Pick your dates, then try the Shopify checkout — this is a demo booking.
Type a date. Watch Apaleo answer.
Availability re-synced hourly, straight from the calendar.
Live on Apaleo
Eight properties run this today. Apaleo stays the single system of record; nothing about that changes when a guest checks out on Shopify. Rates and availability sync from Apaleo every hour, so the storefront never quotes a room that the front desk cannot honour. Every confirmed booking writes back into Apaleo as a native reservation — no export, no side database, nothing for the front desk to reconcile by hand. Apaleo's API-first design made this two-way sync possible where closed systems refuse it; Plekify built one of the first integrations to use it. Setup runs in three steps and lands within days. Pricing stays at €99 a month with zero commission per booking, built on PAngV/GoBD-compliant rails.
See how Apaleo properties go live →
Running more than one property? Plans start from €249 a month — see full tiers on the Apaleo page.
This rate left Apaleo an hour ago, at most.
€99 covers the month. Nothing per booking.
Live rates. Demonstration bookings.
Design partners get several months free and setup waived, in exchange for a case study.
Across 276 measured Playwright runs, search to confirmed booking took 10.9 seconds on Plekify, 16.6 on Mews, 22.9 on NightsBridge and 29.4 on SiteMinder.
10.9 seconds, confirmed across 276 separate runs.
Card settles now. Net-30 settles on account.
Total time is the relative booking duration, calibrated to Plekify's measured 19 seconds. Every system scales proportionally to its friction score — lower friction finishes first and shows less total time. Plekify's figure is real; competitors are proportional to their measured friction.
Mews, NightsBridge, and SiteMinder each took two to three times longer than Plekify.
Cart abandonment up to 70%; off-domain redirects a leading cause
Baymard Institute · 50-study meta-analysis
Up to 70% average cart abandonment (Baymard Institute). Off-domain redirects are a leading abandonment cause.View source
Kalibri Labs — direct bookings ~12.5% more profitable than OTA
Hotel Management / Kalibri Labs · 2024
Direct ~12.5% more profitable than OTA — strongest public Kalibri figure.View source
Search-to-booking: seconds from first query to confirmed reservation.Playwright drove identical search-to-booking journeys against each platform's live storefront.
Open repository — github.com/matthew-swart/plekify-booking-friction-study ↗
Source:
Plekify Booking Friction Study (open repository, v2 grounded LFI + ARS)
github.com · 2026
Plekify 10.9 / Mews 16.6 / NightsBridge 22.9 / SiteMinder 29.4. Agent-Readiness: Plekify 3.0 (only open-web agent-ready system).View source
Booking friction study
A friction score counts seconds from search to a confirmed booking, using measured timestamps rather than estimates.
| System | Avg friction score | Success rate | Clicks to payment | Domain handoffs | Key note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plekify | 4.2 | 94% | 4 | 0 | On-domain Shopify checkout; Shop Pay / Apple Pay / Google Pay |
| Cloudbeds | 5.8 | 30% | 3 | 0–1 | Widget inconsistency and CAPTCHA blocked most runs; also blocks AI agents |
| ProfitRoom | 6.8 | 78% | 2 | 2 | Fast initial path but multiple off-domain handoffs |
| SiteMinder | 10.1 | 80% | 6 | 1 | More steps before payment; one handoff |
| NightsBridge | 14.6 | 60% | 13 | 1 | Highest click count; inquiry-only on some properties |
Friction score = weighted interaction burden (clicks, handoffs, fields, pages). Lower is better. Success rate = % of automated Playwright runs that reached a payment page. Clicks = interaction events from homepage to payment.
Study parameters: Python/Playwright automated browser testing, event-based instrumentation, June 2026. 276 runs, 23 properties, 5 PMS platforms, desktop + mobile viewports.
Metrics measured: clicks, domain handoffs, form fields, page loads, inquiry-only flags, autofill score, accelerated checkout availability.
Formula: locked v3.0 formula shown above; no post-hoc changes.
Open methodology: full protocol, formula, raw data and reproducible test scripts are on GitHub ↗. This accordion is the complete on-page methodology summary.
Plain pricing
€99 a month covers one property with zero commission per booking. Rates re-sync from Apaleo every hour. Checkout runs on the property's own domain, by card or Net-30 account terms, with nothing routed through a third-party booking page.
Volume pricing available
Dedicated terms
50% deposit on order; balance on go-live. Shopify subscription billed separately.
Built on Shopify Standard — no Plus required. Upgrade to Shopify Plus anytime if you need it.
Who built this
Eighteen years running Africa's largest travel marketplace.
Matthew co-founded SafariNow.com in 1999 and ran it as CEO for eighteen years. SafariNow held the largest accommodation supply across six African countries, took in more than R2 billion in lifetime gross bookings, and peaked at R296.8 million in audited annual revenue with about 100 staff. Tiger Global held a stake for seven years, from 2010 to 2017, before the majority sold to Travelstart. Those SafariNow years taught a narrow lesson: operators do best owning checkout on their own domain, sparing them the rent a marketplace charges for it. Shopify makes that lesson buildable — on-domain checkout, Shop Pay in one tap, one catalogue whether the account holds a single stay or a multi-property group. Plekify carries that belief into Apaleo's data, live, one property at a time.
Questions go straight to Matthew — no sales queue in between.
Matthew Swart
Founder, Plekify · Co-founder, SafariNow.com
This suits a WETU customer, an operator with a website worth harvesting, or anyone with room content ready to upload.
Singita: a 16-property group website created and synced from WETU content, which can also carry a travel-search extension for multi-property bookings via Apaleo.
