Digital guidebook software for vacation rentals
FreshLinen is digital guidebook software for short-term rentals. It takes the things you repeat to every guest, the wifi, the arrival steps, the house rules, how the thermostat works, the places you actually send people to eat, and puts them on one page a guest opens on their own phone.
Hosts call this different things. A guidebook or a property guidebook, a welcome book, a house manual, a guest book, a house guide, a guest guide, a guest app. It is the same job either way: the practical half of hosting, written once, at one link, instead of retyped into a message thread every Friday.
What the software does
- Builds the book from sections you pick, or drafts one for you from a listing link you paste
- Publishes it to one plain link, with printable QR codes for the whole book or a single section
- Saves to the guest's phone on first open, so the arrival page still loads with no signal at the door
- Lets guests search the book in their own words, and shows you what they searched for and did not find
- Holds every property on one account, with a shared library so a change to a common section updates each book
You pick how it looks from a set of built-in themes, and the book carries your own property name, photos, and colors. Guests never download anything.
What it costs
Building is free, for as long as you like. Publishing is $49.99 a year, flat, and that one price covers every property on your account. One cabin or ten, the number does not change.
That is the unusual part. Most guidebook tools price per property or per guidebook, so the bill grows every time you add a place. The comparison page lays the pricing models side by side, and the roundup of guidebook tools covers where each one is genuinely better than us.
What it deliberately does not do
Some of this category's standard features are missing on purpose, and it is fairer to say so here than to let you find out after signing up.
- No ads, no sponsored recommendations, no upsell store, no guest fees. Nothing is ever sold to your guests.
- No guest emails. FreshLinen never contacts your guests, so you share the link yourself in your own check-in message.
- No AI chat widget. A guest reads what you wrote, not a bot improvising an answer about your house at two in the morning.
- No property management integrations and no smart-lock control. The book is a book.
If your workflow runs through a property manager and you want the guidebook wired into it, or you want a bot answering guest questions around the clock, another tool will suit you better. FreshLinen is for hosts who want the book to be good and the guest's screen left alone.
Works for every guest, however they booked
The book is a plain link and a QR code, so the same one works for your Airbnb guests, your Vrbo guests, and anyone who booked direct. Airbnb has a guidebook feature of its own, but it holds local recommendations only and disappears for guests who booked elsewhere. Our guide for Airbnb hosts explains where the two split.
Open a real example book first, or see what $49.99 covers.