A PMS demo is a performance. The screens are pre-loaded, the sample hotel is always full, and nothing ever crashes at 2am. You're not choosing a demo, though — you're choosing the system your desk will fight with, or lean on, every single day for years. These twelve questions cut through the show. Ask them all, in writing where it matters.
The money questions
1. “What is my exact monthly bill, all-in?”
Per-room price × your rooms, plus every add-on, interface charge, setup fee and payment-gateway markup. If the answer takes more than one line, the pricing is designed to grow after you sign. (Our answer, for the record, is printed here.)
2. “What happens to my rate at renewal?”
Renewal letters have a habit of arriving 15–20% heavier than the sales quote. Ask for the year-two number in writing — and ask whether existing customers kept their price the last time the list price rose. The answer to the second question is the real policy.
3. “Does your booking engine take a commission?”
Three numbers, in writing: the commission percentage on direct bookings, the per-booking fee, and what “payment handling” means. We've mapped where these charges hide in the fine-print guide — for the checklist, the only acceptable set is 0, 0, and “the gateway's standard fee, paid to the gateway”.
The operations questions
4. “Show me a check-in, start to finish, on the clock.”
Not a tour — a timed check-in, with an ID, a rate change and a UPI payment. Under two minutes is the bar. Your 9am queue will thank you.
5. “What exactly happens at day close, and who has to be awake for it?”
The night audit is where accounting spines are separated from screenshot software. If the answer involves a person at 3am, keep shopping.
6. “When an OTA booking lands, how many seconds until every other channel knows?”
Overbookings live in that gap. Ask for the number, then ask to watch it happen live with a real test booking.
7. “Does the restaurant bill land on the room folio by itself?”
If rooms and F&B are separate systems stapled together, the seam shows up as re-typed bills, missed charges and a cashier who goes home late. One folio, one audit, one GST register.
8. “Is the GST invoice correct out of the box — CGST/SGST by slab, registers filing-ready?”
Ask to see a sales register export. Your CA can spot software adapted for India from one built for it in about ten seconds.
The data questions
9. “What format does my data leave in, and how fast?”
Ask for a sample export during the trial — bookings, guests, folios, rates — in files your CA or the next system can actually open. A vendor who hesitates on a sample is telling you how the real exit will go.
10. “Who else can see my rates and guest data?”
The right answer is no one: strict per-property isolation, encryption at rest, access logged by staff role. Ask the question directly and watch how comfortable the answer sounds.
The support questions
11. “It's 2am and check-in is stuck. Who answers, and in how many minutes?”
Hotels don't close. “Raise a ticket” is not an answer at 2am — a phone number that rings a person is. Ask whether support is the same on every plan or sold back to you as “priority”.
12. “Who does the migration, and what does it cost?”
Rooms, rate plans, future bookings, guest history, OTA connections — moved by the vendor, in days, with a parallel-run safety window. If migration is your job or a paid project, the real price of the software just changed.
Scoring it
Twelve questions, twelve written answers. Anything vague counts as a no. And if you'd like to watch one vendor answer all twelve on a live screen with your own room types loaded, that's exactly what our demo is.