This is the single most common concern and the good news is: no data needs to be lost. Apaleo is relatively open with data exports. You can export reservations in CSV format, and guest profile data is accessible via Apaleo's own APIs — which makes extraction clean and structured.

HotelFriend's onboarding team will handle the import on their side. Future reservations (any booking with a check-in date after your go-live date) transfer directly. Historical records — past stays, invoices, folios — are typically brought across as an archived reference set rather than live operational data, which is standard practice in any PMS migration.

One thing to know about Apaleo's own migration docs: existing payment data and credit card tokens cannot be transferred during migration. This applies when leaving Apaleo too — PCI compliance rules prevent raw card data from moving between vaults. Plan ahead for any pending payment settlements before your go-live date.

HotelFriend is designed to be ready out of the box, and the onboarding team coordinates a phased cutover to avoid any gap in live operations. The timeline depends on the complexity of your property, but typical ranges look like this:

• Small independent hotel (under 30 rooms): 1–3 weeks from contract to go-live.
• Mid-size property with existing channel manager setup: 3–5 weeks.
• Multi-property or heavily customised Apaleo setup: 6–10 weeks with full migration support.

The actual day you switch over from Apaleo to HotelFriend should be planned for a low-occupancy night, so your front desk is never without a live system. In-house reservations that straddle the cutover date are handled manually for one night and then normalised in HotelFriend.

Apaleo's own figure: they advertise "under 7 days" for migration to their platform. Migrating away requires similar planning, and HotelFriend's team has run this process many times. You will not be doing it alone.

Apaleo's base PMS sits around €400/month. But Apaleo is a skeleton, as it has no native Channel Manager, no Booking Engine, no Housekeeping, no Order Management. Every one of those requires a third-party app from the Apaleo Store, each with its own monthly subscription.

Apaleo (real total)

€400 PMS base + €50–200 Channel Manager + €50–150 Booking Engine + €30–100 Housekeeping + €50–200 POS = €600–€1,200+/mo

HotelFriend (all-in)

PMS + Booking Engine + Channel Manager (3 OTAs): from €125/mo. Full suite including Order management, Housekeeping, Guest Communication: scales with property size.

For the typical independent hotel that needs a complete operating stack, HotelFriend is materially cheaper — and your total bill doesn't grow every time you add a capability you should have had from day one.

HotelFriend supports 120+ integrations across payment gateways, locking systems, CRS platforms, accounting software, and third-party revenue management or upselling tools. If you're using a well-known specialist tool — like a standalone RMS or upselling platform — there's a reasonable chance HotelFriend already connects to it.

Before committing to any migration, ask HotelFriend directly: "Does your platform integrate with [specific tool]?" If it doesn't yet, ask whether it's on our roadmap. This is a practical step any hotelier should take, regardless of which platform they're evaluating.

Keep in mind that HotelFriend includes native KPI dashboards, ADR/RevPAR reporting, and dynamic rates out of the box — for many independent hotels, these built-in tools remove the need for a separate RMS entirely.

Apaleo's app store is genuinely impressive — for a tech team. The problem is that every one of those 200+ apps is a separate contract, separate invoice, and separate support relationship. When something breaks between your Channel Manager and your PMS at 11pm on a Saturday, you'll find yourself caught between two different vendors pointing at each other.

HotelFriend's philosophy is the opposite: build the most-needed functionality natively so that the system works as a coherent unit, and open integrations for genuine specialist needs. The 120+ integrations HotelFriend supports cover the vast majority of what hotels actually need.

The right question isn't "how many apps can connect?" It's "how many separate subscriptions and support relationships do I want to manage?" For most hoteliers, the answer is: as few as possible.

Yes — and this is a genuine strength of HotelFriend's architecture. The platform was designed with mixed-use hospitality in mind: hotels with restaurants, conference facilities, wellness centres, cruise ships, and even multi-location holiday parks are active clients.

• Event management — conference rooms, group bookings, package builder, function sheets.
• POS — F&B, spa, room service, all charges posted directly to guest folio.
• Multi-property — manage multiple locations from one login.
• E-vouchers & arrangements — create and sell bundled experiences directly.
• Offline mode — works on cruise ships and locations with unstable connectivity.

HotelFriend has delivered custom solutions for cruise ships where the system needed to operate offline across multiple vessels. If that works, your event floor almost certainly does too.

Yes. HotelFriend supports multi-property operations — multiple locations managed from a single login with unified reporting and centralised configuration. This is a core feature, not an enterprise add-on.

Apaleo's multi-property model (one login, property cloning from templates, single data view across the chain) is a genuine advantage of their architecture. HotelFriend's equivalent works at the operational level — shared dashboards, cross-property analytics, and consistent rate management across sites.

For hotel groups with a large number of properties and complex corporate billing or loyalty requirements, it's worth requesting a demo specifically focused on your multi-property scenario so you can assess fit accurately.

HotelFriend's platform is hosted on Amazon AWS servers in Frankfurt, Germany — one of the world's most reliable cloud infrastructure providers, with documented 99.99% availability SLAs at the infrastructure level. AWS Frankfurt is also a fully disclosed, named data center — unlike Apaleo, which states only “EU” as a hosting location without naming the specific provider or facility.

If a hotel has specific infrastructure or compliance requirements, HotelFriend also supports deployment on Google Cloud Servers and Microsoft Azure, providing additional flexibility for enterprise-level needs.

For properties that need to operate in offline or low-connectivity environments, HotelFriend also supports an offline mode — a capability Apaleo's cloud-only architecture does not offer.

• Hosted on AWS Frankfurt — infrastructure-level 99.99% availability
• Optional deployment on Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure upon request
• Regular security updates and audits
• SSL encryption in transit and at rest
• Offline mode available for disconnected environments

Yes — and this is one of HotelFriend's strongest differentiators over Apaleo for German-market hotels. HotelFriend is a certified German provider, headquartered in Berlin, with native compliance built into the platform rather than bolted on through a third-party app.

• GoBD — proper principles for digital bookkeeping, built in natively
• TSE (Technical Security System) — fiscal register certification for POS transactions
• DSFinV-K — digital interface for fiscal authorities, compliant export format
• DATEV integration — direct connection to Germany's leading accounting software
• E-invoicing — native support for ZUGFeRD and other German e-invoice standards
• GDPR — data hosted on German soil under German jurisdiction

For Apaleo users accustomed to developer-style self-service, HotelFriend's support model is more traditional — which most non-technical hoteliers actually prefer.

HotelFriend offers several levels of support to ensure a smooth migration and reliable operations after go-live.

During the migration phase, our team works closely with your hotel to coordinate data transfer, system setup, and overall onboarding. After go-live, you can choose from different support options depending on your needs:

• Ticket-based support for standard requests and issue resolution
• Premium support for faster response times and dedicated assistance
• On-site visits for hands-on help, training, and complex setups

These support options are available as paid add-ons, allowing you to select the level of service that best fits your operational requirements.