Guest messages
Emails you send a guest used to end with "you can reply directly to this email". They now end with a Reply in your booking portal button instead, which opens a messages page on that booking's guest portal. The guest still reads your message in their inbox — only the reply moves.
This keeps the whole conversation attached to the booking, where anyone on your team can see it, rather than sitting in one person's mailbox. To read every booking's conversation in one place — with the ones waiting on a reply at the top — see The Messages inbox.
What the guest sees
From their portal a guest opens a Messages card and lands on a thread showing the messages you've sent them and the ones they've sent you, oldest first, with a box to write a new one. They can start a conversation, not just reply — there's no need for you to message first.
Guests don't need an account or password; the portal link itself grants access, the same as the rest of the portal.
What the guest does not see
The thread on the guest's side is deliberately narrower than the one you see on the booking:
- Owner notifications are never shown. Emails that went to your notification address — new booking alerts, overdue-balance warnings and the like — are recorded against the booking, but they're marked as owner-addressed and stay hidden from the guest.
- Internal channel detail is hidden. The guest sees who sent each message and when, not which channel it went out on, whether you've read theirs, or which automated template produced it.
Where the messages arrive
A guest's message lands in the Messages tab of that booking, alongside email and any OTA messages, so there's one thread per booking regardless of how each message travelled.
You're told about it two ways:
- By email. A new guest message emails your notification address with the guest's name, the booking reference and what they wrote. This is the same address used for other owner notifications — see Owner notifications for where to set it. If you haven't set one, no alert is sent.
- In the app. The Bookings item in the left-hand navigation shows a red count of unread guest messages across all your bookings. An envelope icon next to the guest's name in the bookings list, and a matching dot on the booking's bar in the calendar, show you exactly which booking it's on — no need to open each one to find it. Opening a booking marks that booking's messages read, and the count and icons update within a minute.
Emails you send from the booking appear here too
The emails you send a guest by hand from the booking screen — booking confirmation, payment link, invoice and booking updated — are recorded in the thread as you send them, so the Messages tab is a full record of what that guest has received from you, not just the automated messages and their replies.
Each one shows the subject the guest saw and a short plain-text version of the email, rather than the full formatted design — enough to see at a glance what was sent and when. A payment link includes the link itself, so the guest can pay from their portal as well as from their inbox.
Guests see these in their own portal thread, because they're messages addressed to them. Owner notifications still stay hidden from the guest, as above.
Replying
Reply from the Messages tab on the booking exactly as before. For a direct or website booking your reply is emailed to the guest, again with the portal button at the bottom. For a booking that came from an OTA through Channex, your reply goes back through the channel to the guest there.
If a guest replies to the email anyway
Some will, out of habit or from an older email. Those replies are still captured into the booking's thread and still trigger the same notification — nothing is lost. Stayant just no longer invites it.
What you need
Guest messaging needs both the Guest Portal and Send Email features on your plan. Without them the Messages card and page don't appear, and your emails keep their previous wording rather than linking to a page your guests can't open.
Related
- Owner notifications — setting the address these alerts go to
- The guest portal (what guests see)
- Automated & scheduled messages