With all the time and energy spent on getting reservations and tending to guests, the critically important tasks between booking and check-in are easy to lose sight of and at times, can become an administrative headache.
Enter Guesty’s Pre-Stay Tools, a suite of three features — Check-In Form, Rental Agreements and Authority Reporting — designed to ensure you can easily collect all the documents you need to protect your properties and deliver an outstanding guest experience.
1) Check-In Form: Guest Management Made Simple
One of the most important things short-term rental property managers can do to ensure smooth and enjoyable guest experiences is to collect all relevant information prior to each stay. Collecting this information and automatically syncing it with your Guesty dashboard will help streamline your pre-check-in process and reduce manual labor.
Use the Check-In Form to collect extra tidbits about your guests to help make administrative tasks easier and to ensure you can create a tailored, five-star experience. For example, you might ask for a photo of their driver’s license, compliance to house rules, their personal email address, their method of transportation or any special requests for their stay. Considering 80% of consumers prefer personalized experiences, that’s no small perk.
How it Works:
Easy and effortless – In advance of a reservation, property managers can either manually or automatically send Guesty’s digital Check-In Form to incoming guests and request that they verify all their details as well as fill in any missing information. To save time, Guesty will automatically populate the form with known information provided by each booking, such as the guest’s name and reservation date. Once a form is completed, all responses will be added to the reservation information on your Guesty dashboard.
Automated from A-Z – All you have to do is configure the form and set up the sending process initially, and then it will automatically be sent to new guests along with periodic reminders until they fill it out. You can also maximize completion rates and collect more of the data you need by using the form as a mandatory step before sending check-in instructions.
Your form, your rules – You can edit the form’s titles and descriptions, include unique terms and conditions and house rules, choose which fields to show or hide and, of course, brand the form with your company messaging and logos. You can also determine at which stage in the booking cycle the form should be sent out to guests.
2) Rental Agreements: Protect Your Properties
Handing over the keys to your properties always comes with a little risk. Though sophisticated guest screening and verification platforms can do a lot to minimize your vulnerability, forward-thinking players in the short-term rental space will want to cover all their bases by acquiring guest signatures, indicating their agreement to specific terms and conditions. This added layer of security will also help with fighting any false charge-back claims. That’s where Guesty’s Rental Agreements feature comes in.
How it Works:
Personalized contracts – Either upload your existing agreements or use Guesty’s template. You can then add a signature field to collect legally binding e-signatures from your guests, as well as add other dynamic fields, such as the exact check-in/check-out dates and the total payout, to further personalize each agreement.
Automatic audit trail – Guesty automatically creates an audit trail, which is stored in your dashboard and can be easily accessed as well as presented to your bank or local authority in case of false chargebacks or other violations of the contract.
Create the ideal flow – Automate the distribution of agreements as well as reminders to sign them, and even arrange for the signing of a rental agreement to trigger the sending of check-in instructions.
3) Authority Reporting: Submit Guest Information Without the Stress
Many property management companies across the EU are required to submit guest information to local authorities. You can utilize Guesty’s Marketplace partner CheKin for all your Authority Reporting needs to make the process stress-free. For each listing, you simply need to provide the requested information, set the relevant authority and add your credentials to that authority’s website.
Once you’ve set it up, Guesty will be able to automatically send upcoming guests the appropriate form to fill out based on the property they’ve booked. After they’ve filled out the relevant form, you’ll receive a notification via Guesty’s Unified Inbox to let you know it’s complete. You’ll also get a follow-up notification upon check-in to confirm that the form has been successfully submitted to the local authority. If the form submission fails for any reason, you’ll be notified so you can reach out to the guest to fix it.
For more information about Guesty’s Authority Reporting feature, check out this article.
The Big Picture
Guesty’s Pre-Stay Tools help you optimize your daily operations, enabling you to not only provide a five-star guest experience but also protect your properties from fraud and damage, all before your guests even arrive.
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