Escapia's Guest Guides: Digital guest guidebook software webinar

Escapia's Guest Guides represent the latest in Escapia's dedication to providing a comprehensive vacation rental software solution for property managers. This digital guidebook tool for vacation rentals is a modern, mobile-friendly welcome book that enables you to create, customize, and share unit-specific information such as local recommendations and unit requirements, all within a branded guest portal!

Guest Guides is a built-in addition, coming at no cost to customers, and is integrated directly into the software to allow for easier information integration. It is intended to replace complex solutions like the Glad to Have You hospitality app (which required guests to download a third party app to view digital guidebooks) and act as an alternative to third party platforms. Guests can access their personalized mobile-friendly experience via a personalized site (no app required!) or via an offline PDF (for those visits which may be out of service range.

Why use Guest Guides?

Guest Guides represents a powerful customer benefit to both Escapia users and their guests! Guest Guides are a modern and cost-effective solution for property managers looking for a digital guest welcome book experience that utilizes a streamlined setup to eliminate needs for outdated or out of place integrations. The tool comes with pre-built templates to reduce set up effort and allows for company branding to deliver a professional experience that reflects your business identity and builds trust that recourages re-booking - especially when your guests see their easily accessible guest portal!

What are the key features of Guest Guides?

These digital guestbooks offer several important key features to deliver the best experience possible. The Guest Guides are easily customizable and accessible via your company's unique URL and PDF (which can be automated via our Communications Hub!) and deliver structured information across a broad range of categories such as:

• Arrival and departure information
• Access codes (our Guest Guides integrate with most third-party solutions to auto-populate!)
• Wi-Fi information and other unit policies
• Property amenities
• Local Recommendations
• And more!

What's more, the Guest Guides can also be shared manually via a direct link, through traditional correspondence, and via other means to allow your business to easily save time on vacation rental guest welcome books. 

As our latest addition, users may be wondering how to access Guest Guides. We include a short video in the webinar to guide users this new platform tool, which includes the extensive customization options and template tools that can allow you to make the most of the experience for guests. The video will also guide you through how to delete or add categories or sub-categories, as well as where you can update your brand information for the guest portals!

Our Guest Guides template is what allows our vacation rental guest welcome book tool to easily reflect the uniqueness of each property in your portfolio while saving you time. The Guide template section of Guest Guides is comprised of categories across multiple different common areas (such as arrival/departure information, property information, etc.). Each category can have multiple sub-categories that allow you to add extra information for guests and elaborate where you'd like! The template categories can also be enabled or disabled at will if information on your properties is subject to change.

When you visit Escapia's Guest Guides for the first time, you'll notice that we've pre-populated some of the most common categories for you - this will enable you to more easily fill in the information on these digital guidebooks and get started quicker! You can swap these out, move them around, or delete them as you'd like. These categories were based off of our most commonly seen categories in the Hospitality by Glad to Have You solution.

Guest Guide categories are organized like a table of contents to reflect how they may appear on a PDF download version of the experience for guests. Templates within these categories are how content is actually filled within the Guest Guides to display unit information.

We've made sure to provide you with plenty of options inside these templates, including merge tags that allow you to auto-fill information specific to each unit while maintaining easy template styling that reflects your broader brand, the option to restrict how or where template information appears based on channel / unit / source, the ability to add styling / images / links, and more! We encourage Escapia users to experiment and play around with the Guest Guides to get a feel of how they can create the best user experience possible for guests.

Our Guest Guides are also highly customizable to "Phase of Stay", which will allow you to send the Guest Guides at a specific time or part of that guest's stay.

No more asking guests to download unwieldy third-party apps or complex integrated product procedures - Escapia's Guest Guides are accessible to guest via two easy methods!

The primary accessibility method is via the customizable guest portal which can be branded with your company's information. After filling in their reservation information, guests will be able to view the categories you filled in with unit specific information, see images of the unit you uploaded, and download the PDF version of the digital guidebook for offline access as desired. This guest portal will be an easy way for guests to access that information at whatever time they need should they be doing early research or need a reminder of important information (like parking, Wi-fi, or house rules!) on the go.

The PDF can also be sent via traditional methods via email or correspondence. Escapia offers plenty of automation tools that will allow you to automate each step of this process from creation to sending to allow your team to focus on the work that matters while ensuring the guest experience is smooth and successful!

As always, Escapia is dedicated to enabling your team to customize reports as you see fit and empower your analytics process. Our new upgrades to the Performance Insights report will allow you to filter even more precisely than before, with a capacity to drill down by booking channel, specify time periods, and review Revenue, Bookings, and other key details by new insights.

We’ve also updated our Flex Reservation Report (which utilizes data from 30+ scattered other reports) to give you the levers you need to customize and create your own reservation-related reports. Similarly to Guest Guides, we’ve run instructor-led training sessions on how to optimize your use of this incredible tool that are well worth the review. Additionally, upcoming enhancements include Flex Accounting reports, report scheduling to deliver regular reports to your email at your convenience, and the ability to report on coupon code usage across booking channels!

Airbnb is an important vacation rental distribution channel for your business and being able to quickly and simply manage Airbnb reservations is a top priority for us. That’s why we’re improving our process and creating tools within EscapiaConnect that give you more control over folio creation and help you with the reconciliation process.

The first piece of the puzzle is unlocking improvement to the reconciliation process through tax remittance configurations for your units. This allows you to define which taxes Airbnb is responsible for remitting and which taxes your agency is responsible for remitting. You can now set this up unit by unit by unit or in bulk for all units in a tax district!

Once you’ve set up your tax remittance configuration, you can use the new reservation price comparison report to see a side-by-side reservation comparison of the Escapia calculated folio values versus the actual values collected by the channel for rent, fees, and taxes. Spot folio discrepancies and identify fee configurations to reconcile your folio on granular reference points to know how you may need to adjust!

And coming soon, you’ll be able to automatically add commission to Airbnb and other EscapiaConnect reservations, exclude those commission values from owner statements, and use the redefined folio editing experience to have more control over how items are calculated and recalculated. These (and other updates!) will allow you to significantly reduce the amount of manual work to reconcile your folios!

One of our most exciting feature areas we want to highlight today is reservations! And when we say reservations, we’re not just referring to our vacation rental booking calendar, the reservations grid – our goal is to provide you with access to critical reservation information in a streamlined and modernized experience no matter what device type you’re on.

First up is our new Reservations Agenda. This new mobile-first screen is designed to provide you a unified view for managing reservations on the go. While it’s optimized for mobile, we’ll also have this feature on desktop views to provide you with the most important information you need whether you’re in the field or at your desk. The screen consolidates key information that’s currently scattered across several places in Escapia. You’ll now be able to view today’s arrivals, departures, and occupied units all in one place, with information on guest details, unit specific information, payment statuses, rental agreement statuses, and booking channel available alongside them. This way, you can get the most important reservation details faster – especially when you’re on the move!

In parallel, we’re also modernizing the existing Reservations Grid with a fresh, updated look that improves performance, visuals, and ease of use, all while keeping the familiar layout and structure you know. We’re making it easier for you to scan, sort, and manage your reservations, and most importantly, no functionality is being removed! You’ll be able to continue using all your current tools and workflows, just in a cleaner, more intuitive format. 

We've covered a lot - and that's because we're working on a lot! Across guest hospitality, channel distribution, notifications, reporting and reservations, great things are coming for Escapia users. We wanted to take this opportunity to give you a preview of what’s next!

We would like to make some quick reminders. You can learn more about Escapia’s Guest Guides by visiting escapia.com/guest-guides/ for more information on how to get started. Additionally, we regularly offer instructor-led training across features (including the newly released Guest Guides!) that you can sign up for at escapia.com/training.

Be sure you start using the new mobile-friendly housekeeping dashboard and notifications dashboard to get the most out of your Escapia experience and start experimenting with some of the new additions to reporting! Finally, if you’re interested in signing up for EscapiaConnect, contact Escapia support to learn more about our inbuilt channel manager.

This is also an excellent time to check on in on some of our new integrated partners across the AI and housekeeping space, alongside our other options in our partner network. And finally, remember that we’re always open to feedback, and you can supply that in-product and following this webinar in the form of a survey.