SuitePad review: what in-room tablets cost, and whether they earn it

I will say this for SuitePad before I say anything critical: it is the best in-room tablet I have put in front of a guest, and I have looked at most of them. This SuitePad review is not going to argue that the product is bad. It is going to argue something more awkward, which is that a very good product can still be the wrong answer to a question you have not asked yourself yet. The question is not “are these tablets any good.” The question is “do my guests stay in the room long enough to use them.” For a resort, the answer is obvious. For my 80-room city hotel in Amsterdam, it was not, and I had to spend nine weeks and a fair amount of my own time finding out.

I run a property where the average stay is a little under two nights and a good share of my guests are here for one. They arrive late, they sleep, they leave a key card on the desk and they are gone by nine. That profile matters more to this decision than any feature SuitePad ships, and I want to get to it. But first, as always, I want to talk about the price, because SuitePad made that harder than it needed to be.

The price, or the absence of one

Here is what SuitePad publishes: a subscription model “starting at” around $450 a month, and a second model they call performance-based. That is the entire public picture. There is no per-room figure, no grid, no calculator. For a tool where the cost depends entirely on how many rooms you have, “starting at $450” tells an 80-room hotelier almost nothing. So I did the thing I tell everyone not to have to do. I filled in the form, I booked the call, and I waited.

The call was fine. Professional, not pushy, about fifteen minutes. The rep asked about my room count, my stay patterns, my food and beverage setup. And then, instead of a number, I got a model. Two of them.

The first is a straight subscription: a fixed monthly fee that bundles the tablets (bought outright or leased into the fee), the software, installation by their team, training and support. The second is the performance model, and I will admit it is clever in a way that irritated me, because I wanted to dislike it. Under the performance model SuitePad owns and maintains the hardware, charges you nothing upfront, and takes a share of the revenue the tablets generate, with a ceiling on the annual cost agreed in advance. They are, in effect, betting on their own product and capping your downside. For a category where the usual objection is “I am not spending forty thousand euros on tablets that might freeze,” that is a real answer to a real fear.

What I could not get, on either model, was a clean number I could put in a spreadsheet next to my other tools. Not a per-room subscription figure I could hold still, not the revenue-share percentage on the performance model, not a contract length. Everything was “it depends on your configuration, let us build you a proposal.” I have written before that if I need a demo call to see your pricing, I already know it is too expensive. SuitePad is the more interesting case: the call did not reveal the price, it replaced the price with a relationship. I understand why a hardware company with installation costs prices this way. I still think that in 2026 you should be able to tell an 80-room hotel what 80 rooms costs.

For the pilot I will describe below, I went in on the performance model, which let me test the thing without writing a cheque for hardware. That was the right call, and it is also, quietly, the strongest argument SuitePad has.

What I actually tested

I did not tablet the whole hotel. You cannot sensibly trial in-room hardware across 80 rooms, and SuitePad did not ask me to. We put tablets in 18 rooms on one floor and ran them for nine weeks, from early April to early June 2026. I kept the usual spreadsheet: occupied room-nights on that floor, ancillary revenue attributable to the tablet (room service, late checkout, breakfast added after arrival, a couple of spa referrals to a partner down the road), and a column I care about more than any vendor does, which is how many guests touched the thing at all.

Occupancy on the pilot floor ran about 74 per cent over the nine weeks, in line with the rest of the hotel. Installation took an afternoon and their team did it, not mine, which I appreciated. The docking stations are tidy, the tablets have no camera (a deliberate privacy choice, and the right one), and the interface is easy in the way that matters: my 70-year-old guests and my 25-year-old guests both worked out the room-service menu without calling reception. That is not nothing. A lot of guest-facing software fails that exact test.

So the hardware works and the software is well made. Now the awkward part.

The number that decides everything: do they use it?

SuitePad’s own marketing says something like 80 per cent of guests use the tablet for fifteen minutes or more. I do not doubt that figure exists in their data. I doubt it describes my hotel. Those numbers come from the properties that buy a lot of tablets, which are resorts and spa hotels and luxury houses where a guest is in the room for a week and the tablet is the remote control for their holiday.

On my pilot floor, by my own rough count from the usage analytics, somewhere between a third and a half of guests opened the tablet at all, and most of those for a minute or two. The one-night business guest did not touch it. He was not in the room to be sold a spa treatment; he was in the room to charge his phone and leave. The tablet is a shop you can only visit by being somewhere my guests are not, very much, which is the room.

When guests did engage, the money was real. Room service orders through the tablet were larger and more frequent than orders by phone, because a visual menu with photographs sells better than a guest squinting at a laminated card or, more likely, not bothering. Across the pilot I attributed roughly two euros of ancillary revenue per occupied room-night to the tablet. Annualise that naively across 80 rooms at my occupancy and you get something in the region of forty thousand euros a year of gross ancillary revenue, which sounds like a clear yes.

It is not a clear yes, and this is where keeping an honest spreadsheet earns its place. A good part of that room service would have happened anyway, by phone, tablet or not. The tablet did not create all of it; it captured and slightly grew it. My best guess at the truly incremental portion, the revenue that exists only because the tablet exists, was closer to a third of the headline. Set that against a cost I could not pin down, and the case for my property was thin. Not negative. Thin. For a resort doing seven-night stays with a spa and three restaurants, flip every assumption and the same product is a straightforward win.

What worked, beyond the revenue

A few things deserve credit and I am not going to bury them.

The “green option” is the smartest small feature in the product. A guest can decline daily housekeeping from the tablet, usually nudged by a small incentive, and you save the room turn. For a hotel my size the labour saving is modest but real, and guests who think of themselves as environmentally minded feel good doing it. It is the rare feature that saves you money and pleases the guest at once.

Support and onboarding were handled properly. Their team did the install, trained my front desk in an hour, and answered questions quickly when a tablet misbehaved. This is a company that has been doing one thing since 2012 and it shows in the operational polish.

And the performance pricing model, which I keep coming back to, does something almost no one else in hotel tech does: it shares the risk. If the tablets do not earn, you do not pay much. I dislike the opacity and I respect the structure, and both of those can be true.

What did not work

The hardware is hardware, with everything that implies. Two of my eighteen tablets needed attention during the pilot, one that froze and wanted a restart, one with a charging dock that was temperamental. Two out of eighteen over nine weeks is not a disaster, but multiply it across a full hotel and you have a small fleet of devices to charge, clean, update, occasionally replace and insure against theft. That is an operational tail that a messaging tool running on the guest’s own phone simply does not have.

The PMS integration was shallower than the sales conversation implied. For my setup it pushed the basics across but did not give me the clean two-way flow I wanted, and I have heard the same from others. Thomas, who reads API documentation for pleasure, would have opinions about the depth here, and they would not all be kind.

And then the pricing, again, which I am marking down hard not because SuitePad is expensive (I never established that it was) but because it would not tell me. I cannot compare a tool I cannot price.

The data question, briefly

A screen in a private room invites an obvious worry, so let me deal with it. SuitePad is a German company, it hosts in the EU, and the tablets ship with no camera and no listening microphone. That removes the creepiest objection before it starts, and the no-camera choice is deliberate: it tells you they have had the argument internally and landed in the right place. What the tablet does collect is usage data, what guests tap, what they order, how long they linger. That is useful to me as a record of what sells, and it is also guest behaviour I am now responsible for holding. Anna would have read the data processing agreement line by line; I skimmed it and asked the questions that touch my exposure and my P&L, and the answers were reasonable. For a city hotel with European guests this is the easy end of the privacy spectrum: EU company, EU hosting, a clear purpose for the data. If you sit in a stricter procurement environment, get your data protection officer the processing terms before the tablets arrive, not after. I would still rather explain a chat thread to a regulator than a roomful of always-on screens, but on this point SuitePad has done the work.

The question SuitePad does not want you to ask

There is a whole argument in this category that the tablet itself is the wrong object. Why put a device in the room when every guest already carries one in their pocket? The browser-based competitors, Code2Order chief among them, make exactly this case: no hardware to buy, no fleet to maintain, the guest scans a code and uses their own phone. SuitePad’s answer is that a dedicated screen on the nightstand gets used far more than a code on a tent card, and their data supports that for their customer base. For a resort, I believe them. For my city hotel, where the guest’s phone is already in their hand and the room is just somewhere to sleep, the BYOD argument lands harder.

It is also why I kept thinking about messaging the entire pilot. A tool like askng.it, which I run at my own hotel, reaches the guest where they already are, on WhatsApp, before they have even arrived, for a fraction of the per-room cost and with no hardware at all. That is not a fair fight on guest experience inside a luxurious room; a beautiful tablet beats a chat thread for a guest who is lingering. It is a very fair fight on cost per occupied room-night for a guest who is not. Different tools for different stays, which is the whole point of the guest communication category and worth thinking through before you commit to a screen in every room.

Who should actually buy this

If Elena put SuitePad in her family resort on the Greek coast, where guests stay a week, live by the pool and order to the room three times a day, the maths I just walked through would look completely different and probably brilliant. Longer stays, more in-room time, a richer service menu, more to upsell. That is SuitePad’s home, and in that home it is excellent.

My home is the opposite. Short stays, business mid-week, a guest who treats the room as a place to sleep between meetings. The best in-room tablet in the world cannot sell to a guest who is not in the room. SuitePad did not do anything wrong in my hotel. It answered a question my property does not really ask.

So this is a six. The product is closer to an eight; the fit for a property like mine pulls it down, and the refusal to show me a price pulls it down further. If you run a resort, a spa hotel, a luxury house, or anywhere guests really settle in, add two points and book the call. If you run a short-stay city hotel like mine, work out your in-room time first, and put the cost of a fleet of devices next to the cost of reaching the same guest on the phone already in their hand.

SuitePad pricing and ROI: common questions

How much does SuitePad cost?

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SuitePad does not publish per-room pricing. The only public figure is a subscription that starts at around $450 a month; everything beyond that is quote-only, behind a sales call. Even after the call I could not get a clean per-room number, a revenue-share percentage, or a contract length for my 80-room hotel.

Does SuitePad have a performance-based pricing model?

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Yes, and it is the more interesting option. Under the performance model SuitePad owns and maintains the tablets, charges nothing upfront, and takes a share of the revenue the tablets generate, with an annual cost ceiling agreed in advance. For a category where the usual objection is the upfront hardware bill, that shifts the risk off the hotel, which is rare.

Is SuitePad worth it, and what is the ROI?

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It depends entirely on how long your guests stay in the room. At my short-stay city hotel I attributed roughly two euros of ancillary revenue per occupied room-night to the tablet, and only about a third of that was truly incremental; the rest would have happened by phone anyway. At a resort or spa hotel with week-long stays and a richer service menu, the same product earns far more. Work out your in-room time before you sign.

Do you have to buy the tablets?

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Not necessarily. On the subscription model the tablets can be bought outright or leased into the monthly fee. On the performance model SuitePad owns the hardware outright and maintains it, so there is nothing to purchase. Either way it is a fleet of screens to charge, clean, update and insure, an operational cost your spreadsheet should include.

Is SuitePad cheaper than messaging guests on their own phone?

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No. A tablet in every room costs more than reaching the same guest on WhatsApp, where they already are. A messaging tool like askng.it runs at a fraction of the per-room cost with no hardware. The tablet wins on experience for a guest lingering in a comfortable room; the phone wins on cost for a guest who is not. Different tools for different lengths of stay.

If you take one thing from this: SuitePad is not the decision. Your average length of stay is the decision, and SuitePad is the right tool once that number is high enough. Mine is not, quite. Elena’s would be.

• Sophie, for all six of us