Hospitality margins are too thin to lose 18% of every booking to OTAs and tech fees. The right booking and PMS stack pulls direct bookings up, cuts no-shows, and gives your front-of-house team time to actually look after guests. Here's our honest take on the leading UK and EU options in 2026 — for hotels, restaurants and venues turning over £500k to £20m.
Mews has become the default for ambitious independent hotels because the API and direct booking engine let you actually compete with OTAs. For restaurants and bars, ResDiary's flat-fee model just makes financial sense versus per-cover competitors. SevenRooms wins if guest CRM is the centre of your strategy.
Three levers: a faster website with a friction-free booking engine (Mews and Cloudbeds both do this well), a paid search campaign that defends your brand name and outflanks OTAs on price-parity offers, and a guest CRM that turns first stays into repeats. We run all three for UK hotel groups — happy to share results.
For under 20 rooms, Little Hotelier starts around £100/month. Cloudbeds is similar and gives you more headroom. Both include a channel manager — don't pay separately for one.
Only if the cover volume justifies the per-cover commission. For most independents under £1.5m turnover, ResDiary's flat fee is meaningfully cheaper and gives you the customer data. OpenTable still wins on raw discovery in central London and Manchester — judge it on incremental covers, not total covers.
Both. Use WordPress (or a modern alternative) for the marketing site and embed or link to the Mews booking engine for the checkout. Trying to run the whole site inside a PMS limits your SEO and content flexibility.