QloApps

Last reviewed Aug 26, 2026 · 798 words

A 12-room guesthouse doing 60 percent occupancy at 90 euros a night hands roughly 35,000 euros a year to online travel agencies at a 15 percent commission. QloApps is the open-source booking engine that lets you take a share of those bookings direct, on your own domain, with no per-booking fee, and it is the only serious free tool built for hotels rather than adapted from a shop. It will not replace Booking.com, because Booking.com is where guests look; it replaces the part where a guest who already found you still books through them. That is the realistic win, and it is a good one.

It is PrestaShop underneath, which explains everything

QloApps is a fork of PrestaShop 1.6 by Webkul, with the product catalogue reshaped into room types, the cart into a reservation, and the checkout into check-in and check-out dates. If you have run PrestaShop or WooCommerce, the admin will feel familiar: modules, themes, a back office with too many menus, and a MySQL database. If you have not, the ecommerce category has friendlier first shops, but none of them understand a night as the unit of sale.

The install is classic LAMP: PHP with the usual extensions (GD, cURL, mbstring, intl, zip), MySQL or MariaDB, Apache or nginx, and a web installer. The catalogue's 512 MB is realistic with OPcache on; a 2 GB VPS is comfortable. The Docker route works but mirrors the same layout, so expect a PHP-FPM container, a database container and a mounted www directory rather than a single image with sane defaults.

unzip QloApps.zip -d /var/www/qloapps
chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/qloapps
# visit https://hotel.example.com/install and follow the wizard
rm -rf /var/www/qloapps/install
mv /var/www/qloapps/admin /var/www/qloapps/admin-$(openssl rand -hex 4)

The last 2 lines are the part every PrestaShop-family install forgets: delete the installer, rename the admin directory so it is not /admin, and put the whole thing behind Caddy with TLS before a single guest enters card details.

What you get out of the box, and what costs money

The free core covers rooms and room types, per-night and seasonal pricing, occupancy rules, extra services and facilities, tax, multi-currency, guest accounts, invoices, a booking calendar in the back office, and a multi-hotel mode for a small group. Payment is by module: PayPal and a bank-transfer module ship free; Stripe and most regional gateways come from the Webkul module store, priced per module at last check, typically in the tens to low hundreds of euros as one-time purchases. Front-end themes are the same story.

The one that matters most is the channel manager. QloApps itself does not push your availability to Booking.com and Expedia; that is a paid connector module talking to a channel management service, and without it you are updating 2 calendars by hand and courting a double booking. Budget for it from day 1 if you list on any OTA. The catalogue's "smaller plugin ecosystem" con is exactly this: there is 1 vendor for most of what a hotel needs.

Where it loses to a WooCommerce booking plugin

For a single holiday let, a bed-and-breakfast with 3 rooms, or anyone who already has a WordPress site, a WooCommerce booking plugin or a hotel-specific WordPress theme is easier to run, has more freelancers who can help, and integrates with a marketing site you already maintain. QloApps wins from about 8 rooms upward, when seasonal rate plans, per-room-type inventory, and multi-property management stop being "nice" and start being the job. It is a hotel PMS-lite, not a shop, and forcing it to sell towels alongside rooms is fighting the product.

The other loss is upgrade friction. Being a PrestaShop 1.6 fork means the codebase is older PHP with its own release cadence; check the current supported PHP version before picking a distribution, because a too-new PHP is the most common install failure.

What I'd do

Property of 8 to 40 rooms with an existing OTA presence: QloApps on a 2 GB VPS behind Caddy, MariaDB backed up nightly with mysqldump, the admin directory renamed, the channel manager connector bought before launch, Stripe module for cards, and a direct-booking discount of 5 percent to make the OTA-found guest book on your site. Under 8 rooms or already on WordPress: a WooCommerce booking plugin, and revisit QloApps when the second property arrives. Either way, keep the Shopify comparison in mind for the retail side; QloApps is for nights, not for the gift shop.