Pre Arrival Form - Capturing Guest Data Before Their Stay

The Hostfully Property Management Platform (PMP) provides a fairly sophisticated system to gather the data you need to prepare your guests' stay. This comes in the shape of a "pre-arrival form" that you main guest can fill out on behalf of their party.

Getting Started

To set up, under your Hostfully PMP Agency dropdown, go to Templates & Triggers > Pre-Arrival Form section.

The form currently supports the below fields, which you have total control on showing / hiding and in the first case, showing them as optional or required to fill. Existing details from the booking will be pre-populated for the guest's convenience.

Quick go-over of customizing default fields, adding custom fields, and previewing the form. (all edits will be auto-saved)

Here's an example of this form:

There are 2 ways to request that your guests fill out the "Pre-Arrival Form".

Option 1

Set up the pre-arrival form to be shown after a guest provides their payment on Hostfully (this can be for all channels where Hostfully is used as the payment processor). Simply set this from the Agency Settings page, checking the box called "Capture guests information after payment".

Option 2

This option takes a little more time, but allows you to have guests fill out the form regardless of the channel they booked from. This is done by creating a custom template and an associated trigger that you can attach to a booking event. Here are the steps to get this set up:

Step 1: create a custom template

See this article on custom templates. Create a template with this variable: [$GUEST_INFO_URL$]

Step 2: create a custom trigger

Then, simply create a trigger that will fire on a Booking Confirmed event. I would suggest to apply it to channels that are not already covered by the payment processing flow (option 1 above), like Airbnb or TripAdvisor. Select the Guest as the recipient, and select the custom templates we created above:

With the mix of both options, you're covered and you should be getting this valuable data for every one of your bookings.

Finding the guest information

The system will send an email whenever pre-arrival forms are filled out by guests.

Also, for that guest, you can see an icon on Pipeline indicating they already filled out the form.

The data provided by your guests will typically be shown on the Edit Lead window (red button in above screenshot), under the Stay Details tab:

Uploaded documents that guests provided, can be retrieved under the Stay Details tab too, specifically under the Identification Documents URL field.

Retrieving Pre-Arrival Form data:

In order to retrieve the content of the form, you can either see it in your Edit Lead window (as above) or by pulling a Logistics Report. For this, just click on the Reports menu, then the Logistics Reports tab, click on View as CSV, and download the XLSX file:

You can then open the XLSX file with your favorite spreadsheet editor. Below we used Google Spreadsheets. The custom fields will be appended at the end of the file:

Alternatively, you can also access the Logistics Reports from Enhanced Reporting.

Please let us know if you have any question and/or suggestion on this topic.