Digital guest guidebook apps compared: Touch Stay, Hostfully, Guidey, Airbnb House Manual, Sonnim
Written on 2026-08-25
A small rental has six realistic ways to hand guests the house information: three paid guidebook apps (Touch Stay, Hostfully Guidebooks, Guidey), Airbnb's built-in House Manual, a shared Google Doc or Notion page, and Sonnim. The short answer splits three ways. If every guest books through Airbnb and you don't mind answering messages yourself, the House Manual is enough. If you want a long, photo-rich guide to the neighborhood with chapters and maps, Touch Stay or Hostfully fit. If you already have the information written down and want guest questions answered from it automatically, Sonnim. The table below was checked against each service's official pages on 25 August 2026.
At a glance
| Price (1 property) | Free tier | Translation | Guest questions answered automatically | QR and print | Guest sign-up | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Touch Stay (UK) | From $99/year | None (14-day trial) | Google Translate or manual entry | Yes (AI chatbot, all plans) | QR templates | Not needed |
| Hostfully Guidebooks (US) | 1 guidebook free, paid from about $9.99/month | 1 guidebook, with sponsored recommendations shown | 16 languages auto-translated (paid) | Not confirmed | Print, PDF, QR | Not needed |
| Guidey (UK, 2021) | $7.42/month billed yearly | None (14-day trial) | 100+ languages auto-translated | No | Printable QR | Not needed |
| Airbnb House Manual | Free | Everything | Listing is auto-translated; official docs don't say the manual is | No (you answer messages) | None | Confirmed Airbnb guests only |
| Google Doc / Notion | Free | Everything | None (guest uses browser translation) | No | Separate QR generator | Not needed |
| Sonnim (Korea) | Free (accounts created in 2026 stay free for life) | Everything | 5 guest languages auto-translated, 10 selectable on the guest page | Yes (answers only from your guide, hands the rest to you) | QR and A5 booklet | Not needed |
Prices depend on currency and billing period, so they are written as "from". Hostfully's paid prices are not printed on its pricing page; the figure comes from a review site.
Why isn't the Airbnb House Manual enough?
The House Manual opens only for guests with a confirmed Airbnb booking. Guests from Booking.com, Vrbo, direct bookings or a friend's referral never see it. You also can't tell whether a guest read it or where they got stuck; the question arrives as a message either way. If Airbnb is your only channel and the message load is fine, keep using it. The moment you have a second channel, or you notice you're typing the same answer every week, a separate guide starts paying for itself.
Who are Touch Stay and Hostfully for?
Both are "digital guidebooks" in the literal sense: tools for building a guide like a small book, with chapters for restaurants, sights, photos and maps. They reward hosts who want to write a lot. The cost is that you fill in the structure field by field. Touch Stay includes an AI chatbot that answers guest questions on every plan, which makes it the closest to Sonnim in this table; it starts at $99 a year and has no free plan.
What is different about Guidey?
Guidey was started in London in 2021 by a team of three. Its strengths are the price ($7.42 a month on a yearly plan) and auto-translation into more than 100 languages. It does not answer guest questions; whatever the guide doesn't cover, the guest asks you.
What is different about Sonnim?
Sonnim doesn't ask you to write a guide from scratch. You paste what you already have, a house manual, a welcome message, a printed sheet, and the AI splits it into cards; you only reorder and switch cards on or off. Before you publish, it points out the items guests ask about most that your text doesn't cover (checkout time, trash, parking). Guests open the link without an account, and when they ask a question the answer comes only from your guide. Anything not in the guide gets "That's not in the guide, please ask the host," and the question lands in your console. That list of unanswered questions is what you fix in the next version of the guide. Everything is free right now, and accounts created in 2026 stay free for life.
What do guests actually ask?
We counted the guest questions that reached Sonnim guide pages over the last 90 days: 46 questions across live properties, demo excluded. Check-in and check-out were 28%, parking 11%, directions and transport 9%, bathroom and hot water 7%. Nineteen of the 46 (41%) were questions the guide had no answer for, and for directions it was three out of four. What that number says about choosing a tool is simple: how pretty the guide looks matters less than whether the items guests actually ask about are in it, and whether the missing ones come back to you. Of the six options here, only Sonnim collects the unanswered questions for the host, which is why it has a pre-publish check and an inbox for gaps.
How to choose
- One Airbnb listing, happy to answer messages: Airbnb House Manual
- A long neighborhood guide with photos, mostly English-speaking guests: Touch Stay or Hostfully
- The cheapest paid guidebook, no automatic answers needed: Guidey
- The information already exists and you want fewer guest questions: Sonnim