Everything hosts ask us — answered honestly

restay is AI revenue management software for Airbnb, Vrbo, and short-term rental hosts. We audit your nightly pricing, listing quality, and the local vacation-rental market every night, then push approved changes to your property management system (OwnerRez and Hospitable today, more platforms in validation). restay is NOT a restaurant tool, NOT a hospitality-industry assistant, and NOT related to RestoHost, Thanx, or "Restaurant AI" Play Store apps — those are different products in a different vertical. We share two letters with "resto," and that's it. If you're a short-term rental host, vacation rental owner, or property manager running listings on Airbnb / Vrbo / Booking.com, you're in the right place.

Short-term rental and vacation rental hosts and property managers — anyone who runs one or more listings on Airbnb, Vrbo, or Booking.com and wants to manage nightly pricing, listing quality, and competitive position without staring at spreadsheets. Most of our users sit in the 1–50 listing range, but the architecture scales to portfolio operators with hundreds of properties. Plans scale by property count only — Solo (1–3), Host (4–10), Pro (11–30) — and every plan is the complete product: daily audits, named reasoning, and PMS write-back.

Flat-by-tier, not per-property. Solo is $79/mo for 1–3 properties. Host is $249/mo for 4–10 properties. Pro is $549/mo for 11–30 properties. Pick the tier that matches your portfolio size, not the number of listings within each property.

You'll see an explicit upgrade prompt in the dashboard showing the new monthly price and prorated charge for the rest of your cycle. No silent upgrades. You control when (or if) you tier up.

You pick which properties to monitor at connect time. Unselected properties stay visible in your PMS but inactive in restay — no monitoring, no audits, no billing for those properties.

Full product access on the property you pick as your trial listing — audits, recommendations, and PMS writes work exactly as they would after you're a paid customer. During the trial, market-data features run on that one property; your whole portfolio unlocks when the trial converts. You add a card at signup, but it isn't charged until the trial ends — cancel anytime during the 7 days and you pay nothing.

Email scale@restay.ai with your portfolio size and we'll work out custom pricing with dedicated setup support.

Every tier includes the complete product — continuous audits, named-reasoning recommendations, listing-copy rewrites, the forward-rate index across your comps, Rev chat, the email digest, and approval-gated PMS write-back. Tiers differ by property count only: Solo covers 1–3 properties, Host 4–10, Pro 11–30. There are no tier-exclusive features.

Yes. Cancel from the billing portal in two clicks. Service stays live until the end of the current period — no pro-rata clawback, no exit interview, no "are you sure" retention modal.

No — monthly fees are non-refundable. The 7-day free trial is the try-before-you-pay window: cancel any time during it and you're never charged. After a charge, cancelling keeps the service live to the end of the billing period instead of refunding it. If you think you've been charged in error, email billing@restay.ai within 14 days; we investigate in good faith and respond like humans.

No. One monthly price per tier covers unlimited audits, recommendations, and PMS writes. No per-audit fees, no per-write fees, no overages. We enforce internal budgets so you never hit a surprise charge.

Generic AI is great at copy, ideas, and the public web. The numbers that actually move revenue aren't on the public web. Three live data feeds we connect to that ChatGPT and Claude can't see: (1) Your live PMS booking history — actual reservations, lead-time pacing, channel mix. Pulled fresh, not pasted in. (2) A forward-rate index across your closest comps — what the three to six listings most directly competing with you on bed/bath/guest match are charging the next 365 days, not what they charged last month. (3) Market booking pace — how fast the nights around yours are actually filling 30, 60, and 90 days out, against your own pace. So when ChatGPT can write you a description, we can tell you to raise next Friday +$24 — your top comp just moved up +$35 on the same dates and you're paced at 18% for that week vs the market's 31%. Generic AI hits a ceiling at "what does my listing say." We start where that ceiling ends.

No. ReStay brings its own pricing intelligence — live comp analysis, a forward-rate index across your closest comps, market booking pace, and recommended rate and min-night moves that push straight to your PMS on your approval. You don't need a separate dynamic-pricing subscription on top. One honest difference worth knowing: ReStay is operator-in-the-loop by design — it recommends and you approve each move, rather than silently auto-repricing your calendar every night. Every change is yours to approve, edit, or skip, and any applied move has one-click Undo. If you already run a dynamic-pricing tool, ReStay still adds the nightly audit, named reasoning on every recommendation, listing and market intelligence, and the approval-gated write-back. And if what you want is fully hands-off, set-and-forget automation with no approvals — that's a different philosophy than ours, and we're the wrong product for it, on purpose.

Rate gap vs your local comps, minimum-stay settings vs the comp median, trapped single-night calendar gaps, listing-copy gaps vs what draws guests in your market, and amenity gaps vs your comp set. Each recommendation cites the specific data point it came from (comp median, comp count, the exact gap). No black-box score.

The market data is real live comps, not scraped averages. The recommendations are model-generated and we flag confidence on every one. You should sanity-check before pushing a rate change to your PMS — all moves require your approval. Every write is logged with the prior state recorded, so any move can be reversed. We're not selling revenue guarantees; we're selling transparency and reversibility.

On every plan (Solo, Host, Pro) audits run automatically — you never re-run manually. New recommendations land as your comps and your calendar move.

Anywhere short-term rental comp data exists — most of North America, Europe, and major Asia-Pacific metros. In thin markets we don't pretend: when your comp sample is too small to trust (under 10 comparable listings), we hold the rate recommendation entirely rather than dress up a weak signal.

Your first audit fires automatically within minutes of connecting your PMS — nothing to paste, nothing to configure. After that, audits run continuously in the background and new recommendations land in your Queue as they're found.

No — the listings you 'own' in the product must match your PMS connection, because that's the write surface. You still see the market around you: every recommendation cites the comparable listings and the numbers behind it.

OwnerRez and Hospitable are live today — connect, sync, and approval-gated write-back. Hostaway is built and in final validation. We add platforms based on host demand; tell us yours at partners@restay.ai. Connect your PMS once and every agent uses it.

When an agent proposes a rate change, min-night update, or availability tweak, we queue it as a suggested move in the dashboard. You click Approve and it pushes to your PMS within 30 seconds. Every write is logged with the prior state recorded, so any move can be reversed. And nothing ever pushes without your click — if you'd rather apply changes manually in your PMS, simply don't approve; the recommendations keep flowing either way.

Tell us at partners@restay.ai with the platform name and your listing count — we add platforms based on host demand and the engineering effort per integration. Because your PMS is both the data source and the write surface, restay can't run until yours is supported — your note genuinely moves the queue.

Yes — by construction. Nothing is ever written to your PMS without your explicit Approve click, so if you never approve, restay is a pure recommendation engine: you get every suggestion with its reasoning and zero writes fire. There is no automation mode to switch off, because there is no automation mode at all.

Calendar: yes — availability and min-night writes, every one approval-gated. Guest messaging: no. We don't send messages on your behalf, don't reply to inquiries, don't touch guest PII beyond what's needed to scope an audit.

No. Not to fine-tune, not to improve our own models, not as part of any provider's shared training corpus. We route across frontier model providers with zero-data-retention enabled where supported. This is enforced at the policy level and the vendor level. Full subprocessor list lives on /security.

You. Our database has row-level security on every table — the public anonymous key has zero access; the backend reads your rows only after verifying your session. Only the small core team has production database access. No contractors, no vendors, no read-access granted to support tickets.

A managed relational database, US-East region by default, encrypted at rest (AES-256) and in transit (TLS 1.3). Backups use the same standard. EU residency is on the roadmap once we have a material EU cohort where the data-sovereignty requirement moves from nice-to-have to table-stakes.

Yes. From Settings → Account you can download your data as a single JSON file — listings, audits, analysis snapshots, recommendations, execution history, and reservation metadata. We only store the reservation fields needed to scope an audit — not guest PII beyond what your PMS already returns in the connect contract.

Yes. Self-serve delete from Settings → Account removes your account and your data immediately — no 30-day limbo — and cancels any active subscription so you're never charged after deleting. Stripe billing records we retain per US tax law (7 years).

No. We don't sell data, we don't run ads, we don't syndicate your listings or audits to partners. The business model is "hosts pay us" — not the ad-tech tax. Our subprocessor list on /security is the complete set of third parties that touch your data, and each one has a narrow purpose.

Honestly? Not yet. Trust is earned move-by-move: start the 7-day trial, see whether the reasoning matches your read of your own market, and stay only if the logic holds up. Every writeback on every paid tier requires your click — you're in the loop for every dollar of exposure. There is no "let the AI do whatever" mode. The trust is earned move-by-move, not by our marketing page.

You keep your data — we export a complete zip to every customer with at least 30 days of notice. Your PMS relationship is yours, not ours — our access rides a revocable token you can kill from your PMS side at any time. Nothing we do creates lock-in. If we go away, you're worse off because you lose the recommendations, but you're not stranded.

Every writeback is logged with the prior state recorded, so any move can be reversed. Every write requires your click before it fires — there is no hands-off mode, so a bad call can't ship itself. We're not offering a revenue guarantee; we're offering transparency, your approval on every move, and reversibility. If you want hands-off-forever, we're the wrong product.

A small core team — builders, not salespeople. When you email us, you get the person who wrote the code. We don't staff a support queue; we answer ourselves. That changes once we're too big for it to keep working, and we'll say so when it does, not before.

Best-effort during the v0.x phase. The live status page at status.restay.ai shows current and historical uptime — that's the most honest answer for a small team. Not enterprise-grade, not pretending to be. We do not offer formal SLAs today.

Not yet. Planned for 2026 once we cross the customer threshold where the audit is worth the spend — the current annual cost of a SOC 2 Type II for a team our size would cost more than we'd save. Until then, the entire security posture is documented verifiably on /security and the subprocessor list is public.

Email + password or Google sign-in today. Enterprise SSO is on the roadmap and opens alongside formal SLAs.

Not yet — accounts are single-user today. Team seats with roles are on the roadmap; if you need a teammate on your account in the meantime, email hello@restay.ai and we'll figure out what works.

Usually same business day, always within two business days. We email from real inboxes — no bot replies, no "your ticket has been queued." Written by the person who owns the part of the product you're asking about.

Bugs: email hello@restay.ai with two sentences and what you were doing. Security: security@restay.ai — we acknowledge within 2 business days and keep you updated. Responsible disclosure is covered in full on /security. We don't pay bounties yet, but we publicly credit researchers with your permission.

Email hello@restay.ai with two sentences. If it's a privacy topic use privacy@restay.ai; for security disclosure use security@restay.ai. We'll add your question to this page if it's something we should have answered here.

Yes. Solo is $759/yr (save $189), Host is $2,388/yr (save $600), Pro is $5,268/yr (save $1,320). All tiers come with a 20% annual discount versus month-to-month. Pay annually for convenience; month-to-month if you prefer flexibility.

All tiers bill flat-by-tier per month, not per property. When you add a property that crosses a tier boundary, your next invoice shows the new tier price prorated for the remaining days, then the new monthly amount aligns on your next renewal. If you drop a property, billing adjusts on the next cycle.

No. New features ship to every paid tier at no extra cost — you don't pay extra to opt in, and there are no tier-exclusive features.

No overages. Your monthly tier covers unlimited audits, writes, and API calls. We enforce internal budgets so you never hit a surprise charge. If you breach an internal soft limit (very unlikely), we call you first.

Not a formal discount tier yet. If you're managing 100+ listings, email partners@restay.ai — we negotiate portfolio pricing on a case-by-case basis.

Comps are selected by bed/bath/guest match + location radius. Accuracy is limited by how much variance exists in your market — a unique property (e.g., waterfront, historic) will have a smaller comp cluster. When the cluster is too thin to trust (under 10 comparable listings), we hold rate recommendations rather than force a weak signal.

Yes. We pull 365 days of forward rate data from your comps plus market booking pacing. Seasonal patterns are baked into the rate gap. Single-night snapshots miss this — our 365-day horizon is the point.

We retain every audit snapshot for the lifetime of your subscription so you can see how recommendations have evolved.

Audits run on the properties synced from your PMS connection. Once a property is in your dashboard, the audit runs automatically — you don't re-run manually.

We check before recommending. If fewer than 10 comparable listings exist in your cluster, we hold rate recommendations entirely rather than force a weak signal. You still get insights on listing quality and your own data, but we won't dress up a thin market as a full one.

You grant restay access to your PMS via OAuth or an API key (depending on the platform). We store an encrypted token and use it to read your reservations, availability, and property metadata, and to push approved rate/min-night/calendar changes. You can revoke access at any time from your PMS's own settings — the token dies with it.

No write fires without your click — your approval is the guardrail, and you can edit any proposed value before approving. Per-listing guardrail settings (rate floors and ceilings) aren't built yet; we won't claim them before they ship. Prior state is recorded on every write so any move can be reversed.

Failed writes show up in the Execution Log with an error message from your PMS. The write doesn't retry automatically — you see the failure, then decide: retry, apply it manually, or edit the value and approve again. The prior state is still recorded on every succeeded write.

Yes — just don't approve. Recommendations keep flowing into your Queue with full reasoning whether or not you ever click Approve, and nothing touches your PMS without that click. You can execute any suggestion manually in your PMS instead.

Usually under 5 seconds end-to-end. You click Approve, the write pushes, the result lands in your Execution Log. The click adds a few seconds of human latency on top of the network round-trip — that's by design, every write is human-confirmed.

Yes. Every paid tier lets you link multiple PMS integrations (e.g., OwnerRez for one set of properties, Hospitable for another). Recommendations feed the same Queue; you approve or reject per-PMS or in bulk.

Public Airbnb listings in your market matching your property's bed/bath/guest count, via a licensed market-data feed. We pull metadata, ratings, availability, and rate history. No private PMS scraping.

Honestly: the events feed is not live right now. We built the ingestion pipeline (concerts, sports, festivals, conferences with accommodation-impact data), but it's offline while we finalize a data partnership — so no current recommendation is event-driven, and we won't pretend otherwise. Today's demand signals come from market booking pace and 365-day comp forward rates. When events go live, you'll see it on the changelog.

No. We don't read messages, inquiries, or guest reviews. Reservation data we keep is: check-in/out, total price, channel source, guest count, lead time. No names, addresses, or emails.

Yes. Email privacy@restay.ai with the date range and property ID — we'll soft-delete audit snapshots and analysis data for those dates. Deleted data can't be recovered after 30 days (our retention window). Hard-delete is available on request.

Reject any recommendation in the Queue and optionally leave a reason. We aggregate rejection patterns per host and per recommendation type, visible in the rejection insights right on your Queue page. This feedback helps us tune what the agents propose.

Yes. EU-resident data is processed under GDPR; we use standard EU-US data transfer agreements, provide Data Processing Addendums on request, and support right-to-deletion. Full compliance details at /security.

Not yet — the honest answer is that formal E&O / cyber coverage sits on the same list as SOC 2: planned as we grow into it. What we have today is the security posture documented on /security, and payments that never touch our servers (Stripe-tokenized). Ask us anything at security@restay.ai.

Only the core team — no contractors, no vendors, no temp access. Credentials live in a password manager and are rotated on a regular schedule, and every model and market-data call against your data is logged with attribution.

We don't offer formal SLAs today. The live status page at status.restay.ai shows current and historical uptime — that's the most honest answer for a small team. SLAs may come once we cross customer thresholds where the operational overhead is justified.

Yes. Email privacy@restay.ai with your account email and we'll send a log of API calls, audits, and writes touching your data — usually within two business days.

Yes — email hello@restay.ai from your current address and we'll move the account; you'll verify the new address before it switches. No data is lost, and all your listings stay connected. Self-serve email change from settings is on the roadmap.

Roles aren't built yet — accounts are single-user today, and the account owner controls billing, PMS connections, approvals, and deletion. Team seats with owner / approver / read-only roles are on the roadmap; we won't claim them before they ship.

Email hello@restay.ai with the new owner's email. We'll change the account holder and invalidate your session. Billing ownership transfers to the new email; all listings stay.

Sign-in security is handled by our managed identity provider; there's no self-serve 2FA toggle in settings yet. If you have an account-security concern, email security@restay.ai and we'll help directly.

Yes. Your full data export (Settings → Account) is a JSON file that includes your Queue history, approvals, rejections, and Execution Log — timestamps, agent source, recommended vs actual values, and PMS outcomes included. One-click CSV is on the roadmap.

Yes — restay syncs your listings, bookings, and rates through your PMS connection, and the PMS is also the write surface for every change you approve. OwnerRez and Hospitable are live today; more platforms are on the way.

One. Solo ($79/mo) covers 1–3 properties, and every plan starts with a 7-day free trial — see whether the reasoning matches your market sense before the first charge.

Yes. On any paid tier, go to account settings and connect another property from your PMS — if you're still inside your tier's property cap, the new listing activates immediately. If it pushes you over the cap, the listing lands as "pending billing" and the system prompts you to upgrade to the next tier (Solo → Host → Pro). No downtime, no data loss.

PMS connection: 5–10 minutes (OAuth handshake or API key paste). First audit: fires automatically within minutes of connecting your PMS. Total onboarding to first recommendation: under 15 minutes.

Contact partners@restay.ai. We offer custom portfolio pricing, bulk PMS connections, and dedicated setup support once you reach scale.

Team seats aren't built yet — accounts are single-user today, so the clean setup is one account per portfolio (whoever runs revenue owns it) with the weekly digest forwarded. Proper teammate invites with roles are on the roadmap.

Tell us at partners@restay.ai. We prioritize based on host demand and integration effort. Because your PMS is both the data source and the write surface, restay can't run until yours is supported — your note genuinely moves the queue.

Not yet, but we're working on it. For now, the product is the best onboarding — every recommendation shows its reasoning and confidence, and that teaches you how the system works. Email hello@restay.ai if you get stuck.

The system queues the change to your PMS (rate, min-night, availability, calendar). It pushes within 30 seconds. You see the result in the Execution Log — green if successful, amber if the PMS rejected it. The prior state is recorded on every write, and eligible applied moves get a one-click Undo right in the log.

Reject it. Hit "Reject" in the Queue and optionally note why. Your rejection patterns are summarized right on the Queue page, and we aggregate them to tune what the agents propose.

Yes. Click the recommendation card and you'll see editable fields — change the suggested rate, min-nights, or booking window before you Approve. The system will apply your values instead of the suggested ones.

The PMS write itself lands within 30 seconds, and the Execution Log shows the result immediately. How fast the change appears on Airbnb or Vrbo depends on your PMS's channel sync — typically minutes, but that leg runs on your PMS's schedule, not ours. Failed writes show in the log with the PMS's error; they don't silently retry.

One click. Every executed write records the state it replaced — the previous rate, min-nights, or availability — and eligible applied moves carry an Undo button right in the Execution Log: click it, confirm what will be restored, and the recorded pre-change value pushes back to your PMS through the same logged, safety-checked pipeline as any other write. Undo is offered while the recorded prior state exists and the move is still the latest change to that date (each move can be undone once — the log shows it as Rolled back). For anything outside that window, the prior state is still recorded: approve a reverse change with the inline editor, or email hello@restay.ai and we'll revert it same day.

You'll see the error in the Execution Log (PMS offline, invalid value, permission denied, etc.). Decide: retry, apply it manually, or edit the value and approve again. Reversal is still available for any write that succeeded.

Yes. The Queue has a bulk-approve flow on every paid tier — filter to the set you want (all, rate changes only, etc.), arm the bulk action, and confirm; eligible recommendations execute in parallel. Each write records its prior state, so every move in the batch stays individually reversible.

Approve: executes the recommendation on your PMS and logs it. Dismiss: removes the recommendation from your Queue without approving or executing — optionally with a reason, which feeds the rejection insights on the Queue page. Use Dismiss if you've already made the change manually or you're sure you don't want it.

Most dynamic-pricing tools show you a number. restay shows you why — every recommendation cites the specific data point: your comp set moved +$15 on your open dates, or your pacing is 2 weeks behind the market. Transparency is the whole product.

A revenue manager costs $1K–$3K/mo and works 1–2 properties as a case load. restay is flat-by-tier: $79/mo (Solo, 1–3), $249/mo (Host, 4–10), $549/mo (Pro, 11–30), and scales to hundreds. Revenue managers are great for portfolio operators; restay is for self-directed hosts and small teams.

You can, but generic AI can't see your live PMS data (reservations, channel mix, lead times) or forward-rate calendars from your local market — those are the leverage points. Spreadsheets are spreadsheets. restay connects the dots: live data → named reasoning → approved moves.

(This question is answered in the pricing section above — see "Why not just use ChatGPT or Claude to price my listing?")

Doing it manually: check 3–5 comps, estimate market ADR, adjust your rate, move on. You miss pacing signals (are you booked ahead of the market?), comp moves on your overlap dates, and the 365-day forward view. restay does the data-heavy work — you stay in charge of every move.

Yes. Because nothing pushes without your Approve click, you can run restay as a pure recommendation layer while another tool handles writes — just don't approve, and compare the reasoning. restay doesn't lock you in.

Three feeds: (1) Live PMS booking history from your connection (lead time, channel, ADR) — no one else has this without your PMS connection. (2) 365-day forward rates from your comps — not historical averages. (3) Market booking pace — how fast the nights around yours are actually filling 30, 60, and 90 days out. Together they give a complete picture no generic tool can reach.

Yes. If you already have a pricing tool, run restay as a second opinion — every recommendation arrives with its reasoning, and nothing pushes unless you approve it. If you have a revenue manager, they can use restay as a research layer to double-check their own thinking. No lock-in, no conflicts.