Running a small property in Iceland: what to look for in booking and management software

Most accommodation businesses in Iceland are not chains. They are a guesthouse with fourteen rooms, a cluster of cabins, a small hotel outside Reykjavík, or a handful of apartments let by one owner. They run on a website, a booking calendar, Booking.com, a bank, a spreadsheet and email — and the software industry mostly sells to somebody larger.

If you are choosing a system this season, here is what is worth checking before the demo, and what tends to be discovered afterwards.

Start with the invoice, not the calendar

Every property management system has a calendar. Not every one produces an invoice your accountant will accept.

In Iceland an invoice has to carry both parties' kennitala, the seller's VSK number, a description of what was sold, and a pre-assigned sequential number. Gaps in that sequence attract attention, so the numbering has to be claimed by the system rather than typed in by a person. Records are kept for seven years.

There is a second detail that international software regularly gets wrong. Accommodation is taxed at the reduced VSK rate of 11 per cent, while most other things are at the standard 24 per cent. If your property sells anything besides the room — and most do — a single stay can produce one invoice carrying two different rates. Software that stores one tax rate per invoice cannot represent that correctly.

Ask the vendor directly: can a single invoice carry two VAT rates on different lines? It is a short question and the answer is revealing.

Turnover is the operational problem, not occupancy

Occupancy is a number you look at afterwards. Turnover is the thing that goes wrong on the day.

A property with scattered cabins or apartments has a harder version of this problem than a hotel corridor does. Someone has to know which units are being vacated this morning, which of those have an arrival the same afternoon, which need a full clean and which need preparing, and what the guest ordered in advance.

Most small properties solve this with a WhatsApp group and a good memory. It works until it is August, five cabins turn over on the same day, and one of them quietly does not get done.

The question worth asking of any system: does it work out the day's work from the bookings by itself, or does somebody still have to decide and type it in? And if a unit was not finished yesterday, does it stay on the list — or does it disappear because there is no booking event today to put it there?

Direct bookings are worth more than the commission you save

OTA commission is the obvious number. It is real, and for a property with strong seasonality it is a significant amount of money leaving every summer.

But the less obvious part matters more. A direct booking gives you the guest's email address, the ability to sell what you offer alongside the room, and a relationship you can bring back next season. An OTA booking gives you a guest who belongs to the OTA.

Realistically, no system will move all your bookings direct. Anyone who promises that is selling something. But a booking website that actually takes bookings — rather than a widget that sends the guest somewhere else halfway through — moves a meaningful share of them, and those keep their full value.

A widget is not a website

This is the difference most vendor comparisons miss.

Most systems give you an embeddable booking box. You paste it into whatever website you already have. It looks borrowed, because it is: different typography, different spacing, sometimes a different language, and often an iframe that mobile browsers handle badly.

The alternative is a booking website that is your website — your design, your domain, your words — with the reservation logic behind it rather than bolted onto it. For a property whose photographs are its main sales tool, that difference shows up in the conversion rate.

Payments in Iceland are local

Do not assume a system with “Stripe” on the feature list solves this. Many Icelandic properties already have a relationship with a local acquirer, and switching that relationship is not a small administrative task.

What matters is whether the software can connect to what you already use, rather than requiring you to adopt what it already supports.

A short checklist for the demo

Ask these five, and ask them early:

1. Can one invoice carry both the 11 per cent and the 24 per cent rate on different lines?
2. Does the system work out the day's cleaning from the bookings, without anyone entering it?
3. If a unit was not cleaned yesterday, is it still on today's list?
4. Is the booking flow part of my website, or an embedded box inside it?
5. Can it connect to the payment provider I already have a contract with?

Any vendor who cannot answer those in plain language is going to be a difficult partner in October.

Where Revoo fits

Revoo is a property management system and a booking website for independent hotels, cabins, guesthouses and apartments. It is not an off-the-shelf subscription: every property gets the shared platform plus an implementation built around how it actually operates — including its own booking website, its payment provider and its country's invoicing rules.

We work with a small number of properties at a time, which is why there is no sign-up button on this site. If you would like to see whether it fits yours, the next step is a 45-minute conversation.