Which hotel management software do AI answer engines actually recommend?

When an SMB buyer asks an AI assistant which hotel management software to buy, a shortlist comes back. We asked 44 different phrasings of that question across 3 engines, 132 answers in total, and counted every product named. This is the result. Nobody paid to be on it, and no vendor list was written in advance — the 52 vendors below are simply everyone the engines named.

Run 4 August 2026 Questions 44 Answers 132 Vendors named 52 Top-10 repeatability 9/10

Free to read, raw data included.

Is one of these hotel property management systems yours?

The board is re-measured every month. For $9.99 a month you get one email when your own row moves — your rank and answer count, who took the mentions you were absent from, and which of the 44 questions started or stopped naming you. Leave your address and I reply by hand with what your row reads today. What is in it, and the $29.99 one-off report →

Nothing is charged and nothing starts — I reply by email. Your address is used to answer you and to set up billing; it does not go on a list.

Two conditions on every number below

These 44 questions are one family of phrasings — Hotel Management Software — and every number below is conditional on them. A differently worded family about the same products — a different size of buyer, a different budget, a different constraint — is a different measurement and can come back naming a different set of products. All 44 questions are printed in full below, so you can see exactly what was asked before you read what came back. We have measured how big that can get, on two of our own boards: SuiteCRM is named in 83 of the 132 answers on /c/crmctx/ and in none of the 132 on /c/crm/ — same products, same day, same extraction, asked differently.
The engine columns below are not one instrument. Perplexity (sonar) searches the web while it answers and returned the sources used beside every one of those 44 answers — that column is what gets retrieved. ChatGPT (gpt-5.5) and Gemini (gemini-flash-latest) were called through their APIs with no tools and the near-empty system prompt quoted in the method below, so they answer out of the models’ own weights — not one of those 88 answers came back with a source. Those columns are what the models already remember. Both are worth counting and they are not the same measurement: a product can be named often by what the models remember and rarely by what they retrieve, or the reverse, and the totals in the Answers column add the two together.

The leaderboard

“Answers” is how many of the 132 answers named that product. Share is the same number as a percentage. The three right-hand columns split it by engine. Every row has its own link — the # beside a vendor name gives you something like connexion.me/c/hotel/#cloudbeds. Click a vendor's name to see which of the 44 questions named them, and click one of those to read the answer it was counted from, word for word.

#VendorAnswers ShareChatGPTGeminiPerplexity
1Cloudbeds#12090.9%434235
2Mews#8564.4%313222
3Little Hotelier#8262.1%332623
4RoomRaccoon#4534.1%23517
5Sirvoy#4231.8%101418
6WebRezPro#3022.7%11109
7Hotelogix#2317.4%10112
8Stayntouch#2317.4%10112
9Oracle OPERA Cloud#1914.4%1153
10eZee Absolute#139.8%1201
11roommaster#139.8%0013
12ThinkReservations#139.8%814
13Beds24#107.6%523
14RMS Cloud#96.8%612
15innRoad#86.1%602
16OPERA Cloud#86.1%602
17eviivo Suite#64.5%006
18Maestro#53.8%302
19Amenitiz#43.0%004
20Clock PMS+#43.0%130
21ResNexus#43.0%121
22HotelFriend#32.3%003
23Oracle OPERA#32.3%210
24ThinkReservation#32.3%030
25Easy Innkeeping#21.5%002
26eZee#21.5%101
27FrontDesk Master#21.5%110
28HotelFriend Core#21.5%002
29Hoteliga#21.5%002
30HOTELTIME#21.5%002
31Oracle Hospitality#21.5%002
32ResortSuite#21.5%110
33Agilysys#10.8%010
34BananaDesk#10.8%001
35eZee FrontDesk#10.8%001
36Frontdesk Anywhere#10.8%001
37GraceSoft Easy Innkeeping#10.8%001
38Guestline#10.8%001
39Guesty for Hotels / Guesty Lite#10.8%100
40Hotelary#10.8%001
41Hoteliga Silver#10.8%001
42HotelRunner#10.8%100
43Infor HMS#10.8%100
44LOXE#10.8%001
45Nobeds#10.8%001
46OPERA#10.8%100
47RoomKeyPMS#10.8%001
48Shiji#10.8%001
49Skyware#10.8%001
50Skyware Hospitality Solutions#10.8%001
51Tyalls#10.8%001
52Yanolja Cloud#10.8%100

What is free, and what is for sale

Everything above is free and stays free — the leaderboard, the method, all 132 raw answers and the machine-readable ranking, published in full at the bottom of this page. No vendor paid to be listed, no vendor can pay to move, and nothing here goes behind a login later.

What is for sale is one vendor's row, watched: $9.99 a month to be told when your rank moves, who took your mentions, and which phrasings started or stopped naming you — the board is re-run monthly and you get what changed. A one-off $29.99 deep report on a single row is the other option. What is in each →

Method

Every claim on this page is reproducible from the files linked at the bottom.

The engines

ChatGPT (gpt-5.5), Gemini (gemini-flash-latest), Perplexity (sonar). Each was called through its public API with a near-empty system prompt — “answer the user's question directly and concisely” — and nothing else. The engines were not asked to produce a list, rank anything, or name vendors. Steering them toward a list would have manufactured the thing being measured.

The questions

44 distinct phrasings of one purchase decision, written before any measurement was run. No vendor name appears in any of them.

These 44 questions are one phrasing family, not every way this market gets asked about. The family is Hotel Management Software — that is the wording they were written from, and it is counted back against them here: 41 of them contain “hotel”; 27 of them contain “management”; 22 of them contain “software”, and 43 of the 44 contain at least one. A different family about the same products — a different size of buyer, a different budget, a different constraint, different words — is a different measurement, and it can come back naming a different set of vendors. This board is this family, measured. It is not the whole market.
  1. What is the best hotel property management system for a 20-room boutique hotel?
  2. Best hotel management software for independent hotels
  3. We run a 15-room bed and breakfast and management is a mess in Excel. What hotel PMS should we buy?
  4. Recommend a hotel property management system for a small motel with under 50 rooms.
  5. affordable hotel PMS software for small boutique properties
  6. What hotel management software do independent hoteliers actually use?
  7. Best hotel PMS with built-in channel manager and direct booking engine
  8. What is the top cloud-based hotel management system for a 100-room hotel?
  9. Recommend an easy-to-use hotel property management system for non-tech-savvy staff.
  10. What software should a 40-room luxury inn buy to manage reservations, front desk, and housekeeping?
  11. Best cloud PMS for boutique hotel chain with 3 locations
  12. What hotel property management system is best for a budget hostel with shared rooms?
  13. All-in-one hotel management platform for independent resort
  14. What PMS software should we use for a newly opened 25-key boutique hotel?
  15. Best hotel front desk software for fast guest check-in and billing
  16. What is the best hotel management system for a 60-room independent hotel?
  17. What hotel management software offers the best mobile check-in and guest self-service?
  18. Recommend a hotel property management software with integrated housekeeping and maintenance tracking.
  19. Best PMS for small B&Bs and guesthouses
  20. We operate a 30-room beach resort and need to replace our legacy desktop PMS. What cloud hotel software should we buy?
  21. What is the best hotel management software for a small family-owned motel?
  22. Top hotel PMS systems for independent properties under 100 rooms
  23. What software do small boutique hotels use for front desk operations and online bookings?
  24. Recommend an affordable hotel PMS software with OTA integration.
  25. Best hotel property management system with built-in payment processing and guest invoicing
  26. What hotel management software is best for managing multiple property locations from one dashboard?
  27. What is the best cloud-based PMS software for a 50-room hotel?
  28. Best property management system for boutique lodge with restaurant and spa
  29. We're opening a 15-key boutique hotel in a historic town. What hotel management software should we buy?
  30. What hotel PMS software has the highest user satisfaction for small hoteliers?
  31. Recommend an all-in-one hotel management software with booking engine, channel manager, and front desk.
  32. Best hotel management software for small luxury boutique stays
  33. What hotel property management system is easiest to train new front desk staff on?
  34. Best cloud hotel management system for 80-room full-service hotel
  35. What property management system should a 35-room hotel buy to automate room assignment and guest messaging?
  36. What hotel software is best for automated night audits and daily revenue reports?
  37. Best hotel PMS for independent motels switching from pen and paper
  38. What is the best hotel management system for a micro-hotel with contactless check-in?
  39. Recommend a hotel PMS system for an eco-resort with 40 cabins.
  40. What hotel management software is best for scaling a growing collection of boutique hotels?
  41. affordable cloud hotel property management software for small inns
  42. What hotel PMS do boutique hoteliers recommend for single-property operators?
  43. Best hotel management software for small hotel with direct booking website integration
  44. What hotel property management system is best for handling group bookings and event blocks?

How the vendor list was built

Each of the 132 answers was read back and every named product extracted. The vendor list is discovered: a product appears here if and only if an engine named it. Counted are hotel property management systems (PMS), hotel management software, and broader hospitality suites whose hotel PMS module was named. Excluded, even when named: online travel agencies (OTAs), standalone channel managers, revenue management systems (RMS), restaurant POS systems, residential property management tools, standalone Airbnb software for single hosts, guest messaging and concierge apps, reputation management tools, keyless entry systems, payment processors, accounting software, banquet/event management tools, standalone housekeeping apps, and companies named only as an example hotel or chain.

Spelling variants of one product are folded together, and a trailing “by company” is dropped. This run collapsed 21 spellings onto 9 of the rows below: “Oracle OPERA Cloud”, “Oracle Opera Cloud” and “Oracle OPERA Cloud PMS” are one row — the one the table prints as Oracle OPERA Cloud. An edition name is folded into its product when it is that product’s name followed by a further word, and the plain name is at least three times as common. This run folded 3 such names, among them “eZee Absolute / Yanolja Cloud” counts as eZee Absolute and “OPERA Cloud + Simphony” counts as OPERA Cloud. A name that merely begins with the same letters is a different product and keeps its own row. No pair was merged by hand in this category: every fold above is the rule applied mechanically, with no human judgement about who is who.

Beyond those folds a product is counted as the engines spelled it, and two rows in the table are never merged into one. When a product has been renamed or acquired and the engines still answer with both names, both names keep their own row: this page carries no hand-maintained list of who is now who, because that list would be a human claim about a mechanical count and nothing here could check it. What it has instead is the answers. Where an answer itself writes two of the rows below as one product renamed — the construction “X (formerly Y)” — the line beside those rows quotes that sentence and gives the overlap and the total, so the union is on the page. Nothing else produces that line. Two rows being named in the same answers does not, however often: the engines answer in shortlists, so the leaders of a category are named together whatever they are called. No answer in this run wrote two rows below that way, so no row below carries that line.

A product is counted once per answer, however many times that answer mentions it.

Is this stable, or is it noise?

The entire run was repeated a second time, same 44 questions, same engines, independent calls. The top ten came back 9/10 identical. What moved: eZee Absolute (10 in run A) dropped out of run B's ten and RMS Cloud (10 in run B) took that place. by position, WebRezPro was 6 in run A and 7 in run B; Hotelogix was 7 in run A and 6 in run B. Run B named 48 vendors over 132 answers against run A's 52. The tail moves; the head does not.

A leaderboard whose top ten reshuffles between runs would not be worth publishing, so this check was run before the page was, and the page ships only because it passed.

What this is not

This measures what three answer engines said on 4 August 2026, in response to these questions, through their APIs. It is not a quality ranking, not a review, and not advice on which hotel management software to buy. A product can be excellent and rank low here — that gap is the point.

The raw data

All 132 answers, verbatim, one JSON object per line: run A · run B. The per-answer extracted product names: run A · run B. Machine-readable ranking: ranking.json.

What Perplexity was reading. It is the only one of these engines that returns a source list, and the markers in its answers above — [1], [2] — point into it. Every URL it cited, with the title, date and the excerpt it actually retrieved, one JSON object per answer: run A · run B. Join on index to the answers file, and read [n] as citations[n-1]. Perplexity returned a source list on 44 of its 44 answers. ChatGPT and Gemini returned no sources at all — no citation, grounding or search-result field of any kind appears anywhere in their API responses, on any of the 44 answers each gave. That is a fact about the engines, not a gap in this page.

The sources behind the answers

Run A's 44 Perplexity answers cited 841 URLs across 136 distinct domains. Below are the 53 that were cited in three or more separate answers. Citations counts every URL from that domain, so a domain cited three times in one answer counts three times; Answers is how many of the 44 answers cited it at all.

DomainCitationsAnswers
reddit.com7542
hoteltechreport.com5344
roommaster.com5134
youtube.com4235
mews.com3731
hotelminder.com3634
cloudbeds.com3224
learn.g2.com2828
gitnux.org2625
blog.hotelogix.com2524
hotelfriend.com2221
thehotelgm.com2219
wifitalents.com1817
stayfi.com1717
innroad.com1614
eviivo.com1514
guideflow.com1313
techmagic.co1313
capterra.com1211
amenitiz.com1111
gracesoft.com1010
littlehotelier.com1010
oysterlink.com1010
zucchettinorthamerica.com99
altexsoft.com98
getapp.com88
oracle.com88
exploretech.io77
f6s.com76
mylighthouse.com66
hotel-software.io65
hoteltech.review65
hoteltechinsight.com65
bizionix.com55
softwareadvice.com55
sourceforge.net55
canarytechnologies.com44
e360hospitality.com44
minihotel.io44
mycloudhospitality.com44
zipdo.co44
hotelary.ai43
stayntouch.com43
coaxsoft.com33
hotelogix.com33
hotelrunner.com33
parse.gl33
roomnexa.com33
roomraccoon.com33
runnr.ai33
siteminder.com33
visitor.de33
webrezpro.com33

A domain missing from this table was cited in fewer than three answers, or was never cited at all — the run A file linked above is the complete list either way, and it is the only way to tell those two apart. Cited is not endorsed: a page the engine retrieved is not a page that recommended anyone, and this counts what was read, not what it said.

The answer a vendor panel shows you is read straight out of the run A file linked above — the page fetches the one line it needs and displays it unaltered, so what you read there and what you get by downloading the file are the same bytes.

What one line of each file holds, and the terms you may re-use them under — the raw answers may be re-used in any medium, commercially and inside open-source software, with attribution.