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How to get your Touch Stay guide done when time is short

If you’re new to Touch Stay, chances are you’ve never created a Touch Stay guide before. It’s also likely that you’ve joined Touch Stay because you want to start enjoying the benefits of our digital guidebooks quickly – and you want to get your guide up and running ASAP. 

So, while we’ve designed Touch Stay to be easy to navigate and populate, the process of getting that perfect guidebook can still take a bit of time – time you might not have before your guests arrive!

BUT… in this guide, we’ll cover how to get your Touch Stay guidebook guest-ready quickly – without spending too much of your precious time. We’ll cover the following 5 steps:

  • Getting your content organised
  • Learning how to use the system
  • Using templated text and images
  • Uploading your information
  • Adding your personal recommendations

And, if you’re really racing against the clock, check out our COO Joe’s 10 essential guest guidebook ingredients

Step 1: Get your guidebook content organised 

Starting any project in an organised way is the key to getting off to a better start. And creating your Touch Stay guidebook is no different.

So, what do you need to organise before you start creating your guide? First, gather all your content together in one place. Do this in whatever way works best for you. This could be: 

  • Creating a “Touch Stay” folder on your computer 
  • Gathering all your PDFs and print outs together 
  • Writing up all the property information up (if you don’t have it already written somewhere)
  • If you have multiple properties, collating all the information for different properties
  • Gathering all your assets, such as images and videos (again, separating these out for multiple properties.)
  • Creating a list of the local recommendations you want to include.

Once you have everything ready and in one place, it’s time to move onto the next step. 

Step 2: Take a look at the Touch Stay training material  

We’ve put a lot of work into our training content and videos, making sure they’re always up to date, easy to follow and easily accessible. You’ll never find out-of-date training content on our site! 

We pride ourselves on this because we know that any new thing takes a while to get your head around – even the most intuitive software (which, of course, we aim to offer!) has a learning curve. 

By watching our training videos before uploading your content, you’ll get a good idea of how our content hub and admin section works, meaning when you come to upload your content, you’re less likely to fall victim to any simple – yet time-consuming – mistakes. 

Just head to the “Getting Started” section of the knowledge bank. It provides all the information you need to start your Touch Stay guidebook.

Remember – if you have more than one property, there are a couple of other things you need to know that are a bit more fiddly – like using tags so your content shows in the right guide at the right time.  


Step 3: Use the templated images and text to begin 

When you set up your Touch Stay account and select your template, it comes with templated text that you can choose to use or lose. If you’re short on time to write unique content for each section, use the templated text (or just tweak it a little to work more specifically for you). 

You can do the same with images. The guidebook is full of template images that you can use in various sections. Later, if you want to, you can swap these images for your own.

Step 4: Break up the content and add subcategories

Now you have an understanding of how the content hub works, it’s time to start entering your content. 

Work through each tab in the content hub’s template and decide which sub-category headings you want to include for your guide. The information you already have in your word docs should help you structure your content into these subcategories quite naturally. 

If you’re feeling stuck on how to organise your content, you can check out our example guides for inspiration. These will help you visualise how other hosts have organised their content, and help you structure your own. 

Once you’ve named your subcategories, add your topics and copy the text and images from your documents into the guide. Then, work through each of the tabs from start to finish. 

Remember, you can always add more information to your guide at a later date. Just including the most important content is perfectly fine for getting your guide up quickly – your guests will still love it!

Step 5: Populate the local area section

This section is one of the most beloved areas of the Touch Stay guides. That’s because it’s where you can really add value to your guest’s trip, giving them all those magic insights that only a local would know.

But when you’re against the clock, you can still make this section useful for your guests, but not time consuming for you. We suggest including the most important local recommendations (or your favourite places) to begin with. This gives your guide enough personalisation without it taking too much of your time. You always go in and add more information later! 

Title the topics as “essentials” or the “top five” and then organise them into different subcategories before adding them into the guide.

Another timesaving hack is to use the Google offered images instead of adding your own. In fact these are auto-included so it’s a cinch! If you really don’t like the Google image provided, simply check the box to deselect it and leave it without an image or add your own.

Your Touch Stay welcome book – done quickly

Like all things, if you want amazing results, it takes time! But that doesn’t mean you can’t get good results and spend less time. 😉

Remember, this is just the first version of your guidebook. By nature, it will go on to evolve and develop the longer you use it. Either way, your guests will still get a huge amount of value from even the most basic of content that you include. And at the end of the day, guest happiness is all that matters. 

So, work through this guide, and start creating the skeleton of your Touch Stay Welcome book. This will be enough to get you started – and you can fill it in over time. 

And remember, if you do run into any problems, our extensive knowledge base is here to help, along with our super interactive Touch Stay Rock Stars Facebook group. If needed, even our own COO, Joe, will lend a helping hand via the help desk. 

And lastly, the super good news is that once you’ve got the outline to your guide, you never have to do it again! Your information will stay in the guidebook, ready to send to your guests whenever you need to. 

Login to get your guidebook essentials done today.