation rates. We like this data-driven approach as it can potentially help in making decisions and identifying areas for improvement. Having all of the information presented to you makes it so much more convenient than having to grind the numbers yourself.

Smoobu Pricing: How Much Does Smoobu Cost?

One of the first questions most hosts and property managers will ask is the related costs of using Smoobu. So, let’s quickly dive into the different Smoobu prices and plans. We’ll also talk about the features included within each tier.

• Basic: Smoobu actually offers a free version of their platform through their basic plan. It includes the Reservation System (PMS), Website (only subdomain), basic statistics, and requires a self-setup process. From the name itself, it’s pretty basic and doesn’t include access to more advanced features like the Smoobu channel manager, but it’s great to see a free plan that can help hosts and property managers get started.
• Professional: Professional is the most popular plan starting at $31.29 per month, $28.16 per month when billed yearly, and $25.03 per month when billed every two years for a single rental. They don’t follow a per listing per month model, in fact, you get to save more if you have more property listings. It includes added features for the channel manager, website with your own domain, booking engine, communication automation, added customer support, and most of their premium features.
• Team: The Team plan starts at $214.71 per month, $193.24 per month when billed annually, and $171.77 per month when billed every two years for a single vacation rental. It’s the best choice for a team of property managers or hosts who manage numerous property listings. It adds unlimited read-only accounts, write-access accounts, domain setup, booking system customization, priority customer service, and a companion mobile app.

We’d say that the Professional should meet most of your vacation rental management needs if you’re only a single person managing your rental business. It includes everything you’ll need and even includes lower rates the more property listings you enroll.

Smoobu also offers a 14-day free trial for both of their paid plans, so we recommend taking up their offer to explore the platform and learn more about its capabilities yourself. You know what they say, experience is the best teacher.

Smoobu Pricing vs Alternatives

Now, let’s compare Smoobu’s pricing with some of the top players in the property management system industry. We’ve gathered five of the most popular platforms to get a better picture of Smoobu’s pricing and if it gives us a fair value when compared to others.

• Guesty - Lite: starts at $16 per listing/month for up to 3 listings. Pro and Enterprise: For 4-199 listings and 200+ listings, they offer custom prices and you’ll need to contact them for pricing. Guesty also charges for some of their extra features.
• Hostfully - Starter: $119 per month for up to 4 listings. Pro & Pro Plus: $215 per month for up to 11 listings, and $269 per month for up to 19 listings, respectively. Premium: Custom plans for hosts and property managers with numerous listings. They also offer a 10% discount for annual plans.
• Hospitable - Host: $29 per month for 1 property plus $10 per additional active property. Professional: $59 per month for 2 properties and only charge an extra $15 per additional active property. Mogul: $99 per month for 3 properties and charge an extra $30 per additional active property.
• Lodgify - Starter: $20/ month + 1.9% of booking fee per listing. Professional: $50/ month per listing. Ultimate: $73/ month per listing. They also offer discounts per plan per additional listing you have, along with up to 25% off on yearly and two-year plans.
• Hostaway - Hostaway isn’t fully transparent with their rates. They charge a monthly or annual subscription, according to your preference, and prices will vary depending on what features you’ll be using, and the number of listings you’ll manage. You’ll need to contact them directly for pricing inquiries.

Overall, we’d say that Smoobu offers an okay pricing scheme. It’s on the upper end when it comes to managing a handful of rentals, but evens out when you start adding more. In terms of costs, we recommend Smoobu to vacation rental owners with medium to large-sized portfolios. We also recommend using the free trial options that are offered by each platform to truly see which one you prefer the most.

Smoobu Reviews From Across the Web

Now, let’s take a quick look at online reviews posted by verified users. This will help us get a better understanding of the overall user experience that Smoobu provides to different types of property owners. Here are a few online reviews we were able to gather:

• Rebecca Q says this: “This is a great PMS. I haven’t had any glitches or issues with it which is one of the most important things. It does everything I need it to do. I have recommended it to many people and have used it for several clients as a booking engine on their direct rental sites.”
• Jessica claims this: “The software is great and works well but when you need a quick service or send a help ticket. The service is shockingly bad, I have tried to call, they don't answer, leave a voicemail they do not answer, send a ticket get vague replies back. The code to one of my properties has taken a month to sort out. I said I want to be put through to the complaints department they just don't resolve the issues. Service is shockingly bad!”
• Peter B left this comment: “The programme is well structured, very intuitive and easy to use. I built my homepage with Smoobu quickly and despite the fact that there are no different graphics or layout options, the site is impressive and loads easily on all devices. The support guys are very helpful and respond on time.”

It seems that the online reviews left about Smoobu are pretty mixed. There were some users who highly rated the platform and claimed that it was a great piece of vacation rental software that ran without any issues. However, there were also a handful that were disappointed with the platform, saying it wasn’t helpful to their vacation rental business, having slow customer service responses, and an overall bad experience.

This seems to be reflected in the overall score on reliable sites like it’s 4.5/5 over on Capterra but only receiving a 2.8/5 on TrustPilot. We suggest testing out the vacation rental software first and checking your performance indicators since the experience seems to be all over the place.

Final Thoughts

Overall, Smoobu has the features and tools at its disposal to help your property performance and vacation rental business as a whole. However, the seemingly inconsistent reviews and experiences could be a red flag for large property owners. Again, our suggestion is to simply test out the platform yourself. There were numerous good reviews about Smoobu so the experience might vary on a case-to-case basis. If it helps your rentals, then why not, right?

If you’re considering starting out your own Airbnb rental or just looking for a new addition to your portfolio, we suggest checking out our BNBCalc property analysis tool to give you an insight into properties on your radar. It can help you make data-driven decisions, based on what active rentals are already earning, allowing you to get an idea of not only revenue but also expenses, and paint a fuller picture of your potential investment.