No guest app
Street-door access, with no guest app.
The guest opens the building street door and the apartment from the browser already on their phone. Nothing to install at 10pm on the pavement, and nothing left on the device after they leave.
An arrival that depends on a download is an arrival that fails at the street door. The guest is tired, the store is slow, the account form is in the wrong language, and you are the person they message.
Why a guest app fails the moment it is needed
Asking someone to install an app to get into a building they will occupy for three nights is asking them to do work they did not book. Some will not have space. Some will not have the password for the store. Some will bounce off a sign-up screen in a language they do not read. Every one of those is a call to you, standing at a door you cannot see.
The same problem hits a cleaner at 8am and a co-host covering a lockout. An app is a good key for a resident. It is a poor key for someone who is only passing through.
The link is the key
You send one private web link for the stay. It opens in whatever browser the phone already has. The page shows the doors that stay needs and a button for each one. There is no account to create, no store to visit, and no leftover app to delete at checkout.
The link starts at check-in and stops at checkout. You can cap how many times it may be used, or switch it off at any point. Nothing about the key lives on the handset, so a new phone or a borrowed one is not a problem.
The street door is the case this is for
A house has one door. An apartment has at least two, and the first one is a shared entrance you usually cannot alter. Products that give the guest an app for the apartment lock still leave them stuck at the intercom downstairs. This link speaks to the intercom the building already has, then to the apartment, so both doors are one tap each.
More on shared street doors and apartment buildings →
It reads in the guest's own language
The page follows the language setting already on the phone — 18 of them — so arrival instructions are not the thing standing between a guest and the door. They did not have to pick a language, and you did not have to write the message twice.
The same idea for every booking
It does not matter whether the stay came from Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo, Agoda, or straight through you. The guest still just opens a link. How that looks for an Airbnb stay, and for the others →