How GreatStay grew 15% in a year with Guesty

Meet GreatStay

GreatStay started 20 years ago, before Airbnb existed, when its founder rented out a studio as a student. Two decades on, that experiment has become one of Berlin’s most distinctive holiday-apartment operators — a decentralized, boutique-style portfolio of 40+ listings in downtown spots across the city, built for families and groups who want character over uniformity.

What sets GreatStay apart is the attention to decor and service, spread across neighbourhoods rather than concentrated in one block. The ambition is clear: to become Berlin’s finest, state-of-the-art holiday-apartment operator, at 70–100 units.

The breaking point

Before Guesty, GreatStay ran on other PMS platforms, including Hostaway and Kigo. As the portfolio grew, the same limitations kept surfacing.

• Guest communication that was harder to manage than it should have been
• Weak AI integration, limiting what the customer-service team could automate
• Accounting that didn’t keep pace

The through-line was clear: the customer-service features and operational automation the business needed to scale simply weren’t there. The tools were holding growth back.

Choosing Guesty: built for the whole team

What changed first was the simplest thing, and the most important: an interface every employee could actually handle. For a business running on service quality across a spread-out portfolio, a system the whole team can use without friction is the foundation everything else sits on.

From there, the customer-service side transformed. Easier-to-use AI and communication features gave the team the automation the previous platforms lacked.

“Efficient, smart, well designed.”

GreatStay Ltd

A stronger technology core

Guesty centralized the work that had been fragmented across tools. The clearest example is pricing on Booking.com.

Before Guesty, GreatStay had to set rates and special rate plans manually, listing by listing, inside Booking.com. Now it’s done from one interface, across the portfolio.

• Automated guest messaging, including multi-language messages for an international guest base
• Automated reviews, taking a recurring manual task off the team
• Centralized rate and rate-plan management for Booking.com, replacing listing-by-listing work
• Analytics giving clearer visibility across the operation

Together, these turned hours of manual coordination into work that runs from a single screen.

The impact

Since adopting Guesty, GreatStay has:

• Grown its unit count by 15% in a single year
• Lifted occupancy and revenue by around 10%
• Saved 10–20 hours a week through automation
• Centralized Booking.com rate management into one interface
• Added multi-language automated guest messaging and automated reviews

Looking ahead

GreatStay is targeting 10–15% listing growth per year, on the way to its 70–100 unit goal and a clear ambition: to be Berlin’s finest holiday-apartment operator. The operation today is much the same as before, but sharper — the same business, running more effectively on a system built to scale with it.

“You won’t regret it — and you won’t go back to another PMS.”

GreatStay Ltd

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