Kayak
Travel search app comparing flights, hotels and car hire across other booking sites, owned by Booking Holdings
Free
Category
The best Travel software
Travel & Hospitality software and applications
- Tools listed
- 50
All 50 travel tools
Every listing shows its published starting price on the same footing, so a shortlist does not take ten tabs.
What travel software costs
Counted from the published pricing of the 50 listings on this page. A tool counts as free only where it publishes a $0 plan, an open-source licence or a starting price of zero.
- Cheapest paid plan
- $2Roomsy
- Median entry price
- $15across 17 priced
- Dearest entry price
- $260Bookinglayer
- Publish a $0 plan
- 15of 50
Paid travel plans in this set start anywhere from $2 a month for Roomsy to $260 for Bookinglayer. The median entry price across the 17 tools that publish one is $15, half of them start below that figure and half above it.
Entry price is not the ceiling. The dearest published tier anywhere in this category is Clock PMS+'s at $517 a month, 2× the highest entry price on the page. Read the top of each ladder as well as the bottom, because that is where you land after two years of growth.
15 of 50 publish a $0 plan, and 12 of those charge nothing at all. 14 tools have no free tier of any kind.
30 of 50 keep at least one tier unpriced and sold by quote, which in practice means the number you end up paying at the top end is not on this page or on theirs.
How these vendors bill
The billing model each of the 50 travel listings publishes, counted. Two tools at the same headline price are not the same purchase if one of them charges per seat.
- quote
- 19
- Free app, pay per ride with dynamic pricing
- 5
- Per property per month
- 3
- Per room per month
- 3
- Free app, pay per ride and per order with dynamic pricing
- 1
- Free for travellers, commission and package margin
- 1
- Free for travellers, commission charged to listed properties
- 1
- Free for travellers, referral fees from booking partners
- 1
- Free to book, paid add-ons for price freezing and cancellation flexibility
- 1
- Free to browse, revenue from advertising and referral commissions
- 1
- Free to users, revenue from referral commissions and advertising
- 1
- Per booking fee added at checkout
- 1
- Per booking, 3 per cent of booking value
- 1
- Per listing per month
- 1
- Per listing per month or percentage of revenue
- 1
- Per listing per month plus upsell commission
- 1
- Per listing per month, per booked night or percentage of booked price
- 1
- Per month by annual net revenue and room count
- 1
- Per month by plan
- 1
- Per month by property and unit count
- 1
- Per month by property count and plan
- 1
- Per month by rental count
- 1
- Per month plus a booking fee
- 1
- Per unit per month
- 1
Separately, 30 of 50 publish at least one tier with no price attached. Those are sold by quote, so the top of the ladder is negotiable, and unknowable, until you talk to sales.
What comes as standard, and what you pay extra for
Every capability named in a published pricing tier by any of the 31 travel tools here that break their plans down, counted once per vendor. This measures what vendors choose to advertise as a selling point, not everything the software does, an absence below is silence, not a missing feature.
Named most often
- Priority support , 4 of 31
- Invoicing , 2 of 31
- No channel manager , 2 of 31
- Unlimited users , 2 of 31
Named by fewer
Nothing else is named by more than one vendor, beyond the list on the left, no two of these tools describe their tiers the same way.
Named by exactly one vendor: About 300 USD equivalent, Cancel anytime, Fee pass-through to customers available, Multiple rooms, One unit only, Roughly 25 USD monthly minimum. Those are differentiators rather than table stakes.
What “Travel” covers in practice
The subject tags that recur across these 50 listings, with the number of tools carrying each. A category label is a filing decision; this is the closer read of what is actually filed under it.
- Channel Manager13
- Booking Engine9
- Short Term Rental9
- booking8
- hospitality8
- Pms8
- Tmc7
- Vacation Rental7
- Ride Hailing6
- Hotel5
- revenue management5
- Transportation5
Carried by a single tool: Accommodation, corporate-cards, Guest Experience, Itinerary, pos, sentiment-analysis, Super App, Travel Reviews. If one of those is the reason you are here, the category page is the wrong lens, go straight to that product.
How to choose between them
Four things the numbers above should change about your shortlist.
Start with the free tiers if there are enough of them
15 of 50 travel tools here publish a $0 plan, which is enough to run a real trial without a purchase order. A free tier is worth more than a free trial when you are evaluating: a trial expires on the vendor's schedule, a free plan expires when you outgrow it. The thing to check before you commit is which of the capabilities below sit above the free line, starting with priority support, the single most frequently named capability in this category's published tiers.
Read the spread before you read the features
$2 to $260 is a $258 spread on entry price alone, and a spread that wide is never about polish, it is about who the vendor built for. Tools at the bottom of this ladder are priced for one person or a small team; tools near $260 are priced for a department with a procurement process. Decide which of those you are before you compare capability, or you will shortlist four tools that were never competing for the same buyer.
Check which tier you actually land on
14 of 50 tools here publish three or more tiers, and the median vendor in this category ships 1 of them. The advertised price is the first rung, and the things teams tend to need, priority support, invoicing, no channel manager, are named in higher plans far more often than in entry ones. Price your shortlist at the tier that contains what you need, not at the tier on the pricing page's left edge.
The billing model matters more than the headline number
This category splits across 24 billing models: quote on 19 listings, Free app, pay per ride with dynamic pricing on 5, and 22 other arrangements across the rest. A per-user price and a flat subscription at the same headline figure are not the same purchase, the first one grows with headcount and the second does not. Multiply by your real team size before you compare two numbers side by side.
Compare travel tools directly
Every pairing below is a full comparison: the same checklist applied to both, so a gap in one is a gap in the other.
- Kayak vs Careem
- Careem vs Grab
- Grab vs Didi
- Didi vs Egencia
- Egencia vs Ola
- Ola vs BCD TripSource
- BCD TripSource vs Bolt
- Bolt vs TripAdvisor
Go straight to the numbers
- Kayakpricingalternatives
- Careempricingalternatives
- Grabpricingalternatives
- Didipricingalternatives
- Egenciapricingalternatives
- Olapricingalternatives
Questions people ask about travel software
Answered from the listings on this page, and nowhere else.
- How much does travel software cost?
- Across the 50 travel tools listed here, paid plans start between $2 and $260 a month, with a median entry price of $15. The most expensive single tier published in the category is $517 a month (Clock PMS+). 15 of 50 also publish a $0 plan.
- What is the cheapest travel software?
- 12 of the 50 tools listed here cost nothing at all. Among the ones that charge, Roomsy has the lowest published entry price at $2 a month. Cheapest and best value are different questions: check which tier the capability you need actually appears in before you compare starting prices.
- Is there free travel software?
- Yes, 15 of 50 tools in this category publish a plan priced at $0. 12 of them are free outright, with no paid tier above. A tool is only counted as free here when it publishes a $0 plan, an open-source licence, or a starting price of zero, a free trial does not count.
- What features should travel software have?
- Judging by what vendors put in their own published pricing tiers, the most frequently named capabilities in this category are priority support (4 of 31 tools that publish plan detail), invoicing (2) and no channel manager (2). Treat those as the category baseline. Anything named by only one vendor, such as about 300 usd equivalent or cancel anytime, is a differentiator rather than a standard, so it is worth deciding whether you need it before it narrows your shortlist to one.
- How is travel software usually billed?
- quote (19), Free app, pay per ride with dynamic pricing (5), Per property per month (3), Per room per month (3), plus 20 less common arrangements, counted across the 50 listings on this page. The distinction that costs money is per-seat versus flat: a per-user plan at the same headline price scales with your headcount and a flat subscription does not. 30 of 50 tools also keep at least one tier unpriced and sold by quote.
- What does travel software actually cover?
- The 50 tools on this page do not describe themselves the same way. The subject tags they carry most often are channel manager (13), booking engine (9), short term rental (9), booking (8), hospitality (8). That spread is the honest answer to what the category means in practice: it is not one product shape, and two tools filed under travel may overlap on very little.
- How many pricing tiers do travel tools offer?
- 50 of 50 tools here publish a plan breakdown, and the median one has 1 tiers. 14 of 50 publish three or more. More tiers is not generosity, it usually means the capability you are buying for sits two rungs above the advertised price, so price your shortlist at the tier that contains it.
- How many travel tools are listed on Softwr?
- 50 approved travel listings appear on this page, including Kayak, Careem, Grab, Didi. Each links to a full breakdown with its pricing tiers and plan detail, and the category can be filtered by price and sorted by rating above. You can also read the shortlist view at /best/travel, which ranks the same set by published rating.
Keep this
Email me these 50 picks
The shortlist for “Travel”, plus a note if any of their prices change.
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Neighbouring categories
Adjacent in the same taxonomy, not a ranking.