Almost every “best digital guidebook app” article is written by one of the companies selling one, and the winner is always the company that wrote it. This one is written by Askello, which makes one of them, so read it with that in mind — and judge it by whether it tells you when to buy something else. It does, twice.
Everything about other products here was read from their own websites on 22 September 2026. Prices and features change faster than articles do; check the vendor before you decide. Askello’s own prices live only on our pricing page, so they can never be stale here.
First: are you sure you need an app?
A digital guidebook is a web page your guests open. You can make one in a document, export it to PDF, and put the link in your check-in message. For a single place with simple access and a host who answers messages quickly, that is a perfectly good answer and it costs nothing. Our own welcome book template is written to be used that way, with no product attached.
Buy a tool when one of these is true:
- You are answering the same questions over and over. This is the most common reason and the most fixable — see what guests ask most.
- You have more than one place and keeping several documents current has become its own job.
- Your guests do not share your language, and you are translating by hand or hoping.
- The information changes — a new lock, a new bin day — and a PDF somebody downloaded in March is still telling them the old thing.
If none of those is true yet, save your money until one becomes true.
The three kinds, and who each is for
The category looks crowded but sorts into three groups. Pick the group first; the product inside it matters much less than people think.
1. The guidebook platform — for a portfolio, and for hosts who want more than a guide
Touch Stay and Hostfully are the two longest-established names in this category. They have been at this for about a decade, and they sell a guest-experience platform that grew out of a guidebook: scheduled messages before and after a stay, upsells, review prompts, and integrations with dozens of property-management systems.
Choose one of these if you run enough places that a PMS integration saves you real hours, or you want to sell late checkout and airport transfers through the guide. That is a genuinely different product from a guide, and if you want it, we do not have it and are not building it.
The trade is that you pay per property per year whether or not you use the extra machinery, and there is a lot of machinery. We wrote a longer, itemised read of one of them: Askello vs Touch Stay.
2. The free guidebook — for a first place, and for hosts testing whether this helps at all
BetterSTR is the best-known free option, and free is a real answer rather than a trick: if you have one place and want a shareable page with a QR code, a free tool will do it.
Choose free if your main problem is “my information is scattered” rather than “I am answering the same question every week”. Free tools give you somewhere to put the information. What they generally do not give you is something that answers a guest at two in the morning when you are asleep.
3. The AI guest guide — for hosts whose actual problem is the repetition
This is the newest group and the one Askello is in, alongside GuestIntro and others. The difference is not the guide; it is that a guest can ask it a question in their own words and get an answer without waiting for you.
The question worth asking any of them — including us — is where the answers come from. There are two designs, and they behave very differently at 2am:
- Assistants that draw on general knowledge as well as your guide. They answer more questions, and some of those answers are about a neighbourhood the model has read about rather than yours. When they are wrong, they are wrong confidently, and the guest finds out at your door.
- Assistants sealed to your guide alone. They answer fewer questions, say so when they cannot, and never invent a bin day.
Askello is the second kind, deliberately. Every answer names the section of your guide it came from, so you can check it, and the questions it could not answer become a list you can fix. That is the whole argument for it, and it is also the reason it will refuse a question a chattier product would have answered.
Ask a vendor to show you what their assistant does when it does not know. It is the most revealing five minutes of any demo, and eight questions that test an AI guest assistant turn those five minutes into a checklist you can run on any of them.
The honest summary
If this is you Look at One place, simple access, you answer messages quickly A document and a link. Seriously — start with our template One place, information scattered, budget of zero A free guidebook tool Dozens of places, a PMS, upsells to sell A guidebook platform — Touch Stay, Hostfully One to five places, and the repetition is the problem An AI guest guide — Askello, GuestIntro You need the guide itself in several languages Check each vendor’s language list carefully; they differ a lotWhere Askello fits, stated plainly
It is for a host with one to five places whose real complaint is answering the same question for the fortieth time. You paste the listing you already wrote, AI drafts the guide from your words, you edit it, and guests reach it by link or QR code with nothing to install. It is free for one place with no card and no end date, and the assistant is included for the first fourteen days.
It is not for you if you need a PMS integration, an upsell store, or scheduled messaging — none of those exist and none are planned.
The fastest way to judge it is not to read about it. Open the sample guide and ask it something awkward.