Review of Little Hotelier

6
Easy to use for a small operation — but too locked down
Director from 5 to 9 room Airport/Conference Hotels in Halls Gap (Australia)
Verified
4 days ago
Products Reviewed
What do you like most?
Generally we find Little Hotelier a good system to use, especially the integration with the channel manager. It works well for our small (7 cabins) operation. It is easy to use and does most of what we want. It is fairly reliable.
What do you dislike or think could be improved?
A few things come to mind, that are ongoing niggles, in no particular order: 1. authentication and logins: cannot login from multiple devices simultaneously so if you use LH from 2 computers (e.g. back office + front desk), you need separate users defined. 2. mobile app login: they force you to change your password frequently, and I often get 'password invalid' when logging into the mobile app. Also, they don't have passkey login for mobile app. You can't login to the mobile app using the passkey setup on the pc. 3. cannot get access to Google Hotel free booking links using Little Hotelier. They say that you can get access, but only through their 'Demand Plus' feature which has even higher commission % than Booking.com 4. can't get a rates report or download. I want to view my rates for the next 12-24 months to check whether I've got rates too high or two low, or have correct settings for school holidays, long weekends etc. But the ONLY way to view rates is through the Front Desk Inventory screen. According the Help documentation (on their website) there is a Rates API, but it doesn't work, and in fact Support tells me it is deprecated. So why is it still in the Help system? 5. the company is 'distant': there is no such thing as an account manager (as far as I know), the only communication is when they send an email or when you deal with support (who can be great or not so great). Also there is no 'community' such as a Facebook group or a forum, where users like us can discuss issues, processes, product improvement suggestions etc. 6. the system is 'locked up': there are limited ways to get information in or out of the system, such as being logged in and doing a download of e.g. reservations. However you can't setup API connections to do things like extract data or update anything. 7. you are stuck with Little Hotelier Payments if you want automated payment processing. There are no other payment processors you can choose that can be integrated for receiving payments. If you process payments outside of Little Hotelier Payments, you then have to manually login to record the payment (can't have an interface or API to mark a reservation as paid). 8. product demos / training / webinars: as far as I can tell, they don't really exist. Certainly I don't get emails suggesting I sign up for this or that product update webinar (as I do for other system we use). 9. lack of unified messaging: I tried the optional 'Guest Engagement' add-on module but found it impossible to configure even simple things like having images display properly. We opted out. There really should be a unified messaging system so that no matter which channel someone has used to make a reservation, all messages come into and can be responded to in one place. 10. confusing setup split between multiple apps: the system has different apps e.g. Front Desk app (which is within Little Hotelier only) and Direct Booking app. If you want to set up simple things like Payment Policy or Cancellation Policy where do you do it? Turns out you need to do it in multiple places. 11. authentication provider trap: LH wants you to setup Multi Factor Authentication, and use itself as the authentication provider. The issue is that if you get locked out, you can't login again to actually use it as the authentication provider because you need authentication in order to login. It can only be fixed by support. So make sure you use an external authentication provider, such as Google Authenticator. 12. no product roadmap to see what is coming down the track. What are their priorities? What are they working on? What is even in the requested product features list? No idea and no way to find out. 13. limited user roles / permissions: we'd like to give our cleaners the LH mobile app so they can see bookings and number of people to set up for, not the financial info, but it's all or nothing. Can't set a user up with specific things they can and can't see. 14. On the positive side, the AI chatbot to help you do things is excellent, helpful, very well trained, and provides very good guidance in my experience. They have done well here.
3.0
Average
Ease of Use
5.0/5
Customer Support
3.0/5
ROI
3.0/5
Implementation
3.0/5

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