Back in May, at the bottom of a post about photos and the local guide, we said this:
A few more things in the oven, including some work on the guest side… Soon-ish.
This is that. We are choosing to interpret "soon-ish" generously: it took a while because this is the screen your guests actually stand in front of, and we wanted that experience to be as good as we could make it before handing it to them.
The old one showed everyone the same thing
The guest portal used to be a single page with three tabs — Overview, Local Guide, Weather — and no opinion whatsoever about time. A guest six days out from their trip saw the same screen as a guest standing on the porch in the rain at 11pm.
The screen knows when you are
Welcome to
The Aspen Loft
Today’s the day
at The Aspen Loft
You’re at
The Aspen Loft
The new dashboard has a sense of when it is. It reads the stay's check-in and check-out times in the property's timezone and settles into one of five phases:
- Upcoming — a countdown ("In 6 days," "Tomorrow"), the check-in date, the address
- Arriving — "Today's the day," with the access code pinned front and center
- Checked in — the code stays pinned, and the front door moves onto the home screen
- Departing — a warm "Out by 11:00 AM today," checkout steps one tap away
- Ended — a quiet wrap-up, not a checkout checklist for a house they left yesterday
The tiles underneath reshuffle too. Every page is reachable in every phase — we're not hiding anything — but the order changes so the thing a guest probably wants today sits first. Before arrival that's Arrival info and Directions. Mid-stay it's Devices and Wi-Fi. On the last morning, Departure floats to the top.
The code, before they land
This is the one that generated the support email.
The access code used to stay hidden until check-in — which is roughly the worst moment to make someone go looking for it. Guests emailed hosts. Hosts forwarded the emails to us.
Now it's there ahead of time. Open the link a few days out and the code is sitting right under the check-in date and the address, ready when you land.
We put a lot of care into doing that safely. Seeing the code early is not the same as being able to open anything early — the controls stay locked until check-in, greyed out and labelled Available at check-in until the stay actually starts.
And if a property has no lock that takes a code, no code appears. We'd rather show nothing than a number that opens nothing.
The door, without the digging
During the stay, the front door and the garage sit directly on the home screen. Not behind a tab, not two taps down. Lock, unlock, open, close.
The button also tells the truth while it's working — it spins and says Unlocking… until the lock actually reports back, so nobody stands in the cold jabbing at a control that looks broken.
Everything else — climate, lights, switches — is one tap away on the Devices page. The two things people reach for in a hurry are on the front page.
Your bakery finally reached the guest
Last time, we gave you somewhere to put the coffee shop down the street. What we skipped over is that guests still couldn't see any of it.
Now they can. The local guide you curate in property settings shows up in the guest's dashboard, grouped by category, with your Host Picks floated to the top of each group. Your note comes along in quotes, exactly as you wrote it. Tapping a place opens it in their maps app — no copying an address into another app first.
Cardamom buns: officially reachable.
The small stuff
- Wi-Fi comes with a QR code. Guests point a phone at it and connect, and the in-laws do the same without anyone reading a 24-character password aloud. It's drawn right there on the phone — the password never leaves the device to make it.
- The weather tile shows the actual temperature, not the word "Weather."
- Every page is a real page. Controls, Local guide, Weather, Wi-Fi, Directions, Arrival, Departure — each has its own URL. The back button works, refreshing doesn't dump anyone at the top, and a link to any of them is shareable.
- The stay loads once. Moving between pages doesn't re-fetch everything, which matters on a phone with one bar in a canyon.
Nothing for you to do
It's live on every stay. Same guest link as always — nothing to enable, nothing to migrate, no new URL to send anyone.
If you set up a local guide back in May and quietly wondered where it went: open one of your own guest links and tap Local guide. It's been waiting.
Related reading
- Post: Photos and a local guide. Finally. — the host side of the guide guests can now see.
- Post: Why we rebuilt the guest portal around one link — why there's exactly one URL per stay, and why it doesn't ask anyone to log in.
- Help: Creating your first guest link — where the link comes from in the first place.
- Guide: How to send guests door codes automatically — the code that now shows up before they land.