The guest portal: the arrival without the phone calls

It is seven in the evening on a Friday. Three bookings arrive. The first one calls because they cannot find the key box; the second one texts to ask for the wifi password, which is on the fridge but they have not seen it; the third one has parked in the neighbour’s space. None of the three is asking anything unusual. They are asking the same things the three from last Friday asked.

That evening is rush hour in holiday rentals, and not because of the cleaning or the traveller reports: because of the phone calls. What follows is a way to get them out of the way without hiring anyone, and to leave the guest feeling that everything had been thought through. It is called a guest portal, and it is worth understanding what it is before building one.

What a guest asks on the day they arrive

If you write down the calls and messages of arrival evenings for a month, the same questions always come up, in the order the guest runs into them:

None of them is hard. The problem is not answering them, it is answering them one by one, over the phone, at the hour when everyone arrives at once. With ten properties it is a heavy evening; with sixty it is a job.

What a guest portal is (and what it is not)

A guest portal is a private web page per booking with the guide to the stay: how to get there, where to park, how to get in, how the house works, what is around and who to call. The guest opens it on their phone, in their language, and has it at hand before, during and after the arrival.

It is worth saying what it is not, too, because it gets mixed up often:

• It is not an app. Nobody installs anything for a three-night stay. It is a link, and ideally the same link the guest already has.
• It is not a PDF or a long WhatsApp message. A document is sent once and goes stale: you change the lock code and twenty bookings carry the old code in their pocket. A page is updated in one place and everyone sees the new version.
• It is not a smart lock. The portal shows the information; opening the door is still up to whatever lock you have, with a key, a box or a code.

In Kinapi, the portal lives in the traveller-registration link: the same one the guest opens to fill in their details and sign the contract. That has one huge practical consequence: no PMS template needs changing and nothing new needs sending. The link your system already hands out, or the one our emails send, leads to the portal.

What it needs to actually work

A portal works when the guest finds the answer before they think of calling. That takes two things: everything has to be there, and in the order it is needed.

1. Getting there. The address with a button that opens the phone’s maps app — not a text to copy — and two lines on how to recognise the building: “blue door next to the pharmacy, second floor, left”.
2. Parking. Where yes and where no, with its map. It is the question that avoids the most trouble with neighbours.
3. Getting in. Where the key box is, which code opens what, what the wifi is. More on this below, because it is not shown just any way.
4. The house. How it works, by topic: heating, kitchen, hot water, washing machine, rubbish, TV. A paragraph per topic; no manual needed.
5. The rules. The ones the guest signed in the contract, in plain sight. What is seen gets followed more than what was signed on page 4.
6. The area. Your actual recommendations, by category: where to eat, where to have breakfast, the supermarket, the pharmacy, the beach. With a map button on each. It is the part that shows up most in reviews.
7. Leaving. The time, what to do before going and where to leave the keys.
8. Help. Your phone, WhatsApp, 112 and the useful numbers: taxi, health centre, duty pharmacy. When something happens, there is nothing to look up.

And all of it in the guest’s language. A Spanish-only portal serves half the guests on the coast; the rest call again. Titles and categories translate on their own; the texts you write in the languages you serve, and a missing one falls back to Spanish.

The codes: when to show them

Here is the decision that separates a well-made portal from a leaflet with the codes printed on it. Sending the lock code by email or WhatsApp three days ahead is convenient, and it is exactly what not to do: the message gets forwarded, screenshotted, left on the phone of someone who cancelled, and the code stays the same for the next booking.

The rule we use in Kinapi is simple and can be explained to anyone:

• The codes open once registration is complete. Every guest registered and the contract signed. It is the same condition that tells your PMS the booking is ready, so the portal and your system never disagree.
• And only inside the window. From a few hours before check-in — 48 by default, you set it — until the end of the check-out day. After that, they disappear. A link forwarded a week later opens nothing.
• With an emergency exit. The guest is at the door and has not signed: a button on the booking page — or a call from your PMS — opens the access on the spot, and who did it is recorded.

There is a side effect you do not see at first: when the codes only appear once the registration is done, the registration gets done. The traveller report stops being a favour you ask of the guest and becomes the natural step to get in.

Every time the guest taps “show the codes”, when and from which network is recorded. It is not surveillance: it is knowing what happened if a code is misused, which is the question nobody can answer today.

What changes for the property manager

The first thing that changes is Friday evening. We are not going to give you a percentage of calls that disappear, because we have not measured it in your portfolio and any figure would be made up. What we can say is which calls lose their reason to exist: the ones in the table above, which is nearly all of them.

The second thing is less visible and worth more:

• Every question is answered once. You write “the key box is to the left of the street door, behind the tile” once, and the two hundred bookings of the year read it.
• Changing something means changing it in one place. New code, new wifi password, the restaurant that closed: you change it on the property and every guest sees the new version at once. Nothing to resend.
• Reviews mention it. “Crystal-clear instructions”, “everything explained”, “we arrived at night and got in with no trouble” are sentences that appear when the arrival is sorted, and that do not appear when the guest had to call.
• It can be delegated. Whoever answers the phone at the weekend no longer needs sixty key boxes memorised: the guest has it in front of them.

And the third thing is scale. One portal per property, filled in by hand sixty times, never gets finished. That is why in Kinapi it is written on three levels: the common content of the account (rules, departure, useful numbers, the manual) once for all; the named blocks, like the car park of a building, written once and assigned to the six flats that use it; and each flat’s own content, the only part that really has to be written flat by flat: how to get there, the access, the codes, the wifi. Sixty properties in an afternoon is not an exaggeration: it is the count of how much there is to write when what repeats is written once.

Getting started with Kinapi

The guest portal is included in Kinapi at no extra cost, and it comes switched off on every account: the guest link works as it always did until you turn it on. Three steps:

1. In the panel, Guest portal → Common: what applies to every property, written once.
2. On each property, its own content. “View as guest” shows the result on a phone before you publish it, in the language you pick.
3. Under Guest portal → Settings, switch it on. From then on, every booking’s link also carries the guide.

Everything you do in the panel can also be done over the API and from an agent through the MCP server, so a PMS can fill in the portal of every accommodation on its own. It is all laid out with screenshots on the guest portal page and, field by field, in the documentation.