Property Management Stories
Real operator stories from short-term rental hosts, mined from public complaints — and how to solve them.
- When Your PMS Raises Prices 27% and You're Still Filing Support Tickets Every Other Day Author is fed up with Smoobu after a 27% price hike and frequent support tickets, signaling readiness to switch.
- When Your PMS Website Builder Wasn't Built for Multi-Property Portfolios Host managing multiple properties finds Smoobu's website editor limited to 10 pages, unable to properly present multiple properties or optimize SEO, and lacks automated partial invoicing (deposit + balance), requiring manual workarounds and extra domains.
- When Your PMS Onboarding Never Actually Happens Author signed up for Smoobu but couldn't complete setup due to outdated tutorials and no-show onboarding calls, and is still frustrated 7 months later.
- When Your PMS Can't Scale: Why Multi-Property Managers Outgrow Budget Tools Multi-property manager is actively leaving Smoobu after over a year due to terrible customer service, dysfunctional support, and a platform that doesn't scale beyond a few properties.
- When Your PMS Has 'the Bones' but Can't Deliver: The Frustration of Almost-Good-Enough Software Host is frustrated with Smoobu's broken VRBO/Expedia sync, terrible booking engine UI, unreliable analytics, limited team access controls, and frequent glitches with rate/availability updates.
- When Your Channel Manager Can't Handle Per-Channel Pricing Rules Author is frustrated that Smoobu lacks granular pricing control — no cancellation-policy-based rate differentiation on Booking.com and no price syncing on VRBO — making the channel manager too simplistic for real use.
- When Your Channel Manager Only Manages Some Channels Author finds Smoobu's channel integrations too limited (VRBO is iCal-only, no API push to channels) and too expensive for 6 rental units given the product's immaturity.
- When Your Channel Manager Causes the Double Booking — And Blames You for It Author has experienced persistent VRBO API integration failures and a double booking with Smoobu that wasn't even visible in the app, and is explicitly advising others to choose a different channel manager.
- When Your Channel Manager Doesn't Actually Sync: The Hidden Cost of Calendar Failures Host's Smoobu channel manager failed to push availability restrictions to booking sites, causing impossible double bookings across portals that they now must honor to avoid penalties.
- Why Is It So Hard to Leave Your Property Management Software? Host with many listings is trying to leave iGMS but can't deactivate their account, which is blocking their calendar management and preventing them from moving to another tool.