RoomRaccoon review: the all-in-one PMS my newest hire could actually use

My grandmother opened this hotel with a paper ledger and a good memory. My mother expanded it to thirty rooms and switched to a desktop computer running software that looked like a spreadsheet with ambitions. I run it on Mews, which works, but I’ve been curious for a while whether something built specifically for a property my size might fit better than a system designed to scale up to hundreds of rooms.

RoomRaccoon kept coming up. A colleague on Paros mentioned it. A hotelier I met at ITB Berlin was using it for her forty-room property outside Lisbon and said she’d cancelled three separate subscriptions after switching. Three vendors replaced by one. That caught my attention, because managing multiple software relationships is one of the quiet time-drains that nobody warns you about when you run a small hotel.

So I arranged a trial. I wanted to know two things. Could Nikos, my youngest front desk hire, learn it in a morning? And could the all-in-one approach save me from the patchwork of tools I currently juggle alongside Mews?

What RoomRaccoon actually is

For anyone arriving at this review through our property management overview, the short version: RoomRaccoon is a cloud-based PMS from the Netherlands that bundles property management, channel management, a booking engine, payments, yield management, and upselling into a single platform. Founded in 2017, headquartered in Breda with a second office in Cape Town (plus teams in Valencia and Lisbon). They acquired another PMS called Lobbi in October 2024, which expanded their footprint. They claim over 400 integrations.

The company is largely self-funded, which is unusual in hotel tech. Most of the PMS vendors I’ve looked at are backed by venture capital and building for scale. RoomRaccoon seems to be building for hotels like mine: European, independent, somewhere between fifteen and a hundred rooms. That positioning felt honest. I wanted to see if the product matched it.

The Nikos test

I’ve written about this before. When I’m evaluating software, I don’t spend a week learning it myself and then writing a considered assessment. I hand it to whoever is newest on my team. If they can use it, the tool works. If they can’t, no feature list in the world matters.

This season, that person is still Nikos. He’s nineteen, studying tourism in Heraklion, and now in his second season at the front desk. He’s more confident than last year, but he’s still learning, and new software makes him cautious. He tends to click slowly and read every label before he does anything, which is exactly the kind of user who exposes bad design.

I set up the RoomRaccoon trial on a Tuesday morning and gave Nikos the login at nine. By noon he had created test reservations, checked a guest in, checked them out, and figured out how to add a note to a booking. He hadn’t touched the channel manager or the yield management (nor would I expect him to), but the core PMS tasks, the ones he does twenty times a day, were done.

“It looks like a calendar,” he said, pointing at the main view. He meant it as a compliment. The reservation grid uses a familiar layout: rooms down the side, dates across the top, coloured blocks for bookings. Nikos had seen something similar in his textbook at university. That recognition mattered. He wasn’t learning a new mental model; he was applying one he already had.

Katerina, who has three seasons behind her and can train new hires on almost anything, spent about half an hour looking through the system later that afternoon. Her verdict was less enthusiastic than Nikos’s but still positive. “It’s fine. It does what it says. Some of the menus go deeper than I’d like.” Coming from Katerina, that’s a solid endorsement.

One system instead of several

The real argument for RoomRaccoon isn’t any single feature. It’s that you stop paying for and managing a collection of separate tools.

Right now, alongside Mews, I use a separate channel manager to distribute my rooms to Booking.com, Expedia, and the smaller OTAs. I use a separate booking engine on my website. I use Duve for guest communication. And I do revenue management the old-fashioned way, which is to say I adjust prices manually based on how full we are and what the weather forecast looks like. That’s four systems (five if you count the weather app) that need to talk to each other, and sometimes they don’t.

RoomRaccoon puts all of this in one place. The channel manager is built in. The booking engine is built in. Payments are built in. And the yield management (which they call RaccoonRev) is built in too, with AI-powered dynamic pricing that adjusts your rates based on demand, competitors, and market conditions.

For a thirty-room seasonal hotel without a revenue manager on staff, that last part is interesting. I’ve never had the time or the expertise to do proper yield management. I adjust prices for peak season, drop them in shoulder months, and occasionally react when I notice competitors changing their rates. That’s not a strategy; it’s guesswork with a calendar.

RaccoonRev tries to automate this. It watches your occupancy, tracks your competitors’ rates, factors in local events and demand patterns, and suggests (or, if you let it, automatically sets) your room prices. The idea is that a small hotel gets the kind of revenue optimisation that big hotels achieve with a full-time revenue manager.

How the dynamic pricing works in practice

I tested this carefully, because automated pricing for a seasonal Greek resort is a different challenge than automated pricing for a city hotel with steady demand year-round. Our season runs roughly from April to October. In July and August, we’re full regardless of price. In April and late October, we need every booking we can get. The swing between peak and off-peak is dramatic, and any pricing tool needs to understand that rhythm.

RaccoonRev did understand it, mostly. I loaded our historical rates and occupancy data, set minimum and maximum price boundaries for each room type, and let the system run alongside my manual pricing for two weeks (I didn’t activate automatic updates; I just watched what it recommended).

The recommendations were sensible for peak dates. For a Saturday in July, when I was already nearly full, it suggested a rate slightly above what I had set. Correct. For a midweek night in late September, when I had twelve rooms empty, it suggested a lower rate than mine. Also correct, and I probably would have been slow to drop my price without the nudge.

Where it wobbled was in the transitions. The shift from shoulder season to peak is not a straight line in Greece. It depends on when Easter falls, when the first heatwave arrives, when the ferries to the islands start running more frequently. RaccoonRev’s suggestions during these transitional weeks sometimes felt too aggressive (dropping prices when I knew bookings would come) or too cautious (not adjusting for a local festival that fills every hotel in the area). I ended up overriding its suggestions more often than I’d like during April and May.

The colleague in Lisbon told me she’d had a different problem with RaccoonRev: on a couple of occasions the system made sharp, unexpected rate changes that she only caught because a returning guest rang to ask why the price had doubled since the week before. She’d left it on automatic and learned the hard way that you need guardrails. I took the lesson and kept my minimum and maximum boundaries tight.

A colleague running a year-round city hotel in Valencia told me the dynamic pricing works much better for her because her demand patterns are more predictable. I believe her. For seasonal properties, you need to watch it closely, especially during transitions. Don’t set it to automatic and walk away. Treat it as a second opinion, not a replacement for your own knowledge of your market.

The channel manager and booking engine

The built-in channel manager connects to the usual suspects: Booking.com, Expedia, Agoda, Airbnb, and around twenty others. Rates and availability sync in both directions. When Nikos makes a reservation on the front desk, the room closes on Booking.com within a few minutes. When a booking comes in through Expedia, it appears in the RoomRaccoon calendar with the source clearly marked.

One thing I noticed during testing: rate changes didn’t always push to the OTAs as quickly as I expected. I updated a rate on a Thursday afternoon and checked Booking.com twenty minutes later. The old price was still showing. It caught up within the hour, but if you’re making last-minute adjustments during a busy period, that delay could mean selling a room at yesterday’s price. My current channel manager with Mews syncs faster, or at least it feels that way. It’s possible I’m spoiled.

I didn’t experience any double-booking issues during my trial period, which is the minimum standard for a channel manager but also the most important one. With my current setup (Mews plus a separate channel manager), I had two double bookings last season. Both were during peak season when rooms were selling fast across multiple channels. Two in a whole season isn’t terrible, but each one meant a difficult phone call to a guest and a scramble to find alternative accommodation. If RoomRaccoon’s built-in channel manager is even slightly more reliable because there’s no sync delay between separate systems, that alone has value.

The booking engine is clean and does what it needs to. You embed it on your website and guests can check availability, see photos, and book directly. It’s not going to compete with the design of a custom-built booking page, but for a thirty-room resort that doesn’t have a web designer on retainer, it’s more than adequate. Direct bookings come in commission-free, which matters. Every booking that comes through your own website instead of Booking.com saves you fifteen to twenty percent.

What I compared to Mews

I’ve been using Mews for two years. It works. It’s reliable, it connects to everything, and my staff know how to use it. So why would I consider switching?

The honest answer: I’m not sure I would. Mews is a bigger system than I need, and I’m paying for capabilities I don’t use. But the familiarity has value. Katerina knows where everything is. My accountant understands the reports. The integration with Duve works. Switching to RoomRaccoon would mean a period of disruption that I’m not certain the benefits justify.

That said, there are things RoomRaccoon does better for a property my size. The setup is simpler. When I first configured Mews, I needed help from their support team for things that should have been obvious. RoomRaccoon’s setup wizard walked me through room types, rate plans, and channel connections in about two hours. With Mews, the equivalent process took the better part of a day plus a follow-up call.

The all-in-one pricing is also cleaner. With Mews, I pay for the PMS, then separately for the channel manager, then separately for Duve. With RoomRaccoon, one subscription covers PMS, channel manager, booking engine, payments, yield management, and upselling. Sophie would want to see the exact numbers side by side, and the comparison isn’t entirely straightforward because the feature sets aren’t identical. But for a thirty-room property, RoomRaccoon’s complete package at around €450 per month is competitive against my current stack of separate tools.

I should note, though, that the pricing structure has layers. Some features I assumed were included in the standard plan turned out to require a higher tier. The more advanced yield management settings, certain payment features, and some of the automation options sit behind the Premium or Enterprise plans. I only discovered this when I tried to configure something and hit a greyed-out button with an “upgrade” label. My mother still writes every cost in a notebook at the kitchen table, and I inherited her dislike of surprises on invoices. If you’re evaluating RoomRaccoon, get very specific about which features are included at your tier before you commit.

Where Mews is stronger: the marketplace of integrations. Mews connects to a much wider ecosystem. If I want to add a new tool, whether it’s a guest messaging platform, a housekeeping app, or an accounting integration, Mews almost certainly has a connection for it. RoomRaccoon claims over 400 integrations, which sounds like a lot, but in practice some of the connections I looked for (specific Greek accounting software, for instance) weren’t available.

The upselling module

RoomRaccoon includes a built-in upselling feature that lets you offer guests add-ons during the booking process and via pre-arrival emails. Room upgrades, early check-in, late checkout, a bottle of wine, airport transfers. The usual menu.

I set up a few offers and tested them during the trial. The interface for creating upsell items is simple. You add a name, description, photo, and price. Guests see the offers when they book through your booking engine or in their pre-arrival email.

It works, but it’s basic. Compared to what I can do with Duve’s upselling through WhatsApp (where I get around 18% conversion), the RoomRaccoon upselling feels less personal. It’s a form, not a conversation. Guests see a list of options and tick a box. There’s no targeting based on guest profile or booking type, no “offer the boat trip only to guests staying four nights or more.” For a small hotel where we know our guests personally, the lack of targeting is less of an issue because Maria or Katerina will mention the boat trip at check-in anyway. But the tool itself isn’t going to impress anyone who’s used a dedicated upselling platform.

What I personally disliked

The reporting. I found the reports adequate but rigid. I could pull occupancy data, revenue summaries, and channel performance, but when I wanted to see something specific (like revenue per available room broken down by booking source for the shoulder season only), I couldn’t build that view without exporting to a spreadsheet and doing it myself.

Mews lets me customise reports more flexibly. For a hotel owner who makes pricing decisions based on data (or at least tries to), the reporting gap matters. I spend winter evenings going over last season’s numbers, looking for patterns, deciding where to adjust. RoomRaccoon’s standard reports would cover about seventy percent of what I need. The other thirty percent would mean spreadsheets and manual work.

The reliability also gave me pause. I mentioned earlier that the calendar occasionally loaded slowly. But it went beyond slowness. On the second Wednesday of my trial, which I’d set up with dummy data simulating a busy week, the reservation calendar froze for about fifteen seconds and then loaded with two bookings missing from the grid. They were still in the system (I found them through the booking search), but they weren’t showing on the calendar view. I refreshed the page and they reappeared. That same afternoon, the system logged me out mid-session without warning. Nikos had it happen to him twice during the trial as well.

These aren’t fatal problems in a trial with test data. But in August, when every room is full and a family is standing at the desk asking about their reservation, a calendar that freezes or drops bookings from view would rattle even Katerina. I’ve heard similar stories from colleagues. A hotelier I know who runs a sixty-room property in the Algarve told me the system gets noticeably less stable when occupancy is high, which is of course exactly when you need it most. She’s still using it, and she likes it on balance, but she described peak-season reliability as her single biggest frustration.

I also want to mention the lack of a native mobile app. RoomRaccoon works in a mobile browser, and on a tablet it’s perfectly usable. But there’s no dedicated app you can download and open with a tap. I walk the property constantly. I check bookings from the terrace while having coffee, from the beach while talking to the gardener, from the kitchen while arguing with my mother about whether we need new pillows. A proper mobile app with push notifications would make that easier. Opening a browser, logging in (or re-logging in, because the session had expired again), and waiting for the calendar to load is just enough friction that I sometimes don’t bother and walk back to the front desk instead.

And one more thing. Some of the advanced features, particularly around the yield management configuration and the more granular channel manager settings, felt like they were designed for a property slightly larger than mine. A fifty or sixty-room hotel with a dedicated front office manager would use these tools daily. At thirty rooms, where I’m the owner, the revenue manager, the HR department, and sometimes the person carrying luggage, some of these settings represent complexity I don’t have time for. I’ve made my peace with ignoring features I don’t need (it’s that tour bus to the bakery again), but it does mean I’m paying for things I’ll never touch.

A word about contracts

I need to mention something that came up in a conversation with a colleague in Crete. She signed up for RoomRaccoon, used it for eight months, and when she decided to switch to a different system, she found the cancellation process more difficult than she expected. The marketing says there’s no long-term lock-in, and technically that may be true, but she described back-and-forth emails, an auto-renewal she hadn’t noticed, and an unexpected charge after she thought she’d cancelled. It took her the better part of a month to fully close the account.

I don’t know if her experience is typical. Perhaps she missed something in the terms. But she’s not the first person I’ve heard this from; another colleague, this time in the Peloponnese, mentioned being charged for a month he thought was covered by the notice period.

My mother would say: read every line. She’s right. If you sign up, pay attention to the renewal terms and the cancellation process. Ask specifically how it works before you start. These things are easier to sort out before you’re a customer than after.

European, and it shows

RoomRaccoon is headquartered in Breda, Netherlands, with offices in Cape Town, Valencia, and Lisbon. The support team operates across European time zones, and when I contacted them during the trial, I got a response within a few hours. The support was in English, but they also offer Dutch, German, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. For a Greek hotel, English works fine for me, but the multilingual support matters for colleagues across the continent.

The system is built for European tax requirements, which is one of those things you don’t think about until you’ve dealt with a PMS that wasn’t. Greek VAT rules are particular (everything in Greece is particular, my mother would say), and RoomRaccoon handled our tax configuration correctly on the first attempt. With a previous system, before Mews, I spent two weeks going back and forth with support to get the invoices right.

Anna would want to know about data handling. RoomRaccoon processes data within the EU, which is the baseline for any European hotel. They’re GDPR-compliant, they offer a DPA, and guest data stays on European servers. For my purposes, a Dutch-headquartered company with EU data processing is about as safe as it gets. Anna would still read every line of the DPA. I read the summary and moved on.

How it compares to Noovy

I’m also reviewing Noovy for this site, and the comparison is instructive. Noovy is the radical budget option: €5 per room per month, zero setup fees, built by former hoteliers. RoomRaccoon is the established mid-range all-in-one. They’re both aimed at small independents, but they solve different problems.

If I were starting fresh, with no existing PMS and a tight budget, Noovy would be tempting. It’s cheaper, it’s newer, and it’s stripped down to the things that matter. But RoomRaccoon offers more: the built-in channel manager, the yield management, the payments, the upselling. For a property that’s ready to consolidate multiple tools into one, RoomRaccoon is the stronger choice. For a property just getting off spreadsheets and wanting the simplest possible PMS, Noovy is worth a serious look.

The onboarding experience tells the story. Nikos learned both systems quickly, but RoomRaccoon took a full morning while Noovy (in my trial) was even faster. The difference is that RoomRaccoon has more to learn because it does more. Whether that extra complexity serves you depends on whether you need the extra features.

Who this is for

RoomRaccoon fits a specific kind of hotel: European, independent, somewhere between twenty and eighty rooms, currently using multiple separate tools and tired of managing them all. The sweet spot is probably a forty to sixty-room property with a small but capable team. At thirty rooms, my property is at the lower edge, and I felt that in the features I didn’t need.

It’s a good system. Nikos could use it by lunch. The all-in-one approach solves a real problem. The yield management, even with its seasonal limitations, is more than I currently do. And the pricing, while not cheap, is fair for what you get, provided you check which tier actually includes the features you need.

But I’m not switching from Mews. Not yet. The disruption of migrating, the retraining, the risk of things going wrong during peak season, none of that is worth it when my current setup works. The reliability questions I had during the trial made me more cautious, not less. If I were opening a new property, or if Mews raised their prices significantly, or if I lost patience with managing separate tools, RoomRaccoon would be near the top of my list. But I’d want to hear that the stability issues had been sorted before I trusted it with a full house in August.

That’s not a criticism of the product as a whole. The ease of use is real, the value proposition is sound, and for a colleague running a forty-room hotel who’s tired of juggling three or four vendors, I’d still suggest they take a look. I’d just tell them to test it during a busy period, read the contract carefully, and keep their rate boundaries tight on the dynamic pricing.

That’s how small hotel owners make decisions. We’re cautious with working systems because we’ve been burned by change before. My mother used the same reservation book for fifteen years. I’m not that stubborn, but I understand the instinct.