What hotels actually pay for software vs what they really use.

1. What the market charges

Hotel software is priced per room, per month. Across vendor pricing pages and hospitality pricing guides, the rate for a single application runs $1–$5 a room at entry level, $4–$15 in the mainstream where most hotels sit, and $15–$25 at enterprise level.

Two things keep those numbers below the real bill. They are per application, and almost no hotel runs one — front desk, housekeeping, messaging and maintenance are four line items, each priced per room. And the advertised rate is not the invoice: add channel manager access, a booking engine, payments, a support tier, onboarding and transaction charges, and the same guides put the real monthly cost at double to triple the headline.

Now take the most cautious reading of that. Two applications, not four. $4 a room each, the bottom of the mainstream band. Every extra fee ignored.

So on average, a hotel pays around $8 a room, every month — and that is the floor, not the invoice.

2. The per-room myth

Per-room pricing sounds fair. Bigger hotel, bigger bill. Smaller hotel, smaller bill. It sounds like paying for what you use.

It is not. A room does not use software. A team uses software. A 300-room hotel does not run six front desks, it runs one. The checklists are the same checklists, the inbox is the same inbox, the task list is the same task list.

Room count is a measure of what the vendor thinks you can afford. That is a normal way to price a product, and it is worth knowing that is what it is. It does not measure what the software does for you, and nobody will say so in the meeting.

Room count tells a vendor what you can afford. It does not tell them what you use.

3. What teams actually use

Now put that bill against what your team opens. Software research across hundreds of products — broad, not hotel-specific — keeps landing in the same place: about 12% of features produce 80% of daily use, and 80% are rarely or never opened.

Anyone who has worked a shift will recognise it. A receptionist lives in messages and reservations. A housekeeper opens a checklist and closes it. A technician looks at what is assigned today. The revenue module, the analytics suite and the twelve report types are in the demo and in the price, and almost never on a screen.

So the bill grows with room count, and use does not grow at all.

One question worth sending your vendor

Can you share our usage statistics by the features you have? Which were opened last quarter, by how many people, and how often. The answer tells you what you are actually buying.

4. Democratising the cost

Building software is far cheaper and faster than it was five years ago, and it is still getting cheaper. Prices have not followed. Much of what a hotel is quoted today reflects what software cost to build ten years ago, and that saving is being kept rather than passed on.

We think it should be passed on. Treema exists to democratise the cost of running a hotel — the same tools a 300-room resort uses, at a price a 40-room guesthouse can approve without a meeting.

So we changed what the price is attached to. We took the essentials — the features hotel teams open every day — put them in one platform, and set one fair price per property. Front desk, housekeeping and engineering each get their own space in the same system rather than their own invoice, and a hotel with no PMS integration does not pay for one.

What moves the bill is the modules and integrations you switch on. Not how many doors are in the building, and not how many people are on shift. Adding a floor does not change it, and neither does hiring three seasonal housekeepers.

We cut the bill for the hotels that were overpaying, and put a real system within reach of the ones that could never afford one.

5. The comparison

Put that $8 a room against one flat price per property — still the cautious case, when plenty of hotels run a third and a fourth system on top.

Read the two Per room columns against each other. Theirs never moves — $8 whether you have 50 rooms or 300. Ours falls to 50 cents, because the price follows the property, not a number that grows.

Their side is rooms × $8. No vendor is named. Compare it against your own invoices, not against this table.

6. But how do I switch?

The bill is rarely what stops a hotel. The fear is the move — a system half the team never learns, weeks of setup nobody has time for, and a season going wrong in the middle of it.

So do not move the whole hotel. Start with one team and one module — the inbox at the front desk, or checklists in housekeeping — and keep your current tools running beside it. Thirty days, one hotel, no card. If the team does not open it, you have lost nothing.

You do not have to switch a hotel to find out whether the software is any good. You have to switch one team.