Guesty For Hosts

In its prior incarnation as YourPorter, this was one of the best mobile-first channel managers for STRs. Unfortunately post-acquisition by Guesty the product has failed to stay updated, leaving major flaws in the product that cause core functionality like the booking calendar to fail to load properly, message templates to remain too small to use, and (as of the 6.2.0 update) even the message from their development team to fail to load on launch. Whatever message or update the team had to share is lost in the same bugs and errors as the rest of the product. To the product team: please consider investing as much money into the continued development of the product as you spent acquiring it and attempting to extract additional revenue through things like up selling short term rental insurance.

I’ve been using Guesty for Hosts for several months now. Solid support and helpful team. The more I use it, however, the more I run into little nuisances:1. The messaging feature takes a long time to load. When I’m responding to a guest, I have to scroll all the way from the top to the bottom. It’s annoying if I’m in a rush and have to wait for the app to load and then scroll through a long thread simply to say, “sounds good!” or something.2. When sending a photo with a message, I sometimes get an error and the text of the message is lost. I hate that. I’ve had to type out long messages again when this happens. I usually end up going to the AirBNB to redo it because I don’t want to lose it again.3. When there’s a notification, tapping on the notification doesn’t take you to the particular feature you’re being notified about. Tapping on any notification just takes you to the Guesty welcome screen on the app and then I have to go looking for the particular notification item. That’s annoying.4. You can’t customize some of the views. For example, I prefer seeing my whole month in the calendar, but I can’t change it to my default view. I’d also like to see a whole month’s income revenue in one view, but I have to go and select custom dates to see that every time.5. Overall, the app isn’t a true app, but a web browser that looks like an app. Not a big deal, but this is where many of the problems come from. The app does what I want it to do and it’s got the right tools under the hood, but the user experience is clunky and annoying. I like it and it works for me, though, I just hope they keep improving in these areas.

Overall I would recommend this tool to others. It has simplified my multiple calendars across multiple properties and booking platforms. I also really love the unified messaging and the financial reporting. Customer service is not bad. I see in other reviews that people have been unhappy with it but for the most part they are responsive over email to me. The frustrating things for me are some of the glitches I run into but they are not showstoppers. Sometimes there is a bug where I cannot scroll up in message threads and there is another bug where you get stuck on certain application pages because the navigation back arrow at the top disappears, but the workaround is just restarting the app so it’s not a showstopper. And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention how much I love the automated messaging feature. Saves me so much time!