State of the art guest guidebook system

We use Hostfully guidebooks to provide a great experience for our thousands of guests. The ability to create templates saves us a lot of time creating new guidebooks. Both our guests and owners are extremely impressed by the functionality.

Pros

Saves us hours of time, great guest experience, mobile responsive, easy to use.

Cons

The recommendations screen is a little hard to navigate.

Hostfully Guidebook Keeps Guests Informed if Only They Would Read

My experience with the platform is it has been terrific to work with. There are a lot of features and capabilities that may not be readily apparent to a first-time user, such as how to include the ability for guests to review you after their stay, or how to customize the checkout list, or rename a category. But just know, the platform is flexible and there are many ways to organize and setup your guidebook to be uniquely yours.

Pros

The program is tremendously flexible for taking once written binders of information into accessible information whether links, text and/or video. Use of Google Places helps to ensure recommendations are good looking and have all the relevant information such as an image, link, map and whatever information a host would like to write in recommending an attraction, bar or restaurant. Guidebooks created with Hostfully look terrific whether on a computer, smartphone or printed. As a property manager, there's really no need to manage multiple documents of information to send to guests. You can print your guidebook and keep a binder if you want, you can email a PDF version or you can send a link to the guidebook. Hostfully becomes the one place to update all house information, rules, policies and guest recommendations and that's darn handy! And if you are a property management company implementing Hostfully for many properties, you'll appreciate the ability to Brand your guidebooks.

Cons

Hostfully allows you to manage multiple guidebooks. As an administrator of several guidebooks, how to manage one entry to many guidebooks can be a little confusing until you gain experience with the program. However, the fact that Hostfully has such a capability places it in a unique position so I'd call this also a Pro.

Save yourself time while improving your guests' experiences (win-win)

Pros

It's no easy feat to manage over 100 vacation homes/rentals. An even bigger challenge is when they're all full of guests! This is where Hostfully guidebooks came in and saved the day. I've been using Hostfully's guidebooks for over 3 years and our guests love them. They find the information and recommendations we provide extremely helpful and because of it, we believe, they enjoy their stay more. Importantly, they are intuitive for first-time users and easy to dive right into. I was never asked by any guests for instructions or for help using them. We provide a QR code in each property which guests can scan to access the guidebook and voila! The management side is very easy and user-friendly. I was able to create almost 100 guidebooks for different unique homes in just 3 days! Hostfully also makes it easy and quick to update the guidebooks using a super-efficient "card" system which I love (it's genius). I used to create and update guidebooks by using a word processor, a very manual and time-consuming approach I would not recommend from the moment Hostfully is around. It's a no-brainer, really... Give it a try!

Cons

None comes to mind, honestly. I provided feedback for improvements when I first started working with Hostfully and the team was always so receptive and appreciated our feedback. They implemented so many improvements since then... so, what I saw as "cons" in the early days have been more or less ironed out.

Launching Hostfully

Have started yet. Just trying to get it going!

Pros

Lots of great features!! For someone looking at a completed guidebook, it would be very helpful.

Cons

Extremely complex and challenging to get all the details put in properly on the paid version while waiting for emails to get a response. Would be real nice to have phone support or screen shots to assist. The videos are helpful for the overall site but NOT for specific fine details or when glitches arise.

lack of free trial makes it impossible to see quality

Pros

nice design, good potential, but lacks features.

Cons

Lacking of basic features. Unprofessional staff when comes to refunds. Sales team very aggressive but no free trial so they oversell its abilities Massive overselling and marketing hype but very much overhyped. Not user-centric.