Messaging Guests Before and During Their Stay

Where guest messaging lives

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.

What it's for

Guest messaging on Finding Retreats covers the ordinary, practical communication a stay generates:

• Answering questions from a guest who's deciding whether to book, or who's sent a booking request with a message attached
• Pre-arrival details a guest needs before they show up, like directions, what to bring, or timing
• Questions that come up during the stay itself

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.

Working through your inbox

The conversation list is where you'll spend most of your time in Messages. From there you can:

• Open a conversation to read and reply in the full message thread
• Mark a conversation as unread if you want to come back to it later, which also surfaces it in an unread filter
• Start a new conversation directly, either on its own or tied to a specific booking, using the booking reference so the guest immediately knows what it's about

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.

Setting expectations with guests

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.

Related help

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.