Boom
VS
Hostfully
Hostfully's best idea is a separate product.
On Boom, it is the product.
Hostfully made its name with digital guidebooks — and still sells them on their own price list, beside a platform fee, a per-property fee and, on the entry plan, a percentage of every booking. Pricing, accounting and protection come from its partners. Boom is one system: the guest experience, the finance and an AI that finishes the job, on one bill.
Ask an operator what they like about Hostfully and the first word is usually “guidebooks.” Ask what they pay for it and the answer takes a while, because it comes in pieces.
The pieces are all published, to Hostfully's credit. A per-property fee — $15 on Growth, $25 on Pro — “plus platform fee.” On Growth, a 1% payment gateway fee and a 0.85% direct booking fee on top. Then the add-ons: the Open API, Hostfully Devices, and the Digital Guidebooks themselves, which have their own pricing page with their own Free, Pro and Enterprise tiers.
And then the partners. Hostfully's pricing page says it plainly: “We partner with 100+ integration partners to seamlessly help you manage: dynamic pricing, cleaning & turnover, accounting, insurance & guest screening, and more.”
The thing Hostfully is best known for is the thing you buy separately. The things a manager needs most are the things a partner supplies.
This is not a page that claims Hostfully cannot do these things. Between the platform, the add-ons and the partner list, it can reach almost all of them. That is why the table below says Add-on or Partner rather than a red cross.
But a guest experience sold as a separate product cannot see the reservation it is attached to. A pricing tool from a partner cannot see the owner statement. And an inbox AI that “screens and sends AI-generated responses” is, in the end, a person doing the sending. Boom put all of it in one system — the guidebook-grade guest portal, the upsells, the pricing, the trust accounting — and gave the AI the whole thing to work with.
Here is the comparison. Anything marked Add-on or Partner comes from Hostfully's own pricing and features pages, checked in September 2026 and listed at the end of this article.
Start with the AI rows. Then follow the pills.
Hostfully has AI: InboxAI generates responses for a person to screen and send. Boom's AI finishes the job. The rest of the table asks the question its own price list invites: is it in the platform, is it a separate product, or is it a partner?
| Capability | Hostfully Platform + add-ons + partners |
Boom One AI-native PMS |
|---|---|---|
| Artificial intelligence where most operators decide | ||
| AI drafts a guest reply for a person to send | AssistiveInboxAI — “screen and send” | ✓ |
| AI writes review responses | ✗not on the features page | ✓100% of reviews answered |
| AI resolves the guest conversation end to end | ✗a person screens — and sends | ✓up to 90% · 40+ languages |
| AI opens the task that conversation created | ✗ | ✓ |
| AI makes the upsell offer — and charges it | ✗ | ✓ |
| AI posts the result to the owner statement | ✗ | ✓ |
| AI handles owner & team communication | ✗ | ✓ |
| One model with the whole business in context | ✗AI attached to the inbox | ✓AI-native architecture |
| An agentic manager that acts before you ask | ✗ | ✓BAM — risks, gaps & opportunities |
| Bookings & distribution | ||
| Rates, availability & reservations | ✓ | ✓ |
| Channel distribution | ✓Channel/Reservations Manager | ✓40+ channels, one calendar |
| Direct booking website & booking engine | ✓0.85% direct booking fee on Growth | ✓included, no percentage |
| AI discovery that matches guests to properties | ✗ | ✓ |
| AI lead capture & booking follow-up | ✗booking pipeline — manual | ✓+25% direct conversion |
| Guest membership & loyalty layer | ✗ | ✓first of its kind |
| Communication | ||
| Unified inbox & automated messages | ✓Unified Inbox | ✓ |
| CRM — guest profiles, history & segments | ✓customer data management | ✓CRM & guest chat |
| Call centre — inbound guest calls answered | ✗not part of the platform | ✓Call center — a Boom App |
| Guest experience | ||
| Guest Portal — arrival, check-in, requests | Add-onDigital Guidebooks — separate product | ✓included |
| Smart upsells & in-stay offers | Add-onguidebooks Pro — “revenue-generating capabilities” | ✓ |
| Operations | ||
| Reservation & property workflows | ✓task management | ✓ |
| Housekeeping, inspections & readiness | Partner“cleaning & turnover” | ✓built in, field-ready |
| Maintenance, contractors & escalations | ✓via task management | ✓ |
| Tasks auto-created from guest conversations | ✗ | ✓ |
| Smart locks & access — codes issued per stay | Add-onHostfully Devices | ✓Locks & smart home — a Boom App |
| Document storage — leases, contracts, photos | ✓rental agreements & signatures | ✓filed to the unit, owner and stay |
| Revenue & finance | ||
| Payments & booking activity | ✓1% gateway fee on Growth · none on Pro | ✓ |
| AI dynamic pricing | Partner“dynamic pricing” via integration partners | ✓365 days repriced |
| Trust accounting | ✗ | ✓included — industry first |
| Automated accounting — books that close themselves | Partner“accounting” via integration partners | ✓ |
| Owner portal & statements | ✓owner portal with financial reports | ✓live P&L, in real time |
| Damage protection on every reservation | Add-onScreen & Protect | ✓BoomGuard, built in |
| Guest damage waiver attached to the stay | Add-on | ✓Insurance — a Boom App |
| Leadership | ||
| Reports & dashboards | ✓reporting & analytics | ✓ask for any report |
| Open API for your own integrations | Add-onHostfully Open API | ✓included |
| One platform, one contract, one support desk | ✗platform + platform fee + add-ons + partners | ✓ |
The green ticks in the Hostfully column are real, and there are plenty of them: the calendar, the channel manager, the inbox, the owner portal, task management. Hostfully is a competent platform. The coral pills are what it charges for separately, and the pattern in them is the argument of this page.
The guest experience is an add-on. The revenue tools inside it are a higher tier of that add-on. Pricing, accounting and protection are partners. So the platform fee buys the platform — and the business you actually run is assembled around it, line by line.
Per property. Plus platform. Plus a percentage.
Hostfully's price list is unusually honest and unusually long. Read it as an operator and the shape is clear: the platform is the entry ticket, and the things that make a portfolio a business arrive on other invoices.
“Screen and send” is a description of your team's job.
Hostfully's features page describes InboxAI precisely: it lets managers “quickly screen and send AI-generated responses.” That is a real time-saver, and it is also an admission. The AI generates. A person screens. A person sends. Multiply by every message, every night.
The limit is not the model. It is what the model can see. An AI attached to an inbox knows the thread. It does not know the guidebook is a separate product, that the cleaner is in a partner app, or that the owner's statement lives with an accounting partner.
Boom's AI has all of that in one place, so it can do all of it: answer the guest in their language, open the task, make the late-checkout offer, take the payment and post it to the owner — then tell you what it did.
Two numbers that never appear on the same page.
Hostfully's percentages are on its pricing page; its upsells are on the guidebooks page. Put them side by side for a 50-listing portfolio and you can see what the entry plan takes, and what the separate product leaves on the table:
What Growth takes off the top
The entry plan's two percentages, applied to a portfolio's card payments and its direct bookings. Pro removes them — at $10 more per property:
What the separate product leaves unsold
Early check-in, late check-out, transfers, groceries, spa, tours, upgrades — offers that live in a guidebook tier on Hostfully and inside the AI's conversation on Boom:
Three products give you three views. BAM reads all of them as one.
BAM is Boom's Business Agentic Manager — part of the platform, not an add-on to it. It watches conversations, bookings, operations, maintenance, finance and owner activity all at once, and brings you the next thing to do.
An inbox AI can only be good at the inbox. BAM is good at the business, because on Boom the business is one system.
Operators who put it all in one place.
From Malta to Plymouth to Scotland — press play and hear the operators who run the guest experience, the operation and the finance on one platform, in their own words.
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There is a version of this decision where Hostfully is the right answer.
We would rather write it here than let you find it after the contract. Hostfully has been in this category a long time, its guidebooks are genuinely loved, and for some operators the shape of its price list is a fair trade.
Stay on Hostfully ifThe guidebooks are the heart of your brand
- Your guests know you by your guidebook, your team has built hundreds of them, and the separate price list is a cost you have already accepted for a product you rate.
- You run mid-term or multi-unit inventory at volume — Hostfully's own case studies make that claim credibly, and the platform is built for it.
- You are on Pro with a dedicated success manager, the percentages are gone, and the partner stack you assembled is one you actually like.
- You want to screen every AI reply yourself, and your message volume makes that a reasonable job for one person.
Move to Boom ifYou want the guest experience and the finance in the same system
- You want the guest portal, the upsells and the stay in one record, so the AI can sell inside the conversation and post it to the owner without a hand-off.
- You need trust accounting, which is on none of Hostfully's price lists and none of its partner categories by name.
- You want AI that closes the loop — answers, acts, charges, records — rather than AI that generates a reply for your team to screen.
- You want one bill and no percentage of your bookings on any plan, at any size.
- You want an agentic manager reading the whole business, because a platform, an add-on and a partner list cannot read each other.
Bringing three products into one is mostly a matter of listing them.
The listings are the easy part. The work is inventorying the guidebooks, the add-ons and the partner subscriptions — and rebuilding the guest experience inside the PMS rather than beside it. We do that with you.
Kickoff & audit
We map your properties, channels, rates and workflows — and inventory every guidebook, add-on and partner subscription you're currently paying for.
Data migration
Listings, bookings, guests, rates and history come across. Your guidebook content becomes your guest portal, and nothing about the stay is lost.
Team training
Hands-on sessions for front desk, operations and finance — one interface for the guest experience, the tasks and the statements.
Connect & reconcile
Channels, payments and accounting connect and balance. We verify every calendar and every opening balance together.
Go live & cancel the extras
You switch with 24/7 support at your side — then work down the audit from step one, cancelling the price lists you no longer need.
Keep Hostfully. Take the AI anyway.
You do not have to migrate to act on any of this. BAM and the Boom Apps run on top of Hostfully through a read-only connection. Nothing moves, nothing changes for your team, and you cancel nothing. It is the quickest way to put an AI that acts on top of a platform whose AI screens.
One read-only connection
The Boom team connects your Hostfully account for you — read-only, no migration, no credit card, nothing changed on the Hostfully side.
BAM reads your portfolio
Twenty-four months of reservations, your listings, rates and availability, guest messages and reviews, and your payouts, fees and expenses.
You ask it anything
Occupancy, P&L, a guest thread from March, which cleaner keeps running late — answered in seconds, with the rows it used shown.
Then you let it act
Write access is granted per action — pricing, messaging, tasks — and every automated action is logged, attributed and reversible.
BAM on your Hostfully
The Business Agentic Manager, reading your live portfolio. An intelligent agent, not a chatbot — and read-only until you decide otherwise.
- BAM Chat — ask anything; it already knows
- BAM Studio — describe a report, get it owner-ready
- BAM Playbooks — write the rule once, it runs
- BAM Optimizers — rates, min-stays, gap nights, fees
Boom Apps
Keep Hostfully. Choose the tools you need — every one powered by BAM, every one working with the PMS you already run.
- Ops · $10 — CRM & guest chat, task management, field ops, reviews manager
- Pro · $20 — adds dynamic pricing, guest experience, direct booking site, accounting & statements, analytics, storage
- Each tool trialled and switched on independently
- Start in co-pilot mode — your team approves every message and rate change
Questions we get asked.
What's the main difference between Boom and Hostfully?+
Does Hostfully really charge a percentage?+
How does Boom's guest experience compare to Hostfully's guidebooks?+
How is Boom's AI different from InboxAI?+
Does Hostfully do trust accounting?+
How hard is it to migrate from Hostfully to Boom?+
Can I keep Hostfully and still use Boom's AI?+
- Hostfully's published pricing page — the Growth ($15 per property per month “+ platform fee”, with a “1% payment gateway fee” and a “0.85% direct booking fee”), Pro ($25 per property per month “+ platform fee”, “no payment gateway fee”, “no commissions on direct bookings”) and Enterprise plans; the add-ons listed beneath them (Open API, Digital Guidebooks, Hostfully Devices); and the sentence “We partner with 100+ integration partners to seamlessly help you manage: dynamic pricing, cleaning & turnover, accounting, insurance & guest screening, and more.” Checked September 2026.
- Hostfully's Digital Guidebooks pricing page, which prices the guidebooks separately from the platform in Free, Pro and Enterprise tiers and places “revenue-generating capabilities” on Pro. Checked September 2026.
- Hostfully's features page, which describes InboxAI as letting managers “quickly screen and send AI-generated responses”, and lists Screen & Protect, Hostfully Devices and the Open API as add-ons. Checked September 2026.
- Where a capability does not appear on those pages — AI review responses, for instance — the table says so rather than asserting that Hostfully lacks it. Tell us if we have missed a published feature and we will change the cell.
- Boom platform figures — 20,000+ properties, 30+ countries, +18% revenue, up to 90% of routine messages handled, +25% direct bookings, 1–4 week onboarding — are Boom's own product and customer numbers. Every customer quote on this page is published in full on our case studies page.
- The 50-listing model is illustrative. It uses only the assumptions printed inside each calculation — revenue per listing, direct-booking share, ancillary spend — so you can substitute your own. The percentages are Hostfully's; the portfolio is invented. Ask us and we will run it against your actual numbers.
- Trademarks and product names belong to their respective owners and are used here to identify the products being compared. Hostfully has not reviewed or endorsed this page. If you believe anything here is out of date, tell us and we will correct it.
