Host Tools - 2026 Pricing, Features, Reviews & Alternatives

Host Tools is a channel manager and property management system for short-term rental hosts and small property managers.

Channel connections run on certified partner APIs with Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com, not iCal imports or scraping. A reservation on one channel blocks those dates on the others in seconds. Rates, minimum stays, and booking windows push per channel, with each platform's fee difference applied automatically. Houfy and generic iCal feeds are also supported for anything outside the three main APIs.

Messaging runs through a unified inbox covering every connected channel plus cleaner threads. Rules trigger on reservation events rather than fixed dates, so a message can fire on booking, check-in, a door unlock, a booking change, or a cancellation. AI replies answer inquiries using question and answer pairs extracted from your own past conversations, with intent categorization and a confidence score on each suggestion. Filters cover channel, reservation status, message type, unread, and minimum payout. Messages translate in both directions on web and mobile.

Smart locks connect through Seam, which covers the major brands. Host Tools generates a code per reservation from the guest phone number, activates it at check-in with a configurable buffer, expires it at checkout, and rewrites it if check-in times change. Lock events appear in the conversation timeline and low battery alerts route to your cleaner.

Pricing and availability are rule based. You can set weekend and peak season rates, handle orphan nights, adjust minimum stays from calendar rules, block specific check-in or checkout dates, and link separate units into a combined listing for group bookings. PriceLabs and Beyond Pricing integrate for dynamic pricing.

The Pro plan includes a direct booking site: your own domain, Stripe payments to your account, contract signing, guest ID verification, Schema.org markup, canonical URLs, and Google Analytics or GTM. Listings can also publish to Google Vacation Rentals.

For developers, there is a public REST API covering reservations, reviews across all three channels, and quote generation, plus webhooks for Zapier, IFTTT, n8n and custom workflows. A public status page reports integration uptime.

Accounts support multiple users with per-person permissions, sender attribution on every message, and authenticator-based two-factor authentication. iOS and Android apps carry the full feature set including push notifications for bookings, channel errors, and lock failures.

Pricing starts at $28 a month for one listing and scales down per listing as the portfolio grows. Onboarding is free at any size, the trial runs 14 days, and no credit card is required.