Hostfully Digital Guidebooks Review
A mature, well-reviewed digital guidebook that's genuinely free for one property — though the real price of its paid tier only shows up after you click through to checkout.
Pros
- Free plan is a genuinely permanent single-guidebook tier ($0/month) with sponsored recommendations and Hostfully PMS/Devices sync, not a time-limited trial (hostfully.com/pricing/digital-guidebooks/)
- AI Itinerary Planner builds a personalized guest itinerary from stay length, group size, ages and interests, and auto-generated PIN codes sync to Hostfully Devices smart locks for self-check-in (hostfully.com/digital-guidebooks/)
- Instant translation into 16+ languages on the Pro plan, including Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew and Vietnamese (hostfully.com/digital-guidebooks/)
- 4.8-out-of-5 rating across 123 reviews on Capterra, with ease-of-use and customer service both scored 4.7/5 — verified directly
- Company has run the guidebook product since 2015 and holds Preferred/Premier/Elite partner status with Airbnb, Booking.com and Vrbo (hostfully.com/pricing/digital-guidebooks/)
- Hostfully's own cut of upsells is small — a 1% Stripe fee on Guidebook Marketplace transactions and an 8% commission on Viator activity referrals, not a heavy revenue share (hostfully.com/digital-guidebooks/)
Cons
- Hostfully's own pricing page never states a Pro dollar figure — it only says “Up to 199 guidebooks”; the real per-guidebook price only appears after clicking through to the Chargify checkout page (hostfully.chargifypay.com/subscribe/mdd4bpc24ydp/digital-guidebooks)
- Pro pricing is volume-tiered per guidebook rather than flat — a single guidebook costs $12/month while a 20-guidebook portfolio pays $6/month each, so a solo host pays double the per-unit rate a large manager pays (hostfully.chargifypay.com/subscribe/mdd4bpc24ydp/digital-guidebooks)
- The free tier's “sponsored recommendations” are paid, location-based ads placed inside your guest-facing guidebook, which Capterra reviewers specifically flagged as “irrelevant” (capterra.com/p/223111/Hostfully-Guidebooks/reviews/)
- Scoped to the guidebook layer only — no guest-messaging inbox, no phone answering, no review-writing automation; Hostfully sells that separately as its own PMS product
- G2's dedicated “Hostfully - Guidebooks” listing returned an HTTP 403 when we tried to verify it directly, and Capterra's own pricing listing for this product shows a stale, different tier structure (“Power Host,” “Prime,” “Prime Plus” at $9.99–$75/month) that doesn't match what's live on hostfully.com today (capterra.com/p/223111/Hostfully-Guidebooks/pricing/)
Hostfully Digital Guidebooks is the standalone guest-guidebook product built by Hostfully, the vacation rental software company that also sells a full property management platform. It replaces the paper welcome binder with a branded, mobile-friendly digital guide covering check-in instructions, WiFi codes, house rules, and local recommendations, plus, on paid plans, a small marketplace for upselling extras like early check-in or a mid-stay clean.
Pricing
Per Hostfully's own pricing page, the Free plan is $0 a month for one guidebook, including sponsored recommendations (ads) and syncing with Hostfully PMS and Hostfully Devices. The Pro plan unlocks custom branding, the revenue-generating upsell marketplace, bulk editing, and instant translation into 16+ languages, and covers up to 199 guidebooks — but the pricing page itself never states a dollar figure for Pro, only “Up to 199 guidebooks.” We followed the page's own “Get Started” button through to Hostfully's live Chargify checkout, which turns out to be volume-tiered per guidebook: $12 per guidebook per month for a single guidebook, sliding to $11, $10, $9, $8, $7, $6.50, and finally $6 per guidebook per month at 20 or more guidebooks. Paying annually runs $129.96 per guidebook per year at the low end down to $64.80 per guidebook per year at 20-plus — a consistent 10% discount versus paying monthly at every tier. Enterprise, for 200-plus guidebooks, is a custom bulk-rate quote. On top of the subscription, a 1% Stripe fee applies to any Guidebook Marketplace upsell transaction, and Viator activity bookings made through the guidebook pay Hostfully an 8% referral commission.
Who it's for
Hostfully Guidebooks fits a host or property manager who wants a genuinely polished, branded digital welcome guide — built in minutes with the Guidebook Wizard, editable in bulk across a whole portfolio, and capable of generating auto-PIN codes for self-check-in when paired with Hostfully's own smart locks. The AI Itinerary Planner is a specific, real feature: it builds a guest itinerary from stay length, group size, ages, and stated interests rather than just listing static recommendations. It's a strong fit if the job you're hiring software for is “replace the laminated welcome binder and cut down repetitive questions,” and a poor fit if the job is “handle my guest messages and phone calls,” since Guidebooks doesn't touch either.
What we could verify
Hostfully Guidebooks carries a 4.8-out-of-5 rating across 123 reviews on Capterra, with ease-of-use and customer service both scored 4.7/5; reviewers there consistently cite easy setup and fewer repetitive guest questions, alongside recurring complaints about a dated interface and glitches in the translation tool. We could not verify a rating on G2 — its dedicated “Hostfully - Guidebooks” listing returned an HTTP 403 error when we tried to load it directly, so we're not citing a G2 score here. Worth flagging: Capterra's own pricing listing for this product shows a completely different tier structure — plans named “Power Host,” “Prime,” and “Prime Plus” priced $9.99 to $75 a month — that doesn't match the Free/Pro/Enterprise structure live on hostfully.com today. That reads as a stale third-party listing rather than a second real pricing option, so we've used what's actually on Hostfully's own site and checkout flow throughout this review.
How it compares to our top pick
BnBGenius and Hostfully Guidebooks solve different problems. BnBGenius is a flat $10-a-month AI layer — after your first 500 messages free, with no PMS required — that answers guest messages and phone calls, completes tasks, writes reviews, and pitches gap-night upsells automatically. Hostfully Guidebooks is narrower by design: a well-built, well-reviewed digital guidebook and small upsell marketplace that never opens your inbox or picks up the phone. A host juggling a high volume of guest questions and calls needs something like BnBGenius; a host who mainly wants a professional, translatable welcome guide with self-check-in PINs gets that specifically, and cheaply at one guidebook, from Hostfully. The two aren't mutually exclusive.
See the full field — every PMS, channel manager, and AI messaging tool we've evaluated — in our best Airbnb host software ranking.