Industry Insights
Enso Connect isn't a property management system — it's a guest experience layer that runs on top of one. That means it doesn't handle your reservations, pricing, or calendar, your PMS still does that. What Enso owns is everything that happens between a confirmed booking and checkout: messaging, verification, upsells, and the guidebook a guest actually reads.
We run it across 300+ properties, and our check-in volume alone went from about 90 a month to over 900, which is the scale this review is written from. Here's what we've actually found running it day to day, good and bad.
The Boarding Pass is the single hub tying the whole guest journey together, from the first upsell offer to the last add-on purchase, so a guest isn't juggling five separate messages and links to get through their stay. It's also where verification happens: ID collection when needed and security deposit or damage waiver payments, all before a guest gets their check-in details.
Early check-in, late checkout, and stay extension offers run automatically against live calendar availability instead of a Performance Advisor manually checking a calendar before every message. That timing piece is what made the upsells actually work at our scale.
Before Enso, offering early check-ins, late checkouts, and gap night stays meant a team member checking a calendar before every single message, which isn't realistic once you're managing hundreds of listings instead of dozens. That manual bottleneck meant real upsell revenue was simply going unoffered. Security deposits on non-Airbnb bookings were the other half of the problem: they inflated the price a guest saw at checkout and created ongoing manual work releasing and withholding deposits across a distributed team.
Airbnb and Vrbo have their own baseline guest screening, but we wanted a verification layer above that baseline and a way to handle deposits without hurting conversion at checkout. Enso let us replace security deposits with damage waivers on our direct and Vrbo bookings, which took a checkout price jump out of the moment a guest is deciding whether to book. The ability to manage upsells, deposits, and waivers in one place was a big enough selling point on its own that it was an easy call for us, and we went from basically negligible upsell revenue to over five figures in our first six months running it.
That verification layer has also turned into a selling point with homeowners, and it's not just about closing new business. Owners considering a property manager want to know what happens beyond what the OTAs already screen for, and being able to point to something concrete has helped us close new homeowner clients. Just as important, our existing owners can see the guest experience we're providing, not just hear about it secondhand.
We run a lean stack: Hostaway as our PMS, Notion as our underlying data layer, GoHighLevel as our owner CRM, and Enso Connect for all guest communication. Rolling Enso out across roughly 300 properties took about six weeks, with guidebooks populating automatically from data we already had in Hostaway and Notion (more on that below). The two-way sync between Enso and Hostaway means a message sent or received on one side reflects on the other, and reservation data flows the same way.
The feature our team relies on most is the guidebooks, which pull property details automatically instead of someone rebuilding a guide for every property by hand. That's the difference between onboarding a new listing in two months versus less than 12 days.
Ted's own take is that implementing new technology is always daunting, but setting up Enso alongside Hostaway was pretty straightforward for us. The caveat: Triad already had a master property database in both Hostaway and Notion before bringing Enso in, which is what let us build dynamic guides automatically instead of building 300 by hand. Without that groundwork, expect the setup to take real thought.
Enso makes the most sense once a small team can no longer handle guest messaging manually but before you're ready to build that automation in-house yourself.
Rather than repeat the numbers ourselves, here's our CTO Ted Meyers walking through what implementing Enso Connect actually looked like for us, and what it changed.
Two things from that conversation are easy to miss on a first watch. The review conversion improved alongside the raw review count, meaning more of our guests actually leave a review at all, not just more five-star ones. And the growth wasn't limited to properties: the number of owners and reservations we support grew right alongside the portfolio, all within a single year, while the team supporting it grew at a much slower pace.
We wouldn't have been able to grow the way we have without leaning on tools like this, and Enso Connect specifically has become a core part of how we run day-to-day guest operations. It's not magic, and it does need a team willing to set it up properly, but for a property manager scaling past the point where manual guest communication works, it addresses a real gap.
I would absolutely recommend Enso Connect… For any operator managing a portfolio at scale, Enso is a core component of your operating stack.
Ted Meyers
CTO, Triad Vacation Rentals
For property managers scaling past what a small team can handle manually, yes. It's most valuable once guest communication volume outpaces your team's ability to keep up by hand.
We run Enso Connect on top of Hostaway and haven't had integration issues. Property data flows between the two systems to keep guidebooks and guest communication current.
For our portfolio of roughly 300 properties, it took about six weeks to go fully live.
Guest verification, ID collection, damage waiver and deposit payments, and add-on purchases, all handled in a single guest-facing hub instead of separate tools.
We wrote this review the way we'd want a vendor evaluation done: test the setup ourselves, be honest about the tradeoffs, and check the numbers before repeating them. That's the same standard we hold ourselves to when we manage your property. Automation like this is part of how we grow ancillary revenue and guest satisfaction at the same time, without adding overhead that eventually gets passed back to owners. If you want that level of operational discipline behind your rental, let's talk.
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