Learn how the Guest Book works in Hostaway and how to use it to store, review, and manage guest-related reservation information.

Hostaway Guest Book

Guest Book Overview

The Guest Book feature allows you to keep track of guests' information to increase sales and provide better customer service. Moreover, allows centralizing guest information in one place, using it to create direct reservations more easily, and downloading the information.

Feature Walkthrough

• The Guest Book is placed inside the Reservations tab 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, phone number, city, country, related reservations, and related listings
• Guest information for all staying guests will be added to the Guest Book and can be used for marketing purposes. The primary guest is saved in the Guest Book at the moment of reservation creation, so it will always be in the Guest Book. However, the rest of the guest's information will be stored when the check-in form is submitted
• 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, e.g., or a 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

• 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.
  
  
   

  Please note that the Guests section within an individual reservation is directly linked to the Online Check-In Form toggle under your listing's Guest Portal settings. 

  
  

  If this feature is turned off, the Guests section will be removed from the reservation details, hiding all past collected data. To make this section and the collected data visible again, you must turn the Online Check-In Form toggle back ON.

  

   

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. Same user-created

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.

 

Notes

• Guest 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.