Innkey and Aiosell both come up when Indian hotel owners search for a cloud PMS, and it’s easy to see why. Both are Indian products, both are priced with Indian hotels in mind, and both say they can run most of your hotel from one place. When two options sound this similar, feature lists stop helping and you need practical questions instead. Who handles my OTA connections? What does a month really cost? What happens when something breaks on a Sunday night? This guide goes through those questions in order, and none of it is complicated. A 12-room property in a hill town has different needs from a 60-room city hotel with a restaurant and banquet hall, so keep your own hotel in mind while you read.
I’ve pulled Innkey details from public listings like Capterra and Slashdot, and Aiosell details from aiosell.com, so confirm anything important directly with each company. Prices and features change, and I’d hate for you to decide on an old number.
Know what you’re comparing
Innkey is a cloud PMS from Innkey Infosystems, listed for India and described as suited to small and mid-size hotels, chains, resorts and inns. Its feature list covers reservations, front desk, housekeeping, revenue management, restaurant POS, procurement, accounting, MIS dashboards, multi-property and a mobile app. Reviewers on Capterra mention the reporting and the support team. One reviewer said it’s the only PMS they found that works for both B&Bs and full-service hotels, which says something about how flexible it is across property types.
Aiosell lists thirteen products on one platform, from the PMS and channel manager to HR, CRM and banquets. Each can be bought on its own, so you can start with the core and add pieces later. On paper the overlap is big, so the difference won’t be in the checklist. It’ll be in how the parts connect and how you get billed. The sections below take it one piece at a time, with questions you can copy straight into an email to either vendor.
Distribution: built in or plugged in
This is the first thing I’d check. Innkey’s description says it connects with OTAs, channel managers, GDS and booking engines. That wording suggests you may be plugging in a separate channel manager, which is fine, plenty of hotels do. But it means two vendors and two support lines when rates stop syncing.
How Aiosell handles it
Aiosell builds its hotel channel manager and booking engine into the same system as the property management system. One hotel owner in a review said having both in a single module removed the delay problems they’d expected from separate vendors. So if a booking from Booking.com doesn’t appear at the front desk, there’s one team to call, not two, and nobody pointing at the other company.
What to ask Innkey
Which channel manager do you recommend, who supports it, and what happens when a Booking.com reservation doesn’t show up at the front desk? Ask Aiosell the same thing. The answers matter more than any brochure. If a vendor can’t answer clearly, that’s an answer too.
Back office and reports
Innkey talks about chain-level reports and role-based dashboards, which helps if you run several hotels. Aiosell offers accounting, inventory, HR and a multi-property setup under one group login. In the demo, skip the pretty dashboard and ask to see the reports you’d open daily: night audit, cash report, pickup and daily revenue. Ask how a restaurant order reaches a room bill, and whether your current point of sale system can stay or has to go.
Also ask how a stock purchase flows from request to payment, using something small like detergent. And ask who sets the system up for you. Some vendors do the whole configuration, others hand you a login and a video. For a team that has never used cloud software, that difference decides whether the first month feels fine or painful.
Pricing and billing
Innkey doesn’t publish prices. Its listings say to contact the company, so plan a call. Its listings point to a phone number for pricing, so have your questions ready before you dial. Before it, write down your room count, number of users and modules, then ask about setup fees, training, extra users, support charges and upgrade costs.
Aiosell does publish. Per property per month, Basic PMS starts at ₹1,600 for up to 10 rooms and ₹2,400 for 11 to 30. Operations Pro is ₹400 per room at the smaller size. Extra users are ₹400 a month each, OTA listing is ₹7,500 per property, and setup is ₹3,500 once. Extras like these add up, so count them. That doesn’t make Aiosell automatically cheaper for you. It just lets you do the math yourself before a salesperson calls.
Whatever numbers you get, ask what happens after year one. Does the price jump, is there a notice period, and can you export your guest data and booking history in a normal file if you leave? It’s an awkward question during a sales call, but it’s much more awkward to find the answer later.
Test it yourself
Don’t choose from a spreadsheet. Ask both for a trial or demo with your real property. Aiosell offers a 15-day free trial. Enter your room types and rates, then run the daily jobs: check-in, a room move, late checkout, a restaurant charge, closing the day. Time them, and hand the screen to your front desk person for twenty minutes without help. Write the times down. Two minutes saved per check-in sounds small until you multiply it by every arrival over a year.
A good system should feel obvious after a day or two, not a week. Check weekend support too. Night and weekend support matter more than weekday support for most hotels, because that’s when problems tend to show up. If you want one platform covering the PMS, channel manager and pricing without stitching vendors together, start the Aiosell trial, then do the same with Innkey and compare notes. Keep notes on the small things too, like how fast pages load and whether the same task takes fewer clicks in one system than the other.
