Choosing revenue management software is easy to get wrong because the demos all look good. Colourful calendars, rate suggestions, a chart trending up. The differences show up months later, when the connection is slow, the forecast is wrong on your busiest weekend, or the contract turns out to be longer than you thought. This checklist has twelve points in five groups. It works for small hotels and mid-size ones, and it doesn’t assume you have a revenue manager on staff. Print it, bring it to each demo, and score each vendor the same way. If you’re a small property, you’ll care more about some points than others, and I’ll say which ones as we go. Twelve points, one afternoon, a much better decision.
Fit: who you are and who will use it (points 1 to 3)
Point one is size. Be honest about how many rooms and room types you have, because revenue management software for small hotels is often a different product from one built for 400-room resorts. Point two is the user. Who’ll open it every day? An owner with twenty minutes needs something simple. A dedicated revenue person can handle depth. Point three is your biggest problem. Write down the top three: maybe weekends sell out too cheap, maybe rates go stale, maybe nobody has time. That list is your filter. If a tool’s best feature solves a problem you don’t have, it shouldn’t earn you extra points. It sounds obvious, but a lot of hotels buy the most impressive demo and discover later it solved somebody else’s problem. Spend ten minutes on these three before you book any calls. If you run a small property, this is where you can be a bit ruthless. A tool built for a 400-room resort will have features you’ll never open, and you’ll pay for them anyway.
Data: how it connects (points 4 to 6)
Point four is the PMS link. Your property management system holds the reservations the forecast depends on, so ask how the tool reads them: real time or batch, and how often. Point five is the channel link. Ask how a new rate reaches each booking site and how long it takes, and then test it in the trial. Point six is data cleaning. Can you mark out-of-order rooms, one-off events, and unusual periods so the forecast isn’t misled? These three points quietly decide whether the product works for you. A beautiful tool on stale data will make confident, wrong suggestions, and you’ll only notice after a weekend sells out too cheaply. Ask each vendor to show a booking appearing in the tool and a rate change appearing on a channel, live, in front of you.
Forecast and control (points 7 to 9)
Point seven is explainability. Can you see why a price was suggested? Look for plain reasons like pickup ahead of last year or a competitor selling out. Point eight is guardrails: a floor, a ceiling, a limit on daily movement, and the ability to lock dates you want to handle yourself. Point nine is restrictions. Can it manage minimum stays, closed-to-arrival and length-of-stay rules, or only room price? A good revenue management system lets you start in approval mode, where you accept or change each suggestion, and move to automatic as you trust it. If a vendor can’t explain how the forecast works in ordinary language, or won’t let you override it, be careful. You don’t need to understand the maths, but you do need to stay in charge of your own rates. Two minutes on this saves two weeks of regret.
Money: cost and contract (points 10 and 11)
Point ten is total cost. Ask for a quote at your room count with every module you’d use, and check for setup fees, extra users, and add-ons. Compare pricing models: per room, share of revenue, or flat tiers. Point eleven is the contract. Look at the minimum term, renewal rules, caps on price increases, and what happens if your room count changes. Also ask how you’d leave. Can you export your history in a usable format? A vendor who makes leaving easy is usually confident enough not to need a lock-in. Get everything in writing, because a verbal promise on a sales call won’t help you at renewal. If you’re a smaller hotel, watch percentage-of-revenue fees closely. They feel painless at first and can grow faster than your budget does once the system is working well. Keep the notes from each demo in one place. The answers feel obvious in the moment and blur together by the third call.
People: support and proof (point 12)
Point twelve is proof, and it bundles support, onboarding, and a real trial. Ask how long setup realistically takes and who does the work. Send support a question on a Friday evening during the trial and see how quickly and clearly they respond. Run the tool in shadow mode for a month, where it suggests rates and you keep pricing as normal, then compare what happened. Ask to speak to a customer with a similar hotel, not only the happiest name on the vendor’s list. Check how the tool works with your channel manager, because the link between the two affects day-to-day life more than any single feature. If a vendor refuses a trial on your own data, take note. If they welcome it, that’s usually a good sign about the rest.
Now score each vendor from one to five on each point, weight the ones that matter most to you, and take the top two into a trial. For most small hotels, points four, five, eight and twelve deserve the most weight. Aiosell’s revenue management software works alongside its property management system and channel manager, which helps with the connection points near the top. Run it through the same twelve points as everyone else and see how it scores. If it doesn’t win, you’ll at least know exactly why, which is a better position than most buyers are in.
