—PreArrive vs. Touch Stay

Looking for a Touch Stay alternative?

If you are comparing Touch Stay and PreArrive, it helps to know they are not really competitors. Touch Stay is a digital guidebook. PreArrive is a signed acknowledgment. They solve different problems, and a lot of hosts run both.

01What Touch Stay is good at

What Touch Stay does well.

Touch Stay is a digital guidebook tool, and a good one. It gives guests a clean, mobile-friendly place to find the WiFi password, the door code, how the thermostat works, checkout steps, and your local restaurant picks. It cuts down the "how do I work the TV?" messages and makes a stay feel looked-after. If your goal is a smoother guest experience and fewer logistics questions, that is exactly what Touch Stay is built to do.

Where Touch Stay earns its place

  • A polished, branded digital guidebook guests actually open
  • WiFi, door codes, appliance how-tos, and checkout steps in one place
  • Local recommendations and area tips that lift the guest experience
  • Fewer repetitive "how does this work?" messages during the stay
  • Multi-language support for international guests

A different job, not a worse one

PreArrive does not try to be a guidebook. It exists for the moment after something goes wrong — a damage dispute, an unbilled extra guest, a denied claim — when you need to show a guest agreed to a rule or a fee. A guidebook informs the guest. PreArrive produces a record. That is the whole difference.

02What PreArrive is

PreArrive is the signature step guidebooks skip.

Touch Stay, Hostfully, and the rest are great at showing the guest the rule. They don’t get the guest to sign it. The point of a signature isn’t to win a fight later — it’s to make sure most fights never start, because a rule someone actively acknowledged is a rule they tend to keep.

PreArrive does that one thing: it gets each guest to read, tap through, and sign your house rules and itemized fees before check-in, and gives you a PDF certificate — a drawn signature, line-by-line acknowledgment, a two-event audit trail with IPs and timestamps, and a SHA-256 content hash. If a dispute does escalate, that certificate is the document you attach to an AirCover, insurance, or small-claims filing.

PreArrive

  • Guest taps through each rule and fee, then draws a signature
  • A PDF certificate timestamped before check-in
  • A two-event audit trail with IPs, plus a SHA-256 content hash
  • A paste-ready "Additional Rules" block for the Airbnb listing
  • Evidence to attach to an AirCover, insurance, or small-claims file

Touch Stay

  • A polished, branded digital guidebook guests actually open
  • WiFi, door codes, appliance how-tos, and checkout steps in one place
  • Local recommendations and area tips that lift the guest experience
  • Fewer repetitive "how does this work?" messages during the stay
  • Multi-language support for international guests
Not a scorecard

The two columns above are not a win-and-lose chart. They are two different products. Touch Stay is built for one job; PreArrive is built for another. Reading them side by side just makes the line between the two jobs clear.

03When each is right

Which tool fits which moment.

Neither tool replaces the other. The honest answer for most hosts is that the guidebook and the signed acknowledgment do separate jobs — and running both is a perfectly reasonable setup.

You want guests to stop messaging you about the WiFi and the thermostat

The right toolTouch Stay — that is squarely what a digital guidebook is for.

You want a signed record that the guest agreed to your rules and fees

The right toolPreArrive — a guidebook discloses information; it does not capture acknowledgment.

A guest broke a rule and you need evidence for an AirCover or insurance claim

The right toolPreArrive — the PDF certificate is built to be that evidence.

You want both a great guest experience and a defensible paper trail

The right toolBoth — many hosts send a guidebook for the stay and a PreArrive packet for the signature.

Add the signed record. Keep the guidebook.

PreArrive is the acknowledgment layer, not a guidebook replacement. Free covers one property — no credit card.

Add the signature layer — free See how it works

04Keep reading

Related, if you're going deeper.

How it worksFrom a packet of rules to a signed PDF certificate, in four stages. Why PreArrive existsThe case for collecting a signed acknowledgment before check-in. Airbnb house rules templateA free, copy-pasteable starter rules and fee schedule. Hostfully Guidebooks alternativeThe same guidebook-vs-evidence question, for portfolio operators. Chekin alternativeA different alternative — ID verification vs. signed rules, and why they’re different jobs. DocuSign vs. PreArriveWhen a general signature tool is enough, and when a purpose-built one pays back the work.