Messages, in your vendor dashboard, is where you talk to guests directly, separate from the booking flow itself. It shows your conversations as a list you can search and filter, with each one opening into a full message thread alongside the guest's details. If you arrive from a specific booking, the conversation tied to that booking opens automatically.
You can message a guest before their stay starts, while a booking request is still pending, or once they've arrived, all from the same place. There's no separate tool for each stage. The same conversation just keeps going.
Guest messaging on Finding Retreats covers the ordinary, practical communication a stay generates:
Outgoing messages are monitored to prevent contact details being shared outside the platform, so keep specifics like phone numbers and personal email addresses out of messages sent through Finding Retreats. It's a platform-wide rule, not something specific to hosts, and it applies the same way in the other direction when a guest messages you.
The conversation list is where you'll spend most of your time in Messages. From there you can:
On smaller screens, the conversation list and the open thread are separate views rather than a split layout, so replying to a guest on your phone works the same way as it does on a laptop, just one screen at a time.
Because Messages is where pre-arrival questions land, it's worth treating it as part of your response routine, not just an inbox you check occasionally. A guest who has a booking confirmed but hasn't heard from you before arrival is more likely to raise their first question through a support channel instead of directly with you, which is slower for everyone. Sending a short pre-arrival message once a booking is confirmed, rather than waiting for the guest to ask, heads off most of the questions that would otherwise arrive right before check-in.
The same applies mid-stay. A quick reply to a guest's message while they're actually on-site does more for how the visit feels than the same answer delivered after the fact, and it keeps the conversation where both of you can find it later if a question comes up again.
See Message your guests, Pre-arrival communication best practices, and Use message templates in the Help Centre for the exact screens and message-writing guidance.