HolidayHero vs Cohosty

Cohosty is an AI guest assistant for holiday homes, built in Italy around one idea: the guest scans a QR code, opens a chat, and gets answers about the house and the neighbourhood in their own language. HolidayHero is a whole-stay platform, where that assistant is one pillar of five, alongside arrival and check-in, the guest app, revenue and operations.

What Cohosty does well

The setup story is genuinely good. You upload the welcome-guide PDF you already have, the AI pulls out the wifi password, the check-in times, the house rules and the parking, and you have a working assistant in a few minutes. There is no app for the guest to install and no dependency on where the booking came from, which is exactly right for a host with three apartments and no patience for onboarding projects. Pricing is published, starts at 6.90 euro per month, and Cohosty takes no commission on the extras a host sells.

Why HolidayHero

The stay starts before the QR code. Cohosty picks the guest up once they are in the property with a code to scan. HolidayHero starts at booking: online check-in with configurable fields, ID and passport capture, automatic guest registration filing with the authorities, and smart-lock plus smart-home access, so the door, the lights and the thermostat sit in the same system as the chat. Cohosty's site documents none of that. If arrival is the part of your operation that eats the most time, it is the part that has to be automated first.

One inbox, not one chat window. Cohosty's channel is its own chat, opened by the guest from a QR code or a link, with an email to the host when the AI cannot close the request. HolidayHero runs a unified inbox across email, WhatsApp and SMS, converts Booking.com relay mail into chat threads, syncs Airbnb and Booking.com messages, pulls PMS message threads in, and schedules templates gated by conditional rules so the right guest gets the right message at the right moment. That is the difference between waiting to be asked and running the conversation.

Extras that actually close. Both platforms let a guest ask for a transfer or a late checkout, and neither takes a commission on it. The difference is what happens next. On Cohosty the guest leaves an email and a phone number, the host gets a notification, accepts or declines, and payment happens somewhere else: a payment link, or cash at the property. On HolidayHero the guest pays in the app, the money splits automatically between operator, supplier and platform, charges post to the folio through supported PMS integrations, and the supplier receives the inquiry directly in their own portal instead of the host relaying messages. Bookable extras also sit on Cohosty's 9.90 euro Pro plan; on HolidayHero upsells and the local experiences catalogue are part of the product.

Your brand, your domain. The Cohosty guest chat is a Cohosty page with a Cohosty look. HolidayHero's guest app carries your colours, your logo and your theme across the app and every guest-facing message, runs on your own domain, lets you create, sort and hide sections, and changes what the guest sees depending on where they are in the stay: before arrival, in-stay, after checkout. For a single apartment that may not matter. For a brand with a hundred units it is the whole point.

Any property type, on any PMS. Cohosty is built for holiday homes, B&Bs and small properties, and runs standalone with no PMS integration documented. HolidayHero runs hotels, holiday parks, hostels, aparthotels and short-term rentals on one platform, connects to around 17 PMS plus locks, devices and payment providers, supports multiple distinct brands from one account, and exposes an API and a headless guest app so you can run the guest experience inside your own app or site. A standalone assistant stays simple right up until your property data lives in two places.

Operational intelligence, not just analytics. Cohosty reports what guests asked and where information was missing, which is useful. HolidayHero adds sentiment detection, a composite 0–100 engagement score across five dimensions, a workflow builder, task management with assignment and an audit trail, and in-stay surveys that turn into post-stay reviews. The goal is catching the unhappy guest before checkout, not reading about it afterwards.

Pricing you can read, at either end. Both publish their prices and both let you start on your own, which is worth saying plainly. HolidayHero starts at 6.50 euro per unit per month against Cohosty's 6.90 euro, and the gap widens once you want extras, since those need the 9.90 euro Pro tier. Above three properties Cohosty moves to a custom quote.

European by construction. Cohosty is Italian, GDPR-compliant, and unusually explicit about its AI Act transparency obligations, which is to its credit. Its privacy policy also states that some providers may process data outside the EEA under standard safeguards. HolidayHero is GDPR-compliant with EU data residency, and first-party guest data belongs to the operator and can be exported. Cohosty's terms put backing up your own content before account deletion on you, and no export tool is documented.

Capability by capability

Both platforms do the core assistant job well, and the table shows it: an AI concierge answering guests around the clock, a house manual and guidebook, translation into the guest's language, a dashboard over conversations and requests, multi-property from one account, published pricing, a free self-serve start, and no commission on the host's own guests. Cohosty earns those rows.

The table separates on arrival (check-in, ID capture, authority filing, door access), on messaging (unified inbox, WhatsApp, OTA and PMS sync, scheduled templates), on the mechanics behind an extra (folio posting, supplier routing, commission splits), on guest-app control (branding, own domain, stage-based journey, custom sections, itinerary), on operational intelligence (sentiment, engagement score, workflows), and on platform openness (API, headless, integration breadth, multiple brands). Where Cohosty is marked "not publicly documented", that is what its own site and legal pages say today, not a claim about what it could build.

One honest note on our own side: HolidayHero's automatic guest registration filing is live for Spain through SES.Hospedajes, with Italy and Dubai on the roadmap. If you are an Italian host and Alloggiati Web filing is your priority today, ask us about timing rather than assuming. Cohosty does not file registrations either, and its terms leave that obligation with the host.

Which one fits you

If you host one to three holiday homes in Italy, the job you want done is fewer repeated questions about the wifi and the air conditioning, and you want it working this afternoon from a PDF you already wrote, Cohosty is a fine pick. It does that job cheaply and neatly.

If you run more than a handful of units, or a mix of rentals and hotels, parks or hostels; if check-in, ID capture, door access and compliance are part of the work; if you want guest conversations across WhatsApp, email and the OTAs in one inbox; if you want upsells that post to the bill and suppliers who fulfil them without you in the middle; and if the guest app has to carry your brand on your own domain, HolidayHero is the platform built for that.