Looking for a Touch Stay Alternative?

Why hosts start looking for alternatives

The search for a welcome book tool usually starts in one of two places. The first is time: you sign up for a self-serve platform, open the editor, and realise that "fill in the templates" is doing a lot of work. Writing the copy, sourcing photos, keeping the guide current across seasons, translating manually for your German or French guests. That work adds up, and it keeps adding up every time something at the property changes.

The second is the result. A template is built to work for everyone, which means it reflects the character of no one in particular. Hosts with a distinctive property, a converted farmhouse, a clifftop villa, a boutique hotel with a specific aesthetic, find that the finished guide looks roughly the same as every other guide on the platform. It functions. It doesn't feel like theirs.

Neither of these is a criticism of the tools themselves. It is a description of the limits of any self-serve approach. The tools provide the structure; the quality of the output depends entirely on what you put in. That tradeoff is fine for a lot of hosts, and genuinely the wrong call for others.

What Touch Stay and Hostfully do well

Before comparing anything, it's worth being fair about what self-serve tools actually offer, because they do some things well.

• Structured templates. Both tools give you a sensible skeleton to fill in: sections for WiFi, house rules, local recommendations, and so on. If you're starting from a blank document, that structure is genuinely useful. You don't have to think about what to include; you just have to fill in the blanks.
• Digital delivery. Guest guides shared via a link or QR code, accessible on any phone, no app download required. That's the right delivery mechanism for a welcome book, and both tools get it right.
• Host control. If you enjoy building and maintaining your own guide, a self-serve tool gives you that control directly. You can update it whenever you like, add sections for different seasons, adjust house rules between stays. For hosts who want ownership over every detail, that matters.
• Established platforms with real user bases. These aren't fly-by-night tools. They have communities of hosts, support resources, and a track record. If self-serve is the right approach for you, they're reasonable choices to evaluate.

The point isn't to dismiss them. The point is to understand what category they belong to, which makes it easier to see when a different category is the better fit.

The DIY vs. managed distinction

Touch Stay and Hostfully are platforms. Be Our Guest is a service. That distinction is the clearest way to understand what you're actually choosing between.

With a platform, you do the work. You log in, write the copy, organise the sections, choose what to include, decide how to phrase the house rules, figure out which local restaurants to list. The tool handles the delivery; everything in the guide is yours to produce. A monthly subscription buys you access to the editor, not a finished guide.

With Be Our Guest, you provide the raw material: the property details, your knowledge of the area, the things that make your place what it is. We turn it into the finished guide. The writing, the layout, the translation into up to nine languages: that's our job, not yours.

This isn't better or worse in the abstract. It depends on what you want. Some hosts genuinely enjoy building their guide and want to maintain it directly. Others would rather spend that time on the property itself and have the guide handled once, properly, by someone else. Both are legitimate positions, and they point to different tools.

When a managed service fits better

There are four situations where the managed approach tends to produce a noticeably better outcome:

• Multiple properties. Building one welcome book takes time. Building three or five, and keeping them all current, is a meaningful operational burden. A managed service handles the production work for each property, with a consistent standard across all of them.
• International guests in languages you don't speak. If a significant portion of your guests arrive speaking German, French, Italian, or Arabic, a guide in only English is doing less than it could. Manual translation is slow and machine translation reads like machine translation. Be Our Guest writes each language version from scratch. The tone stays warm, the local references still make sense in context. For a fuller picture of why this matters, the multilingual welcome book guide goes into more detail.
• A property with a distinctive character. A template produces a guide that looks and reads like a template. If your property has a specific aesthetic, a story, a personality that guests respond to in reviews, a form doesn't capture that. Good hospitality writing captures it. That's a craft, and it's what the discovery and writing process in Be Our Guest is designed to surface.
• You'd rather not spend the time. This is the most honest reason, and it's completely valid. Some hosts have the time and interest to build a great guide themselves. Many don't, or would simply rather spend those hours on the property, on guests, or elsewhere. A managed service is, among other things, a time decision.

What Be Our Guest does

Be Our Guest produces bespoke digital welcome books for boutique hotels, villas, and short-term rentals, primarily in the Mediterranean, though not exclusively.

The process starts with a discovery call. We ask about the property, the guests you typically host, the local recommendations that matter to you, and the things guests always ask about. From that conversation, we write the copy, in your voice, specific to your property, not from a template. We design the layout, mobile-first, with your property in mind. And we translate into the languages your guests actually speak: up to nine, including English, Greek, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Russian, and Mandarin Chinese. Each translation is written properly, not run through a machine.

The finished guide is a shareable link. Guests open it on their phone, no app, no login, works offline once loaded. You get an editing link so you can update the WiFi password or swap a restaurant recommendation yourself, any time, without coming back to us.

One price, no monthly subscription. The guide is yours. For context on what a complete digital welcome book contains, the complete digital welcome book guide covers it in detail, and what to include in a host welcome book breaks down the specific sections worth getting right.

How to decide

Here is an honest decision framework, not a sales argument.

If you host internationally or want a welcome book that reflects your property rather than a template, the multilingual welcome book guide explains the practical case for investing in it, and what "written properly" means in practice for guests who don't speak English as a first language.

Frequently asked questions