Guest Book - How to Use Follow

We are thrilled to announce our new feature "Guest Book". It will be able to keep track of guests' information to increase sales and provide better customer service. 

So far, guest information was included in the reservation information, which gives limited use to it. We want to provide an easier way to keep track of guests and process that information.

The guest book allows centralizing guest information in one place, using it to create direct reservations more easily, and downloading the information.

Feature Walkthrough 

The guest book can be found inside the Reservations module in Hostaway. 

The information is added automatically when a new reservation is created, whether manually or through one of the channels and from inquiries as well, to be able to remarket to those prospective guests.

The guest book table includes the guest's email, first name, last name, name, phone number, city, country, related reservations, and related listings.

The guest table can be downloaded as a CSV, with or without applying the column filter in the dashboard.

Please note that Guest Book and reservation data do not sync, which means that if a change is made to the reservation details eg: change of email address, this will not be reflected in the guest book. You should update the guest book manually.

Guests can be added manually by clicking the "Add" button on the top-right.

The “agreed to marketing emails” column is populated manually via the guest book, or when the guest books through the Booking engine (after the revamp) - which will be released soon.

When creating a direct reservation, you can choose an existing guest from the guest book by clicking on the button next to the name field and choosing the guest. The information will populate the reservation details and the reservation will be linked to that guest.

User Permissions 

Users have access to the guest book only if the “Allow access to contact data” box is ticked

When the checkbox is ticked, guest book permissions appear in the permissions table

Regardless of permissions, users can only see guests that either:

1. 1. That same user-created, OR

   2. The guest has a related listing to which the user has access

How to search for guests?

You can search for guests by their name, email, phone number, and city. Please ensure to select the 'Has Reservations' check box when searching for a guest whose details were added from reservations and inquiries received from the connected channels, instead of those that were manually created. 

NOTE: Guests details are linked to the reservations received and imported from the external channels, in some cases, the full guest details are not shown if the reservation was created before the channel connection.

You can filter the guest book by guest city, country, whether they have associated reservations and whether they agreed to receive marketing e-mails: