Guesty For Hosts – Introduction
The purpose of this review and tutorial is to provide you with an overview of Guesty for Hosts (click the link for $20 off or use OPTIMIZE upon signup). It used to be that Your Porter App and Guesty were two different platforms that competed with each other.
However, in 2021, Guesty acquired Your Porter App and rebranded it as Guesty for Hosts.
While the layout is nearly identical, some features have been added that I will highlight in this Guesty for Hosts review. I did a tutorial about Guesty for Pros, but that is for hosts with four or more listings. Guesty for Hosts is for hosts with up to three listings.
What is Guesty for Hosts used for?
Guesty for Hosts allows you to unify and manage multiple calendar listings, streamline guest communication into one inbox, build a booking website in minutes to accept direct reservations and avoid online travel agents fees, automate time-consuming tasks and create smart pricing flows.
Just remember, Guesty for Hosts is for hosts with up to three calendar listings.
Here is a pricing comparison between Guesty for Hosts and other Property Management Systems products.
Why use a PMS?
PMS stands for Property Management System. They help you automate a lot of your airbnb calendar listings and short term rental activities. What we need from a good property management system is:
- Automated messaging
- Cleaning automation which we will talk more about in this review.
- Extra features, like damage protection.
One of the most important things and what matters the most is the usability of the platform, and that is the kind of reason why I like Guesty for Hosts. You will see how easy and very simple the platform is when we go through it. The navigation through the platform is going to be intuitive and there is not going to be a huge learning curve like you might have with other platforms.
Guesty for Hosts Review – Dashboard Navigation
Once you login, the first page that you will see is Guesty’s dashboard. Just like my other tutorials, I’m going to go over everything important with you:
1. Timeline
Timeline is basically standard, it just gives you daily activities like check in/check out and the automated cleaning tasks.
2. Calendar
This is where we get a little bit more interesting stuff. If you remember this is only for three listings, there is no search filter.
By pressing on any date on your calendar, a window will pop-up on the left which allows you to update your listing Price and Availability.
Just remember to sync to the platforms that you are currently on.
**Note: if you are using PriceLabs, I recommend you change the prices within PriceLabs.
To see the Reservation Detail, click on the name at the left, and a window will open.
Let me show you what the layout looks like, and what information is provided as we scroll down.
The next thing is Custom Questions, this is very cool and unique to Guesty for Hosts.
In this particular case as shown in the above image, the guest needs to register their car before arriving, so they are giving me the information.
Scrolling down, we have all the Automated Messages, and it is cool if you want to add or edit a message.
For example, let’s say you told the guest to check out at 12 o’clock but your message says 10. You could go in there and change the message. Or if you have a bad guest that you have already offered a discount, you could just go there and pause the message.
Then scrolling down more, we have Task Reminders, I personally use it to automate cleaning reminders.
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3. Cleaning Management
Guesty for Hosts has a good automated cleaning management feature. The cleaners can take pictures when they clean if there is damage, so you will have records.
There is one caution though, this platform does not allow automated cleaning notifications or alterations or cancellations.
This feature will let you create a Cleaner & Teammate Portal. If a guest wants to add another day, then the cleaning portal is where you have to go to inform the cleaner of the reservation update.
This is cool as you do not have to give the cleaner a co-host access where they can see all of your revenue data. Unlike Airbnb, which hasn’t come up with the idea yet to give limited access to certain co-hosting services and functions.
Checklist is not very useful for me. I usually let the cleaners be the experts without micromanaging them on how to clean.
What I do instead is that I provide them with my standards and let them do the job the way they want to do it as long as it fits the check in and check out times. Then I review the cleaning and let them know how to do better.
One time task can be used for mid-day cleaning, if the guest requested that.
A cool feature that Guesty for Hosts have, is that there is a “watch tutorial” button, where you can get useful information about the dashboard to help speed up your limited learning curve.
4. Automated Messaging
Now, how automated messages work in Guesty for Hosts is, first you need to create a message template, and then, you wanna apply that message for when you are going to send it.
Going through the Messaging list, we have an Auto inquiry response, which is for replying to guests requests, so it is when a guest sends a message without the intent to book. A booking request is when the guest has the intent to book, but you need to accept – if you do not have an instant booking turned on -.
So all of the guest requests are answered in the auto inquiry response section before the actual booking takes place.
Lets click on Automated messaging, we will have these options:
Scheduled Messages is where you actually can schedule a new automated message with rules for each message.
In the Advanced Settings of any scheduled message, I found a great feature that will help you with your calendar optimization process.
You can create a message that is only sent to guests if the day before their check in or after their check out is available.
You might be asking, how is that useful? Let me tell you, it happened to me before that a guest wanted to extend their reservation for one day.
I suggest you keep this option available to your guests. This automated message will do it for you without any extra effort from your side, which might give you the opportunity to increase your calendar optimization.
There are also times where you want to exclude messages for last minute requests; if you have a pre-check-in message that you want to skip.
Now going back to the Edit button next to the advanced settings.
This is where you can schedule when to send the message, which calendar listings to apply it to and what template to send.
Back to Automated Messaging, the Weekly Reminder Messages option is very useful. Some of the other platforms like hospitable don’t actually have it. For example, if you have to take out the trash on a particular day, then you can set that up from there.
Messaging Activity right beneath Weekly Reminder Messages, is where you can change or delete a message. I prefer to access them from the calendar tab, as you can view all the messages from there.
Auto review is where Guesty for Hosts will send a review on your behalf, this doesn’t affect your search rank to review a guest or not. However, I like to take advantage of this by mentioning my airbnb listing deal, so how I would do it is that I say “Thank you for staying at Belmonte Penthouse in Medellin Colombia”.
Another cool feature is the Guest Arrival Form. So for a particular host, if they need to send car information or if the guest is celebrating something like an anniversary or birthday, you could do something special for them that will increase your hospitality rating and will definitely differentiate you from others.
The Send One Time Message feature could be used if you want to send the same message to a bunch of guests.
5. Menu
The Menu section is best for your calendar optimization. This is where you could edit everything in your calendar listings.
I actually found a cool hack here, where you can write your title with longer than 50 characters. Unfortunately Airbnb contacted Guesty to remove that option and they have removed it immediately. It is because Airbnb de-emphasized the title in the search rank and search page. Typically with the extra characters, you can list all the important features of your listing in the title, but it’s not the case anymore. I might reveal a project in the next few months that targets this topic, so if you want to hear about it, put yourself on my newsletter.
Damage Protection is new, it’s insurance. I really love it, you can check their plans for the amount of coverage you want.
You wanna think about that as how expensive is your home, what type of guests are you renting to and what is the potential amount of damage. It is also very easy to set up.
Guesty Book Direct Website Builder
The Website Builder in Guesty might be the best one I have seen in terms of ease, just a few clicks, and you are ready to see and use the final product of a Guesty booking website. You can also use your own domain if you don’t want to use the Guesty domain.
This is an example of what a booking website would look like with the Guesty Website Builder “The Belmonte Penthouse”. How super is that? You will have your own URL. They also allow stripe or paypal to be linked. You can have your booking website with your own URL in just 15 minutes or less.
I hope that one day Guesty for Hosts will have the 3D feature, just like the one in Hostfully. If you do not know Hostfully, you can check this video where I review the platform. It is a more expensive and robust platform, but they have some very cool features.
Moving forward, and while we are scrolling down there are other features like Expense Tracking or Statistics. I will not go over them as I keep tracking them with my own private documents.
Guesty Airbnb Rank Booster
The next thing on the more features list is Airbnb Ranking Booster.
So back in the day, if you make any calendar customization, or if you change the text or even pictures, then it is going to affect your search rank. But, that was when things were less advanced.
Nowadays, flipping your photos, adding $1 to your price, or adding to your text, is going to do nothing to your search rank. A cool feature when YourPorter came out five years ago, but no longer useful.
The next thing on our list is Security Deposit. While I was going through building my own booking website, collecting security deposits was one of my issues. It is very nice to see it on Guesty for Hosts.
Guesty Integrations – Dynamic Pricing
Smart Pricing, is where you can connect with Pricelabs, Beyond Pricing, Wheelhouse or any other similar smart pricing tool.
This feature comes in handy if you are using multiple platforms and direct booking. But remember to always go to that platform to make your changes. If you want to know more about dynamic pricing, visit my Youtube playlists.
Smart Locks, is a feature used to automate the check-in process. In terms of theft, in my opinion, your cleaners and maintenance folks are higher risk than guests. Thus it is not necessary to change your code every time.
Finally we come to Add New Reservation. It is where you can add reservations for direct booking, and can be used if someone got a hold of you via other routes.
Guesty for Hosts – Overall Thoughts
That wraps up my review of Guesty for Hosts which was formerly YourPorter App. The biggest benefit of Guesty for Hosts is onboarding. It’s as painless as you get with a PMS. The pricing is competitive and the customer support is solid.
If you use OPTIMIZE with your trial of Guesty for Hosts, you will receive $20 off your first bill. I also have a video review and tutorial of Guesty for Pros.
