Hotel Booking System for Hotels, Lodges & Guest Houses in Kenya

A hotel booking system (also called an online booking engine or reservation system) is the part of your website that lets guests check room availability and reserve a room online by themselves. It connects to your rooms and rates, shows only what is genuinely available for the selected dates, takes payment and confirms the reservation automatically — without front desk staff taking the booking over the phone.

A booking system faces the guest: it is the online booking engine on your website where visitors check availability, reserve a room and pay. A property management system (PMS) faces your team: front desk check-in and check-out, guest records, housekeeping, billing and management reports. Microstation provides both, and they share the same live data — a booking made online appears instantly in the hotel management system, and rooms marked unavailable at the desk are immediately hidden from the booking portal.

Yes. The booking engine supports M-Pesa STK Push, where the guest confirms payment directly from their phone, plus credit and debit card payments (Visa, Mastercard and other major cards). Guests can pay from their phone or with a card when booking, and a confirmed payment automatically moves the reservation into confirmed status, which removes double bookings and manual reconciliation.

It gives you a commission-free channel of your own. OTAs such as Booking.com, Expedia and Airbnb remain useful for discovery, but every direct booking taken through your own booking engine carries no OTA commission — you keep the full rate and the guest relationship. Over time, shifting repeat and returning guests to direct bookings is one of the most effective ways to protect room revenue.

No. The booking system is 100% web-based, so guests simply open the booking portal on your website from any phone, tablet or computer with a browser. Your staff also use the same web-based hotel management system, so there is nothing to install on either side.

Start with the 60-day free trial — every new property can use the complete booking and hotel management system free for 60 days, including the online booking portal, live availability, front desk, housekeeping, billing, M-Pesa and card payments and reports. You only commit to the one-time setup fee and monthly plan once you are confident it fits the way your hotel runs.

No. A channel manager is separate software you subscribe to from a specialist provider. It exists to keep all the places you sell rooms — your own site, Booking.com, Expedia, Airbnb — in step with each other; a channel is simply anywhere you sell a room, and each travel site gives you its own private admin area (Booking.com calls its admin area the Extranet) where you would otherwise update rates and availability by hand. The booking engine and your own direct booking portal work without one, and if you do not sell on OTAs you never need one at all. It only matters if you also sell on Booking.com, Expedia or Airbnb and want rates, availability and reservations kept in step automatically instead of being updated by hand on each travel site. If you already run one, we connect it to the booking system both ways — we are not a reseller, so you buy your licence from your own provider and it stays yours. That connection is a separate service priced on its own, from KES 25,000 one-time setup and KES 3,500 per property per month, and it is not included in the 60-day free trial. Note that a channel manager automates the connection but does not reduce OTA commission on OTA bookings.

There is no per-booking fee — you pay a one-time setup fee plus a monthly plan sized to your room count. For up to 20 rooms, setup is from KES 15,000 to connect the booking engine to an existing website, or from KES 45,000 if we build the website for you, with a monthly plan from KES 10,000. Up to 50 rooms: setup from KES 35,000, or from KES 105,000 with a website build, and KES 20,000 per month. Up to 150 rooms: setup from KES 60,000, or from KES 155,000 with a website build, and KES 40,000 per month. Larger and multi-property properties are quoted individually, and the monthly fee covers app and database hosting, maintenance, security, backups and support. Every new property can also use the complete booking and management system free for 60 days before committing to any of those figures.

You get the full system free for 60 days — not a cut-down demo, and not a limited number of bookings. Live availability, the guest booking portal, front desk, housekeeping, billing, M-Pesa and card payments, reports and staff roles are all included, with no obligation to buy at the end. The platform is web-based, so there is nothing to install and no free-download edition: you log in from a browser. Two things sit outside the trial — connecting a channel manager, which only applies if you already sell on OTAs and is separate paid work, and domain registration and domain hosting if we build a website for you, which are billed separately.

Yes. If you already have a website, we wire the live booking and payment engine into it, so you keep the site, domain, brand and search visibility you have built and simply gain a real-time booking channel. The booking portal can be embedded on your existing pages or linked from them, with your branding, room types, rates and payment workflow configured around how you sell. If you do not have a website yet, we build a starter site as part of setup so the booking portal becomes your online home.

Yes — it is designed for Kenyan hotels, lodges, guest houses and serviced apartments of any size. You define your own room types and rates, so a guest house with a handful of rooms and a larger lodge with several categories both fit the same platform. The Starter plan covers up to 20 rooms with a monthly plan from KES 10,000, and there is no enterprise contract required to get started.

Reservation changes and cancellations are handled by your team from the hotel management system: extensions, date changes, cancellations and no-shows are recorded against the booking, and the room is released back into availability immediately so it can be re-sold. Guests contact the property using the details on their booking confirmation, which keeps your cancellation policy in your hands rather than in the hands of a third-party platform. Your front desk sees the change the moment it is made, so the booking calendar, housekeeping board and the guest record all stay in step.

Yes. Credit and debit cards — Visa, Mastercard and other major cards — are accepted alongside M-Pesa, which matters for international travellers, corporate accounts and anyone who prefers card payment. A guest booking from abroad does not need M-Pesa to reserve a room. Card details go through secure, encrypted checkout and are never stored in plain text, and the payment is recorded against the reservation so billing, receipts and reconciliation stay accurate.

We agree the timeline with you after the demo, based on how many room types and rate plans you have and whether the booking engine is going onto an existing website or we are building one — and you get it in writing before work starts. You are not waiting for go-live to use the system, however: the 60-day trial starts first, so your team can be running the front desk and taking bookings in the platform while configuration is being completed.

No, and mixing them up is common. A booking system — also called a booking engine — is the part of your own website where guests check availability and book direct, and it is where your commission-free revenue comes from. A channel manager is separate software from a specialist provider that keeps third-party travel sites such as Booking.com, Expedia and Airbnb in step with each other so you do not update each one by hand. You need a booking system to sell direct; you only need a channel manager if you also sell on OTAs. If you already run one, we connect it to the booking system both ways for a separate fee, because you own the licence and we are not a reseller.

Yes. Booking-source tracking records direct bookings made through your own portal alongside walk-in and phone reservations and OTA bookings, so you can see how much of your business your own booking engine is winning — and how much commission you are avoiding each month. That reporting is what turns "OTAs are expensive" into a number you can act on.

The platform is web-based, so any device your team uses needs a working internet connection — a phone or tablet on mobile data makes a simple backup at the front desk during an outage. Guests book from their own phones over their own connection, and confirmed reservations live on the server, so nothing that has already been booked is lost or double-sold. Once you reconnect, work continues exactly where it left off.