Hotel software cost in Nigeria: what you really pay for

Ask five vendors about hotel software cost in Nigeria and you will hear five different ways of counting. One quotes a yearly price. Another quotes per room, per month. A third quotes a low figure and adds charges later. Comparing these offers is hard, and the cheapest number on the page is often not the cheapest system.

This post will not give you a list of competitors' prices, because they change and we would be guessing. It will do something more useful: show you every cost that can sit behind the price, so you can ask the right questions and compare like with like.

The four ways vendors charge

1. Per room, per month. You pay for the rooms you have. A 20-room guest house pays less than a 60-room hotel. This is the fairest way for a small property, because the bill grows only when the hotel does.

2. A flat yearly licence. One figure for the year, often based on a size band. It is simple, but check what happens when you add rooms.

3. A one-off purchase. You pay once and install it yourself. This used to be the norm. Ask who pays for updates, who fixes problems, and what happens when the computer it lives on fails.

4. A percentage of bookings. Common with booking-site tools. It can be cheap when you are quiet and expensive when you are busy.

The costs hiding behind the price

Whatever the model, ask whether each of these is included or charged separately:

• Setup. Who enters your rooms, rates, departments and opening balances? Is that a fee?

• Moving your old records. If you have years of guest and booking history in an older system, can it be brought across, and at what cost?

• Training. How many staff are trained, how long it takes, and whether a new receptionist can be trained later without paying again.

• Support. Who answers when the front desk is stuck at 11 pm? Is support by phone, WhatsApp or email only? In which hours?

• Hardware. Does it need a server, a special printer or a card reader? In Nigeria, remember the cost of power and the internet that goes with them.

• Messages and payments. Texts and WhatsApp messages to guests, and card payments, usually have their own charges from the companies that carry them.

• Extra modules. Is the restaurant, the store, the accounts or the door locks included, or sold one by one?

• Growth. What happens to the price when you add 10 rooms, or a second hotel?

Work out the real cost for one year

Take each offer and fill in the same table for your own hotel:

1. Monthly or yearly subscription for your number of rooms.

2. Setup and training, once.

3. Hardware you must buy or replace.

4. Messages, payments and other pass-through charges for a normal month.

5. Support, if it is charged.

Add it up for twelve months, then divide by your rooms. That figure, not the headline price, is what you compare. Do it for two years if one offer is a purchase and another is a subscription.

What to weigh against the price

A system that costs a little less but leaves money going missing is not cheaper. Think about what it does for you:

• Does it show you what happened yesterday without you being in the hotel? See what an owner should read every morning.

• Does it record every void, discount and cash-up so they can be checked? Read how money goes missing in a hotel.

• Does the front desk, bar, store and accounts live in one place, so nobody types the same figure twice?

Put a naira value on the answers. If one system stops even one missed room-night a week, it may pay for itself before the price difference matters.

How Xenia is priced

Xenia is priced per room, in naira, with a 14-day free trial and no card needed, so you can see it working in your own hotel before you pay. Current prices are always on the pricing page. We keep them there rather than in blog posts so you never read an out-of-date number.

If you are comparing us with an older system you already use, the switching page explains how an existing hotel moves over, and you can book a demo to see the real screens on a sample hotel. Ask us the same questions as above. We would rather you ask.