How to choose a hotel PMS: 12 questions for the demo

A demo is a performance. The vendor knows the happy path, the data is clean, and nothing has gone wrong on that laptop in months. These twelve questions are designed to step off the happy path while somebody is still sharing their screen.

Before the demo

1. Can I open it myself, right now, without a call? A product with a live, seeded demo you can walk into unsupervised is making a claim it cannot take back. A calendar link is not the same thing.
2. Who exactly is this built for? A system built for 500-room chains and a system built for a 30-room independent will both technically work, and only one of them will be usable by your team. Ask what a typical customer looks like.

Money

1. What will I pay in total in year one, including setup, migration, training and support? One number.
2. What happens to the price when I hire someone, or have a very good season? This reveals whether you are on a per-user or per-booking model.
3. Do you take a cut of my direct bookings? If yes, your booking engine gets more expensive exactly as it starts working.
4. If AI features are included, is usage metered? A per-message meter is a bill that grows without a decision being made.

The parts that break

1. Post a restaurant order to a room, then show me the folio and the tax lines. You are checking that F&B reaches the room at the F&B slab, immediately.
2. Sell me a room with meals for two people, and show me the tax. One line per night at the room slab, on the combined value. Two lines means a package the return will not like.
3. Show me GSTR-1 coming out of the same ledger the night audit closed. If tax is a separate export, you are buying two systems.
4. Turn the Wi-Fi off and try to check somebody in. You want the screen to say plainly that it cannot, not to accept the entry and lose it. A system that pretends to save offline will eventually sell the same room twice.

After you sign

1. Who moves my existing bookings, rates and guest history, and what does it cost? The right answer is “we do, before you go live, at no charge”.
2. Can I export everything and leave? Bookings, guests, folios and tax reports, on the day you ask. A vendor who hesitates here is telling you about their retention strategy.

The answers that should worry you

• “That's on the roadmap” said about something on the current feature list.
• “You'll never lose connectivity” — everybody does.
• “We can customise that for you” offered before the base product has been shown to work.
• Shared logins suggested as a way to reduce per-user cost. That erases the audit trail you are buying.
• A price that only exists after a discovery call.

For what it is worth, StayFlint answers all twelve in public: there is a live demo hotel anyone can open, pricing is a yearly per-hotel quote with no commission and no per-user licence, migration is included, and the feature page lists only what is shipping — the channel manager, Google Hotel Ads, the guest app and the kitchen display system are on the roadmap and are not advertised as if they were not.