Cloudbeds is a cloud-based hotel management platform which includes tools for managing reservations, availability, rates, distribution channels, payments, guests, housekeeping, and more. The system is suitable for use by owners and managers of hotels, hostels, inns, bed & breakfasts, vacation rentals, and other hospitality properties.
The myfrontdesk module of Cloudbeds allows users to manage rooms and reservations, with a drag-and-drop calendar, room and bed assignments, invoicing, accounting tools, housekeeping management system, and guest registration cards. Users can define custom policies, fees, and taxes on a per-room or per-item basis, and select which payment options to accept. The myallocator module automatically maps inventory from Cloudbeds to booking engines, online travel agencies (OTAs), and other distribution sites, maintaining a central inventory pool which is automatically updated when a booking is made, to control availability and reduce overbookings. Users can set channel-specific pricing, and convert rates into their desired currency for each channel.
Cloudbeds also includes mybookings, which provides users with a dedicated booking engine, allowing them to take direct reservations through their website or Facebook page. Promotional rate plans, coupon codes, and discounts can be managed and processed through the booking engine, and credit card payments can be processed through integration with a range of payment gateways. Custom emails can be sent out to guests automatically for bookings, and users can customize the booking engine to match the branding of their website. The mygroup module gives users tools for managing multiple properties, with group-level analytics, a unified booking engine, and more.
Pros
The software works wonders when it works. It's when there's a connectivity issue or bug in the system this firm fails. Online support does exist and they do offer quick feedback (not necessarily helpful, but it is fast feedback).
Cons
No phone number to call. No personal assistance. Lots of volumnes of help pages, but when your connectivity with an OTA goes faulty- guaranteed to get an email from customer service quickly saying you'll need to contact the OTA provider (who'll tell you to contact your channel manager). These guys sell them selves as the "professionals", but don't want to take care of the real immediate issues (any connection issue is an immediate issue when needing to sell rooms online).
Hi Amy, we don't have a call-in number because we would rather get back to you in a few minutes with a solution than put you on hold. We replied to most of your tickets within 10 to 30 minutes with a resolution. We have some of the best rated support in the industry and 99.9%+ system up-time. We hope we've been able to earn back your trust in our support team over time.
Cloudbeds is the best of an embarrassingly bad market. Their support is cheery and relatively quick to respond, which is all the more frustrating when they consistently cannot help you nor provide you insight into whether your issues will ever be fixed.
They provide an "ideas" site for their customers to use (so their employees aren't required to actually talk to customers), and they have gone as far as to REMOVE the ability to comment on ideas in order to add more detail/use cases/etc. If screaming into the void wasn't bad enough, now they've closed the door in front of your face.
Pros
Seamless integration with third party channels. Would be nice to have less manual work in between each, but that is not something Cloudbeds could change easily, since it's also up to the 3rd party.
Online booking widget/site is very good. Customer friendly, haven't received nearly any calls for people unable to figure out how to book. Calendar is relatively simple to use and provides ~80%+ of the info I need on a daily basis.
Cons
NO integration with a credit card swiping device. Instead, any walk ins or changes to credit cards for existing reservations require you to manually input the credit card, which is both time consuming AND costs us thousands of dollars extra a year in fees (keyed in cards are 1% higher than swiped for us).
No mobile app, meaning you need to use their site which is not mobile friendly.
Poor item entry to a reservation. Adding items to the system is a breeze, but adding them to a reservation takes 7 clicks IF you're already on the reservation folio, otherwise it can take 10 from the calendar! Total waste of time, especially when we sell numerous small items from our on premise store.
Learning experience. Don't go with companies that only have email support. We lost a few thousand dollars in business from their negligence.
Pros
Booking engine appearance is modern and clean, scrolling calendar on mobile devices, calendar shows today's check-ins and checkouts.
Cons
No support. When you have an issue, you email and wait. Then they say, "that's not possible, but put it on the idea boards so it can get voted on." And there it will sit for years. Daily workflow was terribly inefficient compared to our old system. The check in process took about 5 minutes longer with so many more clicks. Just to print something became a nightmare! Setting up rates and availability is a total pain initially, but then it gets so much worse. Instead of seasonal rate intervals with occasional rate increases for high demand dates, we have hundreds of rate intervals (cloudbeds creates automatically) that require tedious manually editing for each room type and each interval. All of this means hours of wasted time and energy spent where it should be minutes or even seconds. The cost. There are more robust PMS's out there for much less, period. Don't waste your time!!!
Hi Keyvin,
We appreciate your feedback and are always looking for ways to improve. We definitely made some mistakes in this case, from which we will learn.
We prioritize our development based on the collective requests from our customers. In this case, you had some fairly unique requirements that we couldn't accommodate on your timeline.
We don't offer a call-in support line because we find it more efficient to get the information first and schedule the call once we have the details and can solve the issue, vs. asking our customers to wait on hold. From looking through your case, it looks like we averaged getting back to you within 30 minutes in most cases.
I've been through 5 PMS, 4 of them in the last 3 years. My difficulty was to find a software that was adequate for my guesthouse and my vacation apartments. I finally found what I needed in Cloudbeds. It was recommended to me by another hotel and it was my lucky day! This software is very easy to use, complete and they're always making it better with all the suggestions given by us. The customer support is the best I've ever worked with, very professional and fast in helping you. Probably because the software works so well they don't have many complains! The PMS has a channel manager for all the main websites and increasing daily the number of channels. It works perfectly without any problems and no double bookings due to connection delays. We have freed 3/4 hours of daily work with this PMS, which we can apply to other activities.
If you're looking for a excellent PMS with a reasonable price than this is what you want. I highly recommend this system and I intend to keep working with them for a long long time.
Pros
Easy to use, very complete. Well organized and flexible. They're always looking for ways to improve
Cons
Housekeeping module still needs a bit of working; reports also need improvement and the list of channels available could be higher. However they work all the time to improve so it's just a matter of time
Pros
WHEN it works it's a great system. But daily downtime and the worst customer support i've ever dealt with make it an easy choice for us to move to another system
Activally working on updating their system, just not the problems that few hotels deal with.
Cons
I pray for your soul if you ever have to deal with their customer support. I've never been through such a frustrating process for 12 weeks and still don't have a mayor problem fixed.
Contract was renewed even though we had written confirmation it wouldn't be before we discussed common issues.
Hey Felix,
It was great to chat with you on the phone. As we discussed, we are sorry that you did not have a great experience with our support team. Our team should have done a better job of communicating the timeline of the issue and also made more of an effort to reach out regarding your billing questions. We are now working on this issue and definitely took your feedback on how we could improve the communication process in the future. We hope you stay with us and we can can earn back your trust, but as we discussed on the phone, we are also more than happy to help you move to another system if you would like.
Personalized pricing quotes are available on request.
Below are some frequently asked questions for Cloudbeds.
Cloudbeds offers the following pricing plans:
Pricing model: Subscription
Free Trial: Available
Personalized pricing quotes are available on request.
Cloudbeds offers the following features:
Cloudbeds has the following typical customers:
Large Enterprises, Mid Size Business, Small Business
Cloudbeds supports the following languages:
English, Portuguese, Spanish
Cloudbeds has the following pricing plans:
Subscription
We do not have any information about what devices Cloudbeds supports
Cloudbeds integrates with the following applications:
Adobe Sign, Capsule, Constant Contact, Dropbox, Google Analytics, Mailchimp, Salesforce Sales Cloud, SugarCRM, SurveyGizmo, SurveyMonkey
Cloudbeds offers the following support options:
FAQs, Knowledge Base, Online Support
Connectivity to OTA's. Online bookings. Lots of benefits actually- as many as ANY channel manager... but the problem was service when the product didn't work... then it really hurt us. Noone to call (no phone number listed) only online help- which was not helpful. They always made the problem mine... not ours as they are hired to be the experts. Like I really can solve the problems of their product not connecting!!