Comparison
Cardinal and Newbook, compared for a Canadian operator
Of the systems on this site, Newbook is the one whose pricing philosophy most resembles ours. That makes this the comparison where the money argument matters least and the rest matters most.
The short answer
Cardinal or Newbook?
Newbook is a Queensland company founded in 2010, now part of Storable, selling a broad tourism platform to holiday parks and accommodation businesses worldwide. It prices per booking at a flat rate, lets you choose whether the guest pays it, and sells in modules. Cardinal is a Canadian property management system at a flat monthly price with everything included, and with Canadian tax and a French booking page built in. On pricing philosophy the two are closer than any other pair on this site, so this comparison turns on the rest: whether the system arrives whole or in modules, how many objects stand between you and an ordinary job, and which country's tax and language the software was shaped around.
Claims are cheap on both sides of a comparison. Watch a full day run in six real screens and judge ours on what it actually does, then ask Newbook for the same thing.
Where Cardinal is
What changes when it is all one system
Every item here is a mechanism or a step count rather than an adjective, because that is the only kind of claim you can check in a demo.
- One model of the property, so nothing is kept in agreement
- The ledger, the tax engine, housekeeping, the booking page and the corporate accounts are not modules that hand records to each other. A charge posted at the desk is already on the company's invoice. A room closed for repairs is already off the booking page, off the availability search, off the write-time check and off the calendar feed, because there is one closure list with four readers rather than four systems to reconcile.
- A stay is the same colour everywhere it appears
- Colour is derived from the state a reservation is in, so the bar on the board, the rail on its folio and the line in the day's recap all read the same hue. Both calendars print their legend along the bottom of the screen. Somebody who started last week reads a busy board by colour before they read a word of it.
- The day arrives as work, not as a menu of everything
- The first screen is what has to happen today, derived from the state of the property and ordered the way the day runs: arrivals, departures, rooms to turn, balances to settle. Nobody has to learn which of forty modules holds the thing they need, which is the cost that repeats every spring on a seasonal team.
- You describe the property in your own words, once
- Amenities are typed rather than ticked off somebody's checklist. Each one is matched against a list of 63 the booking sites recognise, and what matches carries a French label and an icon, so the booking page is bilingual with no second data entry. Anything unrecognised still shows exactly as you typed it rather than being dropped.
- One price with everything in it, rather than modules
- Modular pricing asks you to choose the parts before you know what you need, and the parts you skipped are the ones you discover in July. Here the plan is the whole system: the ledger, the tax engine, the booking page, housekeeping and reporting are not tiers, and Canadian tax across all 13 provinces plus a French guest booking page are in it rather than beside it. The only question the price asks is whether you also run activities.
The architecture behind those, counted in steps on three ordinary jobs, is on how Cardinal is built.
How each one is priced
How each one bills you
Cardinal
A flat monthly price for the property, published, one tier that opens the whole system, and no fee per reservation. The one percentage we charge is 0.5% on card volume run through Cardinal Payments.
Newbook
A flat rate per booking rather than a percentage, with the option of passing it to the guest, and priced modularly so what you pay depends on which parts you take. Quoted rather than published, from a starting monthly figure.
Which of the two costs less on your park is arithmetic rather than opinion, and it depends entirely on your reservation count. Put your own numbers through it, including the break-even where the answer flips.
How Cardinal decides
The questions worth asking of any system, and our answer to each
The right-hand column is the category rather than a company: dozens of systems sell into this market and they do not all do the same thing. Where a claim is about a company, it is in the table under this one, quoted from their own pages.
| The question | Cardinal | Most systems |
|---|---|---|
| What makes the bill go up? | Nothing you do on the property. Not a new cabin, not a busy July, not a seasonal hire | Rooms, sites, reservations, or a share of the rate |
| What does it cost to start? | Nothing beyond the monthly price. Your existing reservations come across as part of getting set up | Commonly a one-time implementation fee, with migration quoted separately |
| Who works out Canadian tax? | The system. GST, HST, QST and PST across all 13, stored per component, with Quebec's agency rule as a rule | Usually configured per property, then reconciled by hand at filing time |
| What do your French-speaking guests get? | A booking page they read in French, included, with no second data entry | Varies |
| Where does your guest data live? | Canada | Varies, and often the United States |
| What does leaving look like? | Self-serve and free: your guests, your reservations and the full ledger, whenever you want them | Often on request |
| What has to run before the books are final? | Nothing. Every charge posts into an append-only ledger the moment it happens | Commonly a night audit, which is why the balance on screen is a projection until it runs |
Side by side
Cardinal and Newbook, the basics side by side
| Question | Cardinal | Newbook |
|---|---|---|
| Where is the company based? | Quebec, Canada | Queensland, Australia |
| How does the price scale? | It does not. One flat price for the property | Per booking at a flat rate, and by which modules you take |
| Is the price published? | Yes, on our pricing page | No, quoted from a starting figure |
| Is there a setup or implementation fee? | None | None on their single-site tier |
| What does bringing your existing reservations across cost? | Nothing. It is in the price, and you can import your own CSV | Included, with four hours of training |
| Does somebody still have to close the day? | No. Every charge posts live to the ledger | Not documented in their public help |
Where Newbook is the better choice
A broader platform, and fifteen years in holiday parks
Newbook has been building for holiday parks since 2010 and sells an all-in-one platform with central reservations, self-service technologies and a broad module set alongside the PMS, backed by Storable. They also avoid the per-room and percentage pricing this category is full of, so on the money question they are not the vendor our pricing argument was written about. Their own site describes onboarding on the single-site tier as including database setup, importing your historical data and four hours of training, at no onboarding fee, which is a genuinely good answer to the question that keeps most operators where they are. If you are running several parks and need that breadth today, that is what it is built for. Cardinal puts the whole system inside one published price and spends its design on making a single property's day shorter.
Ask both of us
Questions a sales script cannot answer
These work on any vendor in this category, including us, and the answers tell you more than a feature list will.
- 1Which modules do I actually need for what I run, and what is the all-in monthly figure with those included?
- 2If the per-booking fee is passed to the guest, show me their final payment screen with it on.
- 3Show me the GST, QST and lodging tax on one Quebec booking, broken out per component.
- 4Is the guest booking page available in French, end to end, including the confirmation email?
- 5Where does my data physically live, and what does it cost to leave with all of it?
- 6How long before somebody hired last week can check a guest in without help?
The number worth negotiating hard on is rarely the one on the quote.
What is written here about Newbook describes how their offer is shaped, read from their own public pages on 2026-08-19. It carries no prices for their product and no feature comparison, because both go stale faster than a page can be maintained. Check the current detail with them, and ask us the same questions.
See it running
Watch a day run before you talk to anyone.
Six real screens from a working property, in the order the day happens. Open it now and go at your own pace.