Guesty closes its Smily deal and buys its way into France

Guesty has completed its acquisition of Smily, the French property management system that spent most of its life trading as BookingSync. The deal was announced on 17 September. Terms were not disclosed.

If you run properties in France on Smily, this is the part that matters: nothing has been said about what happens to the product. Guesty's announcement talks about the two teams combining resources to build "one best-in-class platform" for the French market, and about bringing Guesty's AI features to Smily customers. It does not say whether Smily continues as its own product, gets folded into Guesty, or is wound down over time. Until Guesty says otherwise, treat your migration timeline as an open question worth asking your account manager about directly.

The numbers Guesty put behind the deal give a sense of what it thinks it bought. Smily has processed 3.3 billion euros in bookings for 13 million travellers. France has more than a million active short-term rental listings and roughly 9 billion dollars in gross booking value flowing through OTAs each year, which makes it the second-largest short-term rental market in the world. Guesty itself says it works across more than 500,000 properties in over 100 countries and has raised 410 million dollars.

All five Smily founders and some existing shareholders are reinvesting part of their proceeds back into Guesty equity. That detail is worth more than it looks. Founders taking paper instead of cash usually signals they expect another liquidity event, and it keeps the people who know the French market inside the building rather than on gardening leave.

Sébastien Grosjean, Smily's founder and CEO, framed it in family terms, saying his family have been in vacation rentals for more than 40 years, and described joining "the clear world leader". Amiad Soto, Guesty's co-founder and CEO, called France "one of the fastest-growing short-term rental markets" and described Guesty as "the market leader in size and innovation".

Two things worth keeping in view that the announcement does not raise.

The first is pricing. Neither company has said anything about what happens to existing Smily contracts. Acquisitions in this category have a consistent habit of being followed by repackaging, and Smily and Guesty sell to different ends of the market. If you are on a legacy Smily plan, get your renewal terms in writing before you need them.

The second is consolidation. A large platform buying a regional incumbent rather than competing with it on home turf leaves French operators with one fewer independent vendor to play off against the others. That shows up at contract renewal long before it shows up in the product.

Reported via Short Term Rentalz, which flagged the completion on 17 September. Figures above are from Guesty's own release.