Every booking you take already sends you an email. It has the guest's full name, the reservation code, the dates, the payout, and on Vrbo, the guest's phone number. For years that email has done exactly one thing: sat in your inbox.
This release puts it to work. It's three pieces that turn out to be one story: email forwarding, which is now the first thing we suggest you set up; stay automations, which use what those emails carry; and a new stay page that shows you what happened.
One address, every listing
Email forwarding lives under Settings → Integrations → Email forwarding. Click Create import address and you get one address for your whole organization. Not one per property. One.
Point a forwarding rule in Gmail, Outlook, or iCloud at it, and your Airbnb and Vrbo confirmations, changes, and cancellations start arriving in Staykey within about a minute. Staykey works out which listing each email is about and files the booking under the right property.
How does it read them? With a language model. (In May we promised never to use the word "AI" for a Sparkles button. We stand by that. This one actually reads your email, so we're telling you what it is.)
When it isn't sure, it asks instead of guessing. Those emails wait under Needs review, each with the reason and the right next move: Assign it to a property, Merge into that stay when it overlaps a booking you already have, Try again, or Ignore. Assign a listing once and it lands in Listing mappings, so Staykey never asks about it again. Moved a listing to a different property? Repoint it there. It takes effect on the next email.
Calendar feeds still work, and plenty of hosts run both. Staykey merges them into one stay per booking. But a feed knows the dates and not much else. Vrbo's tells us a first name. The email tells us who's coming.
When plans change
Dates are the one thing a feed is great at, so we lean on it for changes. When a guest adds a night or shifts their trip on Airbnb or Vrbo, the stay in Staykey now moves with it, usually within the hour. The door code's window and the cleaning follow the new dates, and the guest's link stays the same. If you've set a custom check-in or check-out time on the stay, we keep it; only the dates change.
One exception, on purpose: if an extension would run into the next booking, Staykey doesn't apply it and tells you instead, so you can sort out the overlap before anyone's code stops working.
Making sure guests get the link
In March we published a post called "Why Staykey doesn't text your guests." We meant it. So when we say the headline feature of this release is texting guests their stay link, we owe you an explanation.
Here's what we didn't take into account: not every platform's templates are created equal. Airbnb's scheduled messages give you every variable you need to build a guest's Staykey link right inside the template, so one template covers every booking. Vrbo's templated messages offer far fewer variables, and none of them let you build a per-stay link on the fly. There's no easy way to generate the link dynamically. Believe us, we tried.
So Vrbo hosts were pasting links by hand, booking by booking. And sometimes, being human — yes, this human — forgot to send his guest a link. A guest without their link is a guest without their door code. We don't want hosts to have to worry about that.
So we stopped fighting the template. The best way to make sure every guest actually gets their Staykey link is to give hosts options for how that link gets shared. In this case, we gave you the ability to text it to your guest. The Vrbo booking email includes the guest's phone number, so now, per property, you can turn on Guest link text and Staykey will text the guest their link before check-in. Two days ahead by default, or whatever lead time you pick.
What we kept from March:
- Airbnb doesn't change. Airbnb doesn't share guest phone numbers, and its template already works. Your Airbnb guests keep getting their link in the Airbnb thread, exactly as before.
- It's off until you turn it on, property by property.
- The message says who it's from. Every text opens with your property's name and "via Staykey", so it doesn't arrive as a mystery text from a number nobody recognizes.
- It's one message, not a conversation. The wording is fixed. You can add one plain-text line ("Park in the left driveway"), and that's it. Links in that line are stripped. Questions still belong in the Vrbo thread.
- Reply STOP works, and it's on every message.
- It stays polite. A text scheduled between 9 pm and 9 am at the property waits until morning, unless check-in is less than three hours away. Nothing goes out once check-in has passed. Never twice for the same booking.
It goes to US and Canadian numbers. If a guest's number is anywhere else, the stay page tells you it was skipped and why, so you know to send the link yourself.
The thermostat, too
Once Staykey knows when a stay starts and ends, it can do more than text. The second automation is Thermostat: comfort settings a few hours before arrival, eco settings after check-out. You pick which thermostats take part. Nothing is selected until you pick it, because hot tubs and pool heaters show up in that list too, and nobody wants an eco-mode hot tub. It works with thermostats connected through Home Assistant. It never turns a system off.
We've written about the why of this before. Now it's a switch.
A stay page that shows its work
None of this is worth much if you can't see it happen. So we rebuilt the stay page.
It opens on an overview: the guest's link with a Copy link button, the dates, the party, the access code, the payout, and the activity for that stay. Everything else is a click away in the sidebar.
The part we're proudest of is Lock programming. Click Set Now or Retry and the page follows along live. Each lock shows Programming… while it works, then flips to Active or Failed. If a lock is slow, the page says Taking longer than usual instead of spinning forever. If one lock fails and the others don't, you retry just that one.
And under Automations, the stay lists exactly what Staykey did for it: when the link was texted, when the thermostat was set, or what was skipped and why.
Where to start
Set up email forwarding first. It takes five minutes, and it's what everything else here is built on. Then open a property, find Automations in its settings, and pick what you want Staykey to handle.
Related reading
- Help: Setting up booking import: the forwarding rules for Gmail, Outlook, and iCloud, step by step.
- Help: What happens when a guest extends their stay: how date changes flow through to the code, the cleaning, and the guest link.
- Help: Texting guests their stay link: every setting, and what to do when a text wasn't sent.
- Help: Automating the thermostat for each stay: setpoints, timing, and which thermostats work.
- Help: Understanding the stay page: a tour of the new page, lock programming included.
- Post: Why Staykey doesn't text your guests: the March post this one answers.