No Strings Attached
One of the few good points of Guestify is that they allow use of their website builder for free, and you can use it as long as you like. You only have to pay for their service if you are already content with your creation and would like to publish it online. Guestify also does not impose long term contracts so you are not locked in to their service at any given time. Instead, you will be billed on a monthly basis, and you can cancel anytime you want without fear of extra charges. If you also happen to have an existing domain and would like to have it transferred to Guestify’s service, you can do so without any charges at all.
9th Place5 out of 10Pricing and Features
Starting with the Guestify Bronze at £4.99 a month, you can add Guestify’s inquiry form and room availability calendar to an existing website. This includes free updates for the tools as well. This is good if you are already running a website and would like to show your visitors which rooms are available on which dates and give them a faster way to reach out to your hotel’s reservations department and book a room ASAP.
Next, the Guestify Silver plan offers a full website with an inquiry form, which is good enough if you are simply looking to show the amenities of your hotel’s rooms online. It costs £7.99 a month and also includes updates. This plan is sufficient if you want to be able to accept quotation requests and other inquiries from browsing visitors who can potentially become guests.
Lastly, Guestify Gold, at £9.99 a month, opens all of the features offered by their service, which to be perfectly honest, is not that enticing. It only adds the availability calendar to the previous plan’s features, and while the tool can be helpful for visitors, the whole package is a pretty lightweight offer compared to what the competition has. In fact, you can get better features elsewhere at the same price – or sometimes even for less. There are no options to add third-party apps to make use of Content Management Systems like WordPress, nor can you build a gallery of photos and videos, add social media integration for faster sharing among interested individuals, and generally increase the function of the website.
Template Selection
As of the moment, they only offer eight different templates, although you can add a photo or two and edit the text section for a more accurate description of your hotel’s amenities. They do state that they are planning to add more themes to their service, but there is no exact date on when this promise will be delivered, but if they want to stay relevant in the competition, these templates had better come ASAP. Their current offers are limited in terms of design, and there is no way to do any advanced customizations. As such, you can only edit elements like photos and texts. They are severely outdated both in aesthetics and function, to the point that pages are not even mobile optimized. Hopefully, this is one shortcoming that will be addressed in the near future.
One Big Miss
Perhaps the biggest flaw of Guestify is that for a website builder that claims to be dedicated for hotels, they lack the most industry-specific feature found in other website builder services: an online booking management system to accommodate guest reservations made online. Not only does this get rid of the need to wait for a hotel representative to confirm placed bookings, it would have also been extremely convenient for visitors. It is truly disappointing how Guestify keeps their offers to a minimum instead of peppering their packages with enticing yet highly useful features.
Customer Service
Guestify does not have any support center, not even a FAQ section that you can check out to answer common queries. They also do not provide any means for contacting their support team, so you’re pretty much left in the dark should you have any concerns or encounter issues while building your website. This is another great shortcoming of Guestify since other competitors are already offering 24/7 live chat or email support to their subscribers.
What's the Verdict on Guestify?
Guestify Review 2020 – Conclusion
Guestify looks like an outdated service which was designed more or less in the late 90s to early 2000 and was never updated since then. And this is exactly what you can expect from the website builder – old templates, a limited editor, severely lacking website elements, and no mobile optimization and online reservation system. For the prices that their plans come in, one would expect more features – not this barebones service that Guestify offers. The only positive points they have are their free trial that does not expire, and the no strings attached subscription, but for everything else, you may want to skip their service and look for more competent packages elsewhere.
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