Starter
€99/mo or €990 billed annually
Up to 10 rooms
- Two-way rate & availability sync
- Reservation delivery to your PMS
- One storefront, on your domain
- Email support
First live integration
Apaleo runs your hotel. Plekify sells your rooms.
Rates and availability sync from Apaleo every hour. Guests search, book and pay on your own domain — no redirect, no handoff.
Two-way sync · Zero commission · On your domain · PCI-DSS Level 1
Two systems, one direct channel
Apaleo stays the system of record. Rates and availability flow out to Plekify continuously — not once a day, re-synced from Apaleo every hour.
Shoppers search and book on your own domain. Live rates, live availability, Shopify checkout — the same cart and payment flow shoppers already trust.
The reservation flows back into Apaleo as a native booking. No export, no side database, nothing for your front desk to reconcile by hand.
If a sync call fails, it retries and reconciles on its own — the mirror never drifts from Apaleo. See the live sync →
Nothing here is simulated
Eight live properties. Real Apaleo rates and availability, served from a mirror re-synced from Apaleo every hour — not a mock.
Book a room and the reservation writes back to Apaleo for real. Add rooms from two different properties and check out in one basket.
Friction, measured
We measured checkout friction across every booking engine we could test, including our own.
| Search to confirmed booking | 19 seconds, zero handoffs | Study |
| Lodging Friction Index | Plekify 10.9 — lowest measured (Mews 16.6, NightsBridge 22.9, SiteMinder 29.4) | Study |
| Checkout steps | 3 steps vs 14–29 form fields elsewhere | Study |
| Agent-Readiness Score | 3.0/3.0 | Study |
| Shop Pay | 250M+ buyers; up to 50% higher conversion — where a guest has Shop Pay, checkout is biometric approval, no form to fill | Shopify |
| Commission on direct bookings | Zero | Product |
| Checkout location | On-domain — search, book, pay on the hotel's own site, no iframe, no redirect | Product |
Full methodology, every engine tested, every number sourced. Read the study →
What sets this apart
On-domain checkout
Guests search, book and pay on your own website — no redirect to a booking engine or a marketplace checkout.
Zero commission
No per-booking commission on direct bookings — the property pays only its own Shopify plan and gateway.
Corporate rates, NET terms
CORP- codes from Apaleo, revealed at search. Settle on account, NET 15/30/45, with price override.
One basket, several properties
Rooms from several properties in one cart — inventory held at add-to-cart, confirmed to Apaleo on checkout.
Agent-ready MCP
Five read-only tools an AI agent can call to find, reserve and pay — get_checkout_link lands a human on real checkout.
Learn moreMulti-language, store-currency checkout
Shoppers browse in their own language; checkout charges in the property's own store currency — your store, your currency. Shopify Markets localizes display where enabled.
For groups running several properties under one brand, guests fill a single basket, with inventory held at add-to-cart and confirmed to Apaleo on checkout.
Built for European hotels
Guest and booking data lands in the property's own Shopify and Apaleo spaces — first-party, on your domain, not routed through a third-party booking site. Nothing about how a German or Austrian property already reconciles its books has to change.
- Tax-inclusive prices shown the way German price law expects (PAngV).
- An itemised, postable audit trail finance can reconcile against the Apaleo folio — GoBD-shaped by design.
- PCI-DSS Level 1 payments, 99.9% platform uptime.
Pricing and setup
Prices show in your market's currency — rand, euro, or dollar — with zero commission on every booking.
Plans from €99/mo per property. Zero commission on every direct booking.
Growth
€249/mo or €2,490 billed annually
Up to 40 rooms
- Everything in Starter
- Add-on sync (breakfast, parking)
- Deposit links via payment metadata
- Priority support
Scale
€499/mo or €4,990 billed annually
Unlimited rooms
- Everything in Growth
- Multi-property routing — N properties, one store
- Custom webhooks
- SLA
One-time setup fee of €499. Billed annually = setup waived.
Charged in South African rand (ZAR) at checkout.
Ready to move forward? Book a 30-minute call with Matthew below, or write to him using the form further down.
First design-partner cohort: several months free, setup waived — in exchange for a case study. Apply as design partner →
Onboarding, in three steps
Connect. A read-only OAuth link between Apaleo and the property's Shopify store — no re-keying, no export.
Scaffold. Plekify builds the storefront from the property's live Apaleo data — rooms, rates, availability — on the property's own domain. Days, not months.
Go live. Bookings flow back to Apaleo as native reservations. Nothing about how the hotel runs changes.
Questions, answered
Do I have to run Plekify on a Shopify store of my own?
Yes. Plekify is a Shopify app on the property's own store. We scaffold the storefront from your live Apaleo data in days, not months. The property pays its own Shopify plan and gateway.
What happens to my current PMS and website?
Nothing is ripped out. Apaleo stays the system of record and your current site keeps running. Plekify adds a Shopify storefront on your own domain that reads live Apaleo rates and writes bookings back as native reservations.
How does a room-night work as a product, when yesterday's inventory no longer exists?
Room-nights aren't SKUs on a shelf. Plekify serves availability from a mirror re-synced from Apaleo every hour, so a night that's gone is gone everywhere within the hour — no stale stock count.
Our rates change with demand — how does the storefront stay current?
Yield happens in Apaleo. Plekify serves the current rate from the re-synced mirror, so a rate change is live on the storefront within the hour — no rate-sheet export, no stale-price exercise.
The person booking isn't always the person staying — can they differ?
Yes. Checkout extensions capture the guest's own details, so the reservation that lands in Apaleo carries the right guest — not just the buyer.
How does German / Austrian tax and folio handling hold up?
Itemised taxes — including split-VAT where a stay requires it — are handled at checkout and post to the folio line by line, so what finance reconciles in Apaleo matches the transaction.
What happens to our data if we ever want to leave?
Your data stays put — in your own Shopify store and your own Apaleo account. Nothing is re-keyed or exported. Keep your current PMS or keep Apaleo — either way, nothing is ripped out and nothing is trapped. The integration writes confirmed bookings back to Apaleo as native reservations.
Start with the live demo
The demo is public — no password, real test rates, real write-back to Apaleo. See it before you talk to us about it.
Run the live demo → · Talk to us
In the demo search, enter DEMO at the promo field for a lower nightly rate.
The founder
Direct-booking infrastructure, built by someone who's shipped it
Matthew Swart has worked in accommodation-booking technology for more than 25 years. He got his first computer, a Commodore VIC-20, at age eight in 1981, studied survey science at the University of Cape Town, and built one of South Africa's first online accommodation-booking sites, on a 386, in 1998.
In 1999 he co-founded SafariNow.com with a R50,000 loan from his parents. The business grew to roughly 22,000 establishments across eight countries, backed by four funding rounds including Tiger Global. A 2015 SiteMinder integration added 14,000 properties, and annual booking value peaked at approximately R300 million that year. In 2017, machine-learning fraud detection cut fraud by 89%, the same year a majority sale to Travelstart closed an 18-year run.
Plekify is Matthew's next project in the same space: direct bookings and payments on your own Shopify storefront, integrated with your PMS, including Apaleo. If you run Apaleo, you are looking at this from someone who built distribution infrastructure himself, not a reseller's support desk. Every implementation is set up directly with him. Book a 30-minute call below to see if it fits your stack.
Evidence:
approximately R300m peak annual booking value, 2015 · majority sale to Travelstart, 2017
SafariNow — Matthew Swart founder profile (archived)
web.archive.org · 2015
Archived company profile publicly rounded the 2015 peak as R320m; the figure stated here, approximately R300m, is the verified number from company records — deliberately the lower figure.View source
Travelstart acquires SafariNow
Skift · 2017-12
"majority stake", December 2017 — as reported by Skift.View source
- 1998 Built one of South Africa's first online accommodation-booking sites, on a 386.
- 1999 Co-founds SafariNow.com, funded by a R50,000 loan from his parents.
- 2011 SafariNow's annual booking value crosses R100 million (R141.8m).
- 2015 Peak annual booking value reaches approximately R300 million; a SiteMinder integration adds 14,000 properties.
- 2017 Machine-learning fraud detection cuts fraud by 89%; majority sale to Travelstart closes an 18-year run.
- 2026 Builds Plekify: bookings and payments on Shopify, on the operator's own domain, integrated with the PMS.
Talk to Matthew for 30 minutes
A free, no-obligation 30-minute video call with Matthew, the founder. Slots run weekdays, 08:00 to 17:00 South African time (SAST, UTC+2); the picker below shows them converted to your own local time.
Prefer to write instead?
You're running Apaleo and evaluating your direct-booking channel. This form goes straight to Matthew's inbox, not a queue. He replies personally, within one working day.