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 (Hostaway, OwnerRez, Hospitable). 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. Single-property hosts start with the free audit; multi-property operators upgrade to Solo, Host, or Pro for daily audits 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 tier access — all features (audits, recommendations, PMS writes) work exactly as they would after you're a paid customer. No card upfront, cancel anytime. The trial is risk-free.

Email scale@restay.ai with your portfolio size and we'll work out custom pricing. Most portfolios 30+ properties negotiate 20–30% off list price with dedicated setup support.

Solo: 6-hour audit cadence, named-reasoning recommendations, listing rewrites pushed to your PMS with one-click rollback, forward-rate index across comps, email digest. Host: Everything in Solo, plus demand-event alerts (concerts, sports), flight-disruption signals, severe-weather displacement, multi-market portfolio view. Pro: Everything in Host, plus year-over-year performance dashboard, annual revenue percentile vs market, booking lead-time + length-of-stay trends, supply-pressure intelligence.

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.

If you cancel within 7 days of upgrading and haven't yet pushed a write to your PMS, email billing@restay.ai and we'll refund the charge. After that we're pro-rata on the month. We don't do automatic refunds as a churn-prevention tactic; ask and we'll 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 + review history — actual reservations, lead-time pacing, channel mix, reviews mapped to specific amenities. 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) A 365-day demand-event index — concerts, sports, festivals, conferences with measurable accommodation impact within driving distance, ranked by predicted spend lift. So when ChatGPT can write you a description, we can tell you to raise next Friday +$24 — Stagecoach is in town, your top comp just moved up +$35, 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.

Rate gap vs local comps, photo scoring, review-sentiment signal, and a demand curve for the next 90 days. You get a named-reasoning report — each recommendation cites the specific data point (comp median, photo cluster, review theme) it came from. 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 and reversible with a one-click undo. We're not selling revenue guarantees; we're selling transparency and reversibility.

Free audit: one verified audit per email; re-runs require signing up for a paid tier. On Solo, Host, or Pro: audits refresh every 6 hours automatically. Event-triggered reruns also fire — e.g. a major comparable drops its rate by 15%.

Anywhere short-term rental comp data exists — most of North America, Europe, and major Asia-Pacific metros. In thin markets (fewer than 20 active comps within 5 km) we flag the audit with reduced confidence and call out the coverage limit explicitly rather than pretending it's a full signal.

About 60 to 90 seconds end-to-end. You paste the Airbnb URL, the pipeline runs five diagnostic passes in parallel (listing, rates, market, content, photos), and the report renders. You can close the tab and come back — audits persist and resume.

You can run a free audit on any public Airbnb URL — this is how most property managers evaluate us (audit a comp, see if the numbers match what they already know). On paid tiers, the listings you 'own' in the product must match your PMS connection, because that's the write surface.

30+ platforms including Hostaway, Guesty, Hostify, and Lodgify, with OwnerRez and Smoobu in the integration queue. One connect flow, one token, unified write surface. 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 a one-click undo that reverses the change. Advisory mode (suggest-only) is available on any tier if you want to review changes manually in your PMS instead.

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. In the meantime you can run the free audit, get the report, and execute the changes manually in your PMS.

Yes. All paid tiers have a "suggest-only" toggle in settings. You still get the recommendations and reasoning, but we queue zero PMS writes and nothing pushes. Useful if your revenue manager wants to keep a hand on the wheel while you evaluate the signal quality.

Calendar: yes, for availability and min-night writes on the tiers that enable them. 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 account settings you can download a zip of your audits, analysis snapshots, 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 account settings triggers a soft-delete; rows are purged after 30 days. For an immediate hard-delete, email privacy@restay.ai and we'll confirm within 2 business days. 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. You should trust the free audit, see whether the reasoning matches your read of your own market, and upgrade only if the logic holds up over a few weeks of observation. 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 connection is yours, not ours; we don't hold the token, your PMS does. 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 and reversible — you can roll back any move from the audit trail. Every paid-tier write requires your click before it fires. Anomaly-protect auto-pauses if a move would trigger unusual patterns (>15% rate drop, full-availability wipe, min-nights zero). We're not offering a revenue guarantee; we're offering transparency and a one-click undo on every move. 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. We publish incidents openly on /changelog and the live status page is at status.restay.ai. Historical uptime since launch is above 99.5% — 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, Google, or GitHub today. Magic links supported. Enterprise SAML SSO is on the roadmap for the portfolio-pricing tier and opens alongside formal SLA.

Solo and Host tiers support inviting up to 3 teammates per workspace; Pro tier is unlimited. Invite from account settings with an email address and a role (admin / approver / read-only).

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. Coming features (event-driven min-stays, listing-copy edits pushed to PMS, annual-event playbooks) are free to all paid-tier subscribers once they ship. You don't pay extra to opt in.

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, usually 20–30% off list.

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. We flag this explicitly when the cluster is thin (fewer than 20 active competitors).

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

Free audit: one audit per email, stored for 90 days. Paid tiers (Solo, Host, Pro): unlimited; we retain every audit snapshot for the lifetime of your subscription so you can see how recommendations have evolved.

Free audits work on any public Airbnb URL. Once you own a property in a paid tier (Solo, Host, Pro), the audit runs automatically on a 6-hour cadence. You don't re-run manually.

We check before auditing. If fewer than 20 active comparables exist in your radius, the report flags "Thin Market" and lowers the confidence on rate recommendations. You still get insights on listing quality and your own data, but the margin-of-safety is wider.

Market snapshots refresh every 6 hours. Your personal listing data (photos, title, description) updates nightly. Forward-rate calendars (comps and your own) update daily to track pacing shifts.

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 anytime from account settings.

No. You set guardrails — minimum rate floor, maximum rate ceiling, dates to exclude. Every write requires your click before it fires; the system never bypasses your approval. A one-click undo reverses any move in your PMS.

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, decide whether to re-run, manually apply, or adjust guardrails. Rollback is still available on succeeded writes.

Yes. "Advisory mode" in settings disables all PMS writes but keeps recommendations flowing. You'll see suggested rate changes, listing edits, and market alerts in your Queue — you just execute them manually in your PMS instead of clicking Approve.

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., Hostaway for your Airbnb, OwnerRez for Booking.com). Recommendations feed the same Queue; you approve or reject per-PMS or in bulk.

Rate data (comps and pacing) updates daily. Listing metadata and photos update nightly. Event calendars extend 365 days forward. Market metrics (occupancy, ADR, supply) refresh every 6 hours. Nothing older than overnight.

Public Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com listings in your market matching your property's bed/bath/guest count. We pull metadata, ratings, availability, and rate history. No private PMS scraping.

We ingest a 365-day calendar of concerts, sports, conferences, festivals, and conventions with historical accommodation-impact data. This powers demand-driven rate recommendations — when Stagecoach Festival peaks, your comp set rates move, and we surface that before your guests search.

No. We don't read messages, inquiries, or guest reviews beyond the aggregate sentiment metric your PMS already calculates. 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 Insights card on your home page. This feedback helps us iterate the model.

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.

Yes, through our investor. Errors & Omissions + Cyber liability coverage. Certificates available on request — email security@restay.ai.

Three core team members, password-manager protected, signed audit log on every read. No contractors, no vendors, no temp access. We rotate credentials quarterly.

We don't offer formal SLAs today. We publish incidents openly on /changelog and the live status is at status.restay.ai. Historical uptime since launch is above 99.5% — 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. Go to Account Settings and update your email. You'll get a verification link at the new address. No data is lost, and all your listings stay connected.

Owner can invite teammates, change billing, connect new PMS, and delete the workspace. Approver can approve or reject recommendations and adjust guardrails — but cannot change billing or remove integrations. Read-only can view only. Solo and Host tiers support 3 teammates; Pro tier is unlimited.

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.

You can turn off 2FA anytime from account settings. Your account will rely on password + email verification only. We'll send a confirm email first so no one can lock you out by disabling 2FA.

Yes. Download a CSV of your Queue history, approvals, rejections, and Execution Log from the account page. Includes timestamps, agent source, recommended vs actual, and PMS outcomes.

Not for the free audit — you can audit any public Airbnb listing without an account. To use a paid tier (Solo, Host, Pro), you need a connected PMS (Hostaway, Guesty, OwnerRez, etc.) so we can push approved changes. 30+ platforms supported.

One. The free audit works on any single listing without an account. Solo ($79/mo) covers 1–3 properties. Most solo hosts start with the free audit first to see if the reasoning matches their market sense.

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.

Free audit: 2 minutes (paste URL, get report). PMS connection: 5–10 minutes (OAuth handshake or API key paste). First scheduled audit: fires automatically within minutes of connecting your PMS. Total onboarding to first recommendation: under 15 minutes.

Contact partners@restay.ai. We offer portfolio pricing (usually 20–30% discount) for bulk account setups, bulk PMS connections, and dedicated account support once you reach scale.

You can add them as a teammate from account settings (up to 3 on Solo and Host tiers, unlimited on Pro). Or they can create their own account and you grant them access to specific properties. Both workflows are supported.

Tell us at partners@restay.ai. We prioritize based on host demand and integration effort. In the meantime, you can run free audits and execute changes manually in your PMS, or use advisory mode (recommendations flow without writing).

Not yet, but we're working on it. For now, the free audit is the best onboarding — you see the reasoning and confidence on every recommendation, 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. You can always undo.

Reject it. Hit "Reject" in the Queue and optionally note why. Rejected recommendations don't re-surface for 14 days unless market conditions change significantly. We aggregate rejections to improve the model.

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.

Rate changes show up on Airbnb/Vrbo within 15 minutes. Calendar or min-night changes within 30 seconds. You can check the Execution Log immediately to see if the write succeeded. If your PMS is offline, we queue and retry.

Click "Undo" on any executed recommendation in the Execution Log. The system reads your current PMS state and reverts to your previous values. One-click, logged, reversible at any time within 30 days.

You'll see the error in the Execution Log (PMS offline, invalid value, permission denied, etc.). Decide: retry, manually apply, or adjust guardrails and re-run the agent. Rollback is still available if a previous write succeeded.

Yes. The Queue has an "Approve all" button on every paid tier. Select your filter (all, rate changes only, etc.), hit Approve, and all eligible recommendations execute in parallel. You can undo the entire batch with one Undo button.

Approve: executes the recommendation on your PMS and logs it. Archive: removes the recommendation from your Queue without approving or executing. Use Archive 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, a major event happens in 7 days, or your pacing is 2 weeks ahead. 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?), event-driven peaks, and the 365-day forward view. restay does the data-heavy work — you stay in charge of every move.

Yes. Advisory mode (suggest-only, no writes) lets you use restay for recommendations while another tool handles writes. Or you can switch PMS connections — 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) Local demand events (sports, concerts, conferences) with accommodation-impact ranking. Together they give a complete picture no generic tool can reach.

Yes. If you already have a pricing tool, restay runs in advisory mode and gives you second opinions. 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.