Hosts search for a Touch Stay alternative for two very different reasons, and the right answer depends entirely on which one you are.
Reason one: you like the idea of a digital guidebook, but want different pricing, a different look, or a feature Touch Stay does not have. You want a different guidebook.
Reason two: you built a lovely guidebook, sent it to every guest, and you are still answering the Wi-Fi question at 11 PM. You do not want a different guidebook. You want the questions to stop.
Those need different tools. Let us be clear about which is which.
First, credit where it is due
Touch Stay is a well-built product and a genuine improvement over a laminated binder. It is phone-friendly, it can be updated without reprinting anything, it supports QR codes and links, and it handles the pre-arrival information flow properly.
If you do not currently have any digital guest information, a guidebook is a real step up and Touch Stay is a reasonable choice. Nothing below is an argument that it is bad at its job.
The question is whether its job is the job you need done.
If you want a different guidebook
Then you are shopping within a category. Our full guidebook checklist covers what any of them needs to contain, and the things to compare between products are straightforward:
- Price model — per property, per portfolio, or free tier
- Branding control — how much it can look like your property rather than the vendor's
- PMS integration — whether guest details sync automatically
- Offline access — useful in rural properties with poor signal
- Multi-property management — whether shared content can be reused across homes
- Languages — whether the guidebook itself translates
Several products compete here — Hostfully, RueBaRue, BetterSTR and others — and they differ mostly on price, polish and integrations. Any comparison list will serve you.
If you want the questions to stop
This is the more common reason, and swapping one guidebook for another will not fix it. Here is why.
A guidebook is a document. Its model is: the host organises information into sections, and the guest browses to find what they need.
That model has a structural failure point, and it is not a quality problem. It is a behaviour problem:
Guests do not browse. They have one specific question, they want it answered now, and they will take the fastest available route. Opening a link, waiting for it to load and hunting through sections is slower than typing "what's the wifi" to the host. So they type it to the host.
The guest's question and your section heading do not match. You filed it under Climate Control. Their thought is "why is it freezing in here." Bridging that gap is work, and a tired guest at 11 PM will not do it.
The link is not present at the moment of need. You sent it three weeks ago. It is now beneath thirty other notifications.
So the honest test is this: if you already have a guidebook and are still getting the same questions, the guidebook is not the bottleneck. Replacing it with a nicer one changes the sections, not the behaviour.
The other category
The alternative is not a better-organised document. It is letting the guest ask.
This is the AI concierge category. Instead of the guest translating their problem into your structure, they say the problem in their own words — "why is the shower cold", "when do the bins go out", "is there parking" — and get your answer about your property. No navigation, no categories, no scrolling.
That is what Askbnb does. The raw material is identical to what you would put in a guidebook: house rules, Wi-Fi, appliance quirks, checkout steps, your real local recommendations. What differs is the interface. The guest scans a QR code on the fridge, asks, and is answered — in their own language, at whatever hour, with no app to download and no account to create.
It costs $5 per month per property.
An honest comparison
| Digital guidebook | AI concierge | |
|---|---|---|
| Model | Guest browses sections | Guest asks a question |
| Best at | Presenting curated content beautifully | Answering a specific question fast |
| Guest effort | Find link, navigate, scroll | Scan, ask |
| Languages | Whatever you translate | Whatever the guest speaks |
| Pre-arrival planning | Strong — good for browsing before a trip | Weaker — built for in-the-moment questions |
| Visual polish | Photos, maps, curated layout | Conversational, not a brochure |
| Stops repetitive messages | Partly | This is the core job |
Note the row that goes the other way. A guidebook is genuinely better for pre-arrival browsing — a guest planning their trip two weeks out, looking at photos of the area and deciding what to do. That is a browsing task, and browsing is what guidebooks are for.
Plenty of hosts run both, and that is a perfectly sensible setup: a guidebook for planning, an AI concierge for the in-stay questions that arrive at inconvenient hours.
How to decide
Ask yourself one question: do my guests already have guest information, and are they still messaging me?
No, they have nothing — start with a guidebook. Almost any of them. Get the information written down and reachable.
Yes, and it is working — you do not need to change anything.
Yes, and they still message me constantly — in which case start by measuring what they actually ask — you have a category problem, not a product problem. Another guidebook will produce the same result, and the thing to change is not how the information is organised but how the guest gets at it.
Work out which of those three you are before you compare a single feature list. It will save you an evening of research and, more usefully, an evening of answering the Wi-Fi question.