Touch Stay vs Hostfully: Which is the best digital guidebook for your vacation rental business?
However, choosing the right solution for your short-term rental business is key to harnessing the power of guest experience software.
Here, we look at Touch Stay vs Hostfully digital guidebooks. We compare key components of each tool, like:
- Branding and customization
- Local guides
- House manuals
- Upselling opportunities
- Integrations
- Pricing
It’s time to get informed on these digital guidebook solutions so you can be sure you’re picking the right tool for your short-term rental business.
Discover a digital guidebook that guests love
Hostfully vs Touch Stay: An overview
Hostfully and Touch Stay guidebooks help guests get more out of their stay. Let’s look at the features offered by each, below.
Hostfully Guidebooks
With Hostfully Guidebooks, you can create helpful digital guidebooks for your short-term rental properties. As with Operto Guest Guest, craft custom house manuals and local area guides so you can give your guests an outstanding experience, and answer their questions before they’re even asked.
Hostfully’s comprehensive guidebooks help you act as a digital concierge to enhance your visitors’ experiences. The tool offers a variety of valuable features, including:
- Customization and branding
- Self check-in capabilities
- House manuals and local area guides
- Custom categories
- Video embeds within guides
- Multi-language capabilities
- Convenient upsells
- Voice-activated concierge
There are plenty of happy users who can attest to the ways that Hostfully has benefited their business and enhanced the guest experience:
“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.”
-Craig R.
“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.”
-Paul I.
Touch Stay Guidebooks
Like Hostfully, Touch Stay allows you to create a digital welcome book for your guests, packed with all the helpful information they could need: House guides, local area recommendations, arrival information, safety information, and more.
And like Operto Guest, your brand shines through, so when guests open the web app, all they see is your company’s logo and colors.
Touch Stay features include:
- Custom branding throughout your guidebooks
- Check-in and check-out information
- Google Places integration for local guides
- Unlimited photo and video capabilities
- Ability to schedule custom SMS messages and emails throughout your guest’s stay
- Multi-language capabilities
- Mobile-optimized PWA (progressive web app) which can be used offline
What’s the difference between Touch Stay and Hostfully?
As you’re trying to decide which guest experience software is right for you, take a look at exactly where Touch Stay and Hostfully are similar and how they differ.
Pricing
With Hostfully, you can create a free Individual Premium Hostfully account for one property. While it’s limited in some areas of its functionality, this account is free forever, which gives you a chance to try out the software and see if you like it.
If you decide you want a paid account, you have the “Power Host” option for individuals, which is $95.88 per year (billed monthly). Or if you want a business account, you have various options: Prime, Prime Plus, and Professional.
Touch Stay, on the other hand, offers a free 14-day trial, but after that, all their subscriptions are paid. The cost is $99 for one property, $51 more for the second property, and $45 more each for the next three (and so on).
Branding and customization
Like Operto Guest, both Hostfully and Touch Stay feature customization capabilities, meaning you can showcase your brand in the digital guidebooks you share with guests. However, there’s one important difference to consider.
With Hostfully, full customization (displaying your logo, custom colors, personalized welcome messages, and custom categories within your guidebooks) is only available if you have a paid “Power Host” subscription or any of the paid business subscriptions.
Touch Stay allows you to do all that and more, giving you unlimited photo and video capability plus customizable fonts. Since there is only one type of Touch Stay plan with price depending on the number of properties you have, you know customization is included.
Local guides
Hostfully and Touch Stay both allow you to create custom local guides. And as with Operto Guest, they each integrate with Google Maps to create auto-populated guides.With Hostfully, you can add custom locations to your maps: If you know the best spot in town to watch the sunset, just add the GPS coordinates and tag it on your map for your guests to enjoy.
Plus, Hostfully comes with a voice-activated concierge, meaning guests can ask Amazon Echo or Google Home devices at your properties about local recommendations and information about the unit.
Touch Stay also allows you to add location pins to maps so you can share your favorite recommendations, and you can add Tripadvisor reviews to these local tips, too.
House manuals
Hostfully and Touch Stay are quite similar when it comes to house manual creation. With both tools, you can create custom categories where you can list information like your house rules, helpful instructions, and emergency information.
Pro-tip: With Operto Guest, there is NO LIMIT to how many different pages, categories, images, and videos you can add to your house manual. So you can make it easy for your visitors to get the most out of their stay.
Upselling opportunities
A great feature of Hostfully (which Touch Stay lacks) is the opportunity to upsell. Hostfully lets you conveniently upsell products and services, like a mid-stay clean or groceries upon arrival, right within the guidebook.
This is similar to Operto Guest, where you can offer upsells using smart buttons to further monetize the guest—and easily switch between seasonal content and offers with a toggle.
Integrations
Finally, you may want your digital guidebook to integrate with your PMS to easily share your guidebooks and key information like smart lock codes. so you can always stay on top of your bookings and plan accordingly. At Hostfully.com, you can find an extensive list of their integration capabilities, which includes platforms like Breezeway, Autohost, TurnoverBnB, and Operto.
However, at the time of publication Touch Stay only integrates with two PMS solutions: OwnerRez and BookingSync.
Automate sharing your guidebooks and door codes with Operto. See our integrations here.
Hostfully or Touch Stay: Which is the best guest experience software for you?
Hostfully and Touch Stay both give you the power to create a digital guest welcome book and share essential information with your guests.
Hostfully’s voice-activated concierge and Touch Stay’s message scheduling capabilities differentiate the tools from one another. But when it comes to automated management, they’re quite similar.
To choose which guidebook is right for you, determine what you struggle with and where you need a solution.
Is it monetizing your guest? Providing contactless check-in? Strengthening your brand with customization and a white-label web app? If you want a digital guidebook tool that does all this and integrates with your PMS, consider Operto Guest.
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