Choose a PMS by watching your own daily workflows inside the demo, not by counting features. Check that it connects to the channel manager, booking engine and payment provider you already use, that you can export your own data whenever you want, and that support answers in your language and your time zone. Price by room and by year, including setup and training.
Every PMS demo looks fine because the vendor drives it. Take back the wheel. Ask to see a walk in at full occupancy, a group booking split across three rooms, a rate change applied to next weekend, and a folio where the company pays the room and the guest pays extras. Those four moments are where a system either saves your reception time or quietly costs it.
Bring the person who will actually use it. Front desk staff spot friction that a manager never sees, like how many clicks it takes to move a reservation or whether the arrivals list can be filtered the way your morning brief works. If the demo cannot show your real workflows, that is already an answer.
An independent hotel rarely buys one system. You need the PMS to talk to your channel manager, your booking engine, your payment provider and, later, a revenue or CRM tool. Ask for the named integrations, not the count. A list of two hundred partners means nothing if the two you use are on it as beta connections.
Ask what the connection actually syncs and in which direction. Some integrations push reservations but never send back cancellations. Others sync rates but not restrictions. The gap becomes manual work for your team every single day, and it never appears on the pricing page.
Skip the research, talk to someone who has done it 45 minutes with an independent specialist. Free for hotels, no pitch, no commissions. Book a free session →Your reservation history, guest profiles and invoices are your asset. Before signing, ask three questions in writing: can I export everything myself, in what format, and how long do you keep my data after I leave. A vendor that answers clearly is confident. A vendor that redirects you to sales has told you something too.
Switching a PMS is the most disruptive change a hotel makes, so the exit terms matter more than the entry discount. Check the notice period, whether the contract renews automatically, and whether migration support costs extra. Our PMS migration checklist covers what that move looks like in practice.
Most systems are priced from a monthly fee per room, and the headline number rarely includes setup, training, integration fees or the modules you will want in month six. Ask for a written quote covering three years at your real room count, with every extra listed. Then compare like for like across vendors.
Support is part of the price. Find out the hours, the language, the channel and what happens at two in the morning when the system will not print an invoice. Ask for a reference customer of similar size and call them. That call tells you more than any feature comparison.
A PMS manages what happens inside the hotel: rooms, rates, guests, folios and reports. A channel manager distributes your availability and rates to the places you sell, such as OTAs and metasearch. Some vendors sell both, but they are different jobs and you should judge each one separately.
Cloud is the default for most independents because it removes server maintenance and lets you work from anywhere. On-premise still makes sense when connectivity is unreliable or when local regulation requires it. The comparison that matters is who maintains the system and what happens when the internet drops.
For a single independent property, plan several weeks from contract to stable daily use, including data mapping, configuration and staff training. Larger groups plan in months and usually migrate property by property. Any vendor promising same week go live is describing setup, not readiness.
A recommendation is a useful shortlist, not a decision. It usually means the connection is well tested, which is worth something. Still run your own workflow test and check support and exit terms, because you will live inside the PMS every day and inside the channel manager almost never.
Ask to see four things with your own scenarios: a walk in at full occupancy, a group split across rooms, a rate change for next weekend, and a folio split between a company and a guest. Those are the moments that decide whether the system saves reception time.
At least one person from reception, because they will use it every shift and they notice friction a manager never sees. Add whoever handles invoicing, since the accounting side is where most post-purchase surprises appear.