Touch Stay Review

Touch Stay is a digital guest guidebook platform that replaces printed welcome books with a mobile-friendly link hosts share with guests on any device. Founded in 2014 by Andy McNulty and Joe Jones — two travelers who kept running into unclear host communication on their own trips — it's one of the longest-running names in this specific niche, still run today by a distributed team and described on its own site as an "award-winning SaaS company." The product covers check-in instructions, house rules, Wi-Fi details, appliance guides, and local recommendations, plus an AI chatbot, an AI guidebook generator, an upsell widget, two-way SMS messaging, a 5-star review pop-up, and integrations with 29 named property management systems.

Pricing

We opened Touch Stay's dedicated pricing page directly, and it publishes no dollar figures anywhere in its content. Instead it runs an interactive calculator: you select a guidebook type (Short-Term Rental, B&B/Hotel, Glamping, Campsite, or Other), enter a number of properties, choose a currency (USD, GBP, AUD, or EUR), and pick annual or monthly billing before any price appears. Touch Stay's site separately mentions "multi-guide deep discounting" for larger portfolios but doesn't state what that discount actually is. There's no FAQ section on the pricing page covering contract length, cancellation, or refunds either — if those terms are published at all, they live elsewhere in Touch Stay's knowledge base, not on the page built to answer pricing questions. What we can confirm: a 14-day free trial with no credit card required, so an owner can build a real guidebook and test the AI chatbot before any pricing conversation happens. Per our own rule against inventing numbers, we won't guess a per-property rate — running the calculator yourself or booking a demo is currently the only way to get one.

Who it's for

Touch Stay fits a vacation rental host, property manager, or B&B owner who wants a mature, template-driven guidebook rather than a bare-bones one — the AI chatbot, upsell widget, and review pop-up are included on every plan and template rather than reserved for a top tier, a genuinely different posture than guidebook competitors that gate AI behind a premium plan. It also fits an operator already running one of the 29 PMS platforms it connects to — Guesty, Hostaway, Lodgify, OwnerRez, Cloudbeds, Beds24, Uplisting, and Mews among them — since Touch Stay syncs reservations and auto-shares guidebooks instead of requiring manual guest-list uploads. It's a weaker fit for anyone who wants a price up front without feeding a calculator their property details, or who needs more than a guidebook: there's no phone or voice coverage and no task-automation loop for cleaners or vendors — Touch Stay stays inside the guidebook/content layer by design.

What we could verify

Touch Stay's own feature and integration pages were straightforward to confirm directly. The AI chatbot page states plainly that it "only uses your guidebook content, so every answer is specific to your property" and "won't go off-topic or make things up," and that when a guest's question falls outside the guidebook, "the chatbot lets the guest know and you'll receive a notification" — real guardrails, not just a marketing line, and confirmed as available on all plans rather than gated to a premium one. The integrations page lists 29 named PMS and channel platforms, which we've reproduced above rather than taking the homepage's rounder "30+" claim at face value. On the review-platform side, we independently pulled Touch Stay's Capterra listing and found a 5.0-out-of-5 overall rating, with identical 5.0 sub-scores for ease of use, features, customer service, and value for money — genuinely perfect, but built on only 2 reviews, too small a sample to carry much weight next to competitors with dozens of reviews. We also tried G2 twice (its reviews page and its seller profile) and Trustpilot once; all three blocked automated access with an HTTP 403 error, so we could not verify Touch Stay's standing on any of those three platforms ourselves. Homepage testimonials are specific and named — Liquid Life Vacation Rentals reports 550 guidebooks built in 7 days, and Villa Ausblick's host says they've had "zero calls for operational reasons" since adopting it — but we found no aggregate customer or property-count total published anywhere on Touch Stay's own site.

How it compares to our top pick

BnBGenius is built for a different job: free for your first 500 messages, then a flat $10/month with no PMS required, and that single price covers an AI phone concierge, a task-automation loop, review generation, and gap-night upsells — a full operations layer, not just a guidebook. Touch Stay is narrower by design and isn't trying to compete on that ground: it doesn't answer the phone, and it has no task loop for coordinating cleaners or vendors. Where it wins is depth inside its own lane — a chatbot genuinely restricted to your own content on every plan, a 12-year track record, and the widest PMS integration list we've verified in the guidebook category. If a guidebook with AI chat and upsells is genuinely all you need, and you're fine getting a price from a calculator rather than a published rate card, Touch Stay is one of the most established options available. If you want phone coverage and task automation bundled at a flat, published price with no calculator, BnBGenius covers more ground for less.

See the rest of the field in our best Airbnb host software ranking.