GetAll Guide vs Booking.com's guest information

What Booking.com actually gives you

More than Airbnb’s guidebook does, and it is worth saying so.

Through the Extranet you can set house rules as real structured fields — quiet hours, whether extra visitors are allowed, parking, security instructions like locking doors and setting an alarm, and how rubbish and recycling work. You set check-in and check-out times. Under guest information you describe facilities: internet, parking, pets, children, extra beds.

There is also a message thread, in the Extranet and in the Pulse app, with automatic translation built in.

For a lot of hosts that covers the pre-booking questions completely. It is free, it is already attached to your listing, and guests see it without you doing anything.

Where it stops

All of that is listing information. It describes the property to someone deciding whether to book it.

None of it is a place a guest can look something up at 22:00 on the second night. Specifically, there is nowhere on the listing for:

• The WiFi password. The listing says that WiFi exists. It does not carry the password, so that arrives in a message and then scrolls away.
• The door code, for the same reason.
• Which entrance is yours, with a photo taken from the pavement.
• How the boiler, the hob or the washing machine work.
• What to do before leaving.

Each of those is a question that reaches you as a message, and answering them by message has a particular failure mode: the answer is correct on the day you send it and then buried under twenty later messages.

The message thread is not a guide

This is the honest heart of the comparison, because most Booking.com hosts are managing with the message thread and it does technically work.

A thread is a log. It is ordered by time, not by topic, and it cannot be corrected. A guest looking for the WiFi password on Thursday has to scroll back through your arrival instructions, your reply about the parking, and the message about the late check-out to find it.

A guide is organised by what the guest wants. They tap “WiFi” and it is there, along with a QR code that joins the network without them typing anything.

The other difference is that a guide can be fixed. Change the password once and every guest sees the new one — including the ones already in the flat. The message you sent in March stays wrong forever.

The door code, specifically

If you host on Booking.com and use a keypad, your code is currently being sent by message, at whatever moment you remember, to someone you have never met. It then stays in that thread indefinitely.

Here, the code is attached to the booking’s clock. Our server leaves it out of the guest’s page entirely until the time you chose — the day before check-in, or at check-in — then it appears, and then the whole link stops working after check-out. There is no message sitting anywhere afterwards.

You keep the listing fields

Nothing here replaces your Booking.com setup, and you should not empty it.

Keep the house rules on the listing, because guests see and effectively agree to them before booking, and that has real weight if something goes wrong. Keep your check-in times there. Keep the facilities accurate.

Then send one link with everything they need during the stay. The two do different jobs, and hosts who take bookings from more than one place get a second benefit — the same link works for Booking.com guests, Airbnb guests, and the ones who found you directly.

Booking.com’s features were checked against their partner help pages at the time of writing and can change.