Compare digital guidebook and guest experience software
BetterSTR alternative: Book With Haven vs BetterSTR
BetterSTR is a free digital guidebook with a meter on everything around it — per reservation, per property, per message, per translation, per ID check, per access point, per screen — and a 7% cut of every upsell. Haven is the booking site, the guidebook, the CRM, the upsells, and the screening in one platform, at 0% commission, with the guest email captured by the stay itself.
Competitor facts checked
5.0on Capterra · 6 reviews, September 2026BetterSTR is a guest experience platform from Tauranga, New Zealand, built by a Superhost who has hosted since 2015 and rebuilt the tools he ran on his own rentals into a product in 2025. Its core is a digital guidebook that is free forever for unlimited properties, synced from Airbnb and around forty PMSs, with QR and NFC access, house rules with acknowledgment tracking, local maps, upsells, security deposits, and ID checks. Around the guide sit a WiFi captive portal that captures guest emails on your own UniFi or TP-Link Omada access points, an in-room Companion tablet with a noise monitor, and a TV welcome screen. Its Trustpilot reviews — 19 of them, 4.6 as of November 2026 — praise easy setup, fair pricing, and responsive support. The free guidebook is genuinely free, and the hardware layer is something Haven does not do.
Everything past the guide is paid by the unit. Based on publicly available information as of November 2026: the AI chat, Google Maps tab, custom styling, analytics, and branding removal need Premium at $0.50 per reservation or $2.99 per property per month; SMS is 10¢ a message; a guide translation is $2; AI guide generation is $1; ID verification is $2.50 a check ($1.50 on Premium); the WiFi portal is $5 a month plus $2 per access point; the Companion tablet is $2 to $5 a month per device on an Android tablet you supply; Premium TV is $3 a month per screen plus a $35 box; a subdomain is $9.95 a year and a custom domain $14.95; and upsells carry a 7% platform fee (3% on Premium or the $15-per-property Simple bundle) on top of Stripe. A Vrbo, Booking.com, or direct reservation gets a guide only when you add it by hand, on Premium, and BetterSTR does not block those dates on Airbnb for you. Its Website Builder is a general small-business page builder — the page lists dog walkers, tutors, and consultants — with Stripe buttons, no booking calendar, and “no PMS or booking-platform connection”; the free public listing page on BetterSTR’s marketplace links out to your Airbnb, Vrbo, and book-direct URLs rather than taking the booking.
Book With Haven starts from the other end. It is a branded direct booking site with Stripe checkout and 0% commission, synced two-way with your PMS or directly with your Airbnb account, and the guest portal with its digital guidebook comes with every booking automatically — direct, Airbnb, Vrbo, or PMS — with nothing to add by hand and no per-reservation meter. The portal unlocks with the guest’s email, so OTA guests land in Haven’s built-in CRM with no router at the property; AI remarketing then fills gap nights and sells local events to the guests you already hosted. Upsells, ID verification, rental agreements, deposits, guest screening, smart-lock codes, taxes, turnover tasks, loyalty points, and a grounded guest AI with observability are included rather than metered. Moving is a one-time import: paste your BetterSTR guest link and Haven proposes the same sections and places for you to accept.
Book With Haven vs BetterSTR, at a glance
A branded booking site with Stripe checkout and 0% booking commission on every plan, synced with your PMS or Airbnb calendar.
A free public listing page on BetterSTR’s marketplace with your Book Direct, Airbnb, and Vrbo links, and a general-purpose Website Builder with Stripe buttons that has “no PMS or booking-platform connection” and no booking calendar; a 7% platform fee (3% on Premium or Simple) applies to sales through it, as of November 2026.
A digital guidebook in every guest portal: check-in, Wi-Fi, house rules, curated local picks, guest search, and an offline copy on the guest’s phone — included.
A genuine strength: a free-forever guide for unlimited properties with QR and NFC access, house-rule acknowledgment tracking, weather, and templates; the Google Maps tab, custom fonts and styling, and branding removal need Premium, as of November 2026.
Free to build for as long as you like; one plan price covers the booking site, guest portal, CRM, remarketing, upsells, screening, AI chat, and tasks — no per-reservation, per-message, or per-check meters.
The guide and TV welcome screen are free; AI chat, maps, styling, and analytics need Premium ($0.50 per reservation or $2.99 per property per month); SMS is 10¢, translations $2, AI guide generation $1, ID checks $1.50–$2.50, WiFi $5 plus $2 per access point, Premium TV $3 and the Companion tablet $2–$5 per device per month, domains $9.95–$14.95 a year, as of November 2026.
Every booking — direct, Airbnb, Vrbo, or PMS — creates a guest portal automatically, and Haven can post its link into the Airbnb or Vrbo thread through a connected PMS.
Airbnb and PMS reservations sync automatically; a Vrbo, Booking.com, or direct reservation is added by hand under Reservations, needs Premium on that property, and is not written back to Airbnb, so you block the dates yourself, as of November 2026.
The guest portal unlocks with an email, and site popups and checkout capture direct guests — nothing installed at the property.
The WiFi captive portal captures name, email, and opt-in on your own UniFi or TP-Link Omada access points at $5 a month plus $2 per access point; a QR WiFi sign at 20¢ a scan is the no-hardware option, as of November 2026.
One guest database fed by guest portals, site forms, checkout, and connected PMS stays, with saved segments, broadcasts drafted by AI, and lifecycle automations with email, text, and WhatsApp steps.
WiFi guest details with live reporting and CSV export, and SMS remarketing at 10¢ a message; an email campaign builder, segments, and automations are not documented as of November 2026.
Automatically re-engages the right past guests when there is a nearby event worth traveling for, a gap night, a price drop, or a listing update.
Not documented on BetterSTR’s site as of November 2026.
Create and sell your own experiences and add-ons with 0% Haven commission — quantities with real inventory, time slots and event seats, party-size pricing, deposits, and quote requests — sold pre-booking, at checkout, and in the guest portal. AI-assisted setup and import from any website included.
Early check-in, late checkout, and add-ons sold from the guide with instant or approval-based checkout and Viator tours at a 4% share; a 7% platform fee (3% on Premium or Simple) plus Stripe on every sale. Finite inventory, time slots, party-size pricing, and quote requests are not documented, as of November 2026.
Free guest screenings on every plan, plus optional Screen & Protect damage protection of up to $50,000 on eligible bookings via Truvi ($8 per booked night, paid by the guest at checkout or by the host).
ID-plus-selfie verification at $2.50 a check ($1.50 on Premium or Simple), phone verification at 10¢, and Stripe security deposits; no screening of booking risk or damage protection documented, as of November 2026.
One grounded assistant on every property site, group site, guest portal, and custom domain (private stay details only after booking). Every reply graded, gaps grouped into insights with cited chats, one-click Add context fixes it across all sites; hosts train it by chatting with their own sites.
A Premium AI assistant answers from the guide content in 18 languages and is described as escalating urgent issues; analytics count AI chat interactions. Grading each reply, grouping gaps into insights, and fixing them across every guide are not documented, as of November 2026.
Haven is software: the guest portal lives on the guest’s own phone, and there is no in-room screen or decibel monitor.
A genuine strength: a kiosk-mode Companion tablet with decibel alerts and a photo-frame screensaver ($2–$5 a month per device on an Android 11+ tablet you supply) and a TV welcome screen with check-in times and review capture (free screen, Premium TV $3 a month per screen plus a $35 box).
Haven does not run your property WiFi, so it has no splash page or device-count alerts.
A genuine strength: a branded captive portal on your own UniFi or Omada access points with alerts on unusual device counts.
Guest messaging built into the guest stay hub, plus lifecycle automations with email, text, and WhatsApp steps.
Pre-arrival texts at 2, 4, 24, or 48 hours before check-in at 10¢ each; a unified Guest Messaging inbox is listed as coming soon, as of November 2026.
Per-stay door codes and climate automation from the booking, with the code delivered through the guest portal.
Door codes generated by Hospitable, Streamline, Track, or Breezeway are shown in the guide, and the API accepts a code per booking; BetterSTR does not connect to locks itself, as of November 2026.
Turnover cleans and upsell jobs become tasks automatically, offered to your own cleaners and chefs by SMS, WhatsApp, or email — Y/N/DONE replies, a no-login job page, photo proof, backup escalation, and Stripe payouts.
Daily SMS cleaner alerts at 10¢ a message; the Cleaning Scheduler, Maintenance Tracker, and Inventory Manager are listed as coming soon, as of November 2026.
Opt-in loyalty points on every direct booking, spendable at any of your listings and applied automatically at checkout; four automatic rewards emails (points ready, reminder, expiring soon, last call) with the bookings they bring back; optional inactivity expiry with guest protections; and one program across teammates’ or agency clients’ listings, funded so their payouts stay whole. Included on every plan.
Not documented; the planned Property Swap with Better Dollars is a host-to-host exchange, not a guest rewards program, as of November 2026.
The Haven Assistant, pinned to every page of your dashboard, changes your sites and settings from a plain-language request — pages, copy, design, photos, domains, listings, rates and calendar, upsells, guest CRM and remarketing, and email settings — and you approve each change before it ships; for anything it does not change directly, it walks you there step by step. Or connect ChatGPT or Claude through Haven’s MCP server and work from there.
Premium AI Improve polishes guide text; changing account and site settings from a plain-language request is not documented.
A visits-to-booking conversion funnel with traffic-source attribution, plus first-party session replay with rage/dead-click detection.
Premium guide analytics — views, popular sections, engagement, AI chat counts; there is no booking site, so no booking funnel or session replay.
A blog on every site, plus Blog Autopilot: on a weekly to monthly schedule Haven runs a real research pass — the queries people search about your area, the pages that rank and what they miss — reads the organiser, park, venue, and tourism-board pages it will cite, writes only from those verified facts and your listing, has an editor check every claim, and drafts the post for your review or publishes it with a Sources list, sitemap entry, and IndexNow ping. Keeping your own website? Embed the same blog with a two-line widget.
No blog or automated site content documented for hosts; the Website Builder page makes no SEO or blog claims.
AI social reels built from your own listing photos, clips and guest reviews, with a storyboard you approve before anything is spent; narrated property stories read by natural ElevenLabs voices; and custom one-minute instrumental soundtracks composed from the property’s photos, likely guests, location and brand. Download-ready MP4s for Instagram, Facebook and Meta ads.
No built-in tool for turning listing photos into social reels with voiceover or generated music is documented.
A 100-point SEO and AI-search score for every site with a checklist sorted by points gained, live Google Search Console and Bing data, weekly checks that the crawlers behind Google, Bing and Copilot, ChatGPT search, Claude, and Perplexity can read the page, a site llms.txt, IndexNow, image and Vacation Rentals sitemaps, Foursquare listings, and visits from AI assistants tracked as their own channel.
Not a booking website, and the Website Builder documents no SEO tooling.
Your listings appear in Haven’s plain-language AI stay search and in its open search API and MCP server for ChatGPT, Claude, and other assistants — each result links travelers to book direct with you, with no commission or guest fee.
A free listing page on BetterSTR’s book-direct marketplace that links out to your booking URLs; a search API for AI assistants is not documented, as of November 2026.
Connect Airbnb, your PMS, or an iCal feed and every place gets a free Haven site in Haven’s AI guest search, the Haven app, and the catalog AI assistants read. No listing fee, no commission, no guest fee — guests send booking requests, Haven emails you each one, and you pay only to accept.
A genuine strength: the public listing page is filled in automatically from your synced listing with Book Direct, Airbnb, and Vrbo links and no fee stated; it links out rather than taking the booking, as of November 2026.
Keep your current site and embed Haven’s booking widget (a script and one div, works in WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, or React), blog widget, or group site search widget; guest portals, CRM, screening, upsells, and taxes all work alongside it.
Website widgets for weather, activities, and the guidebook, and rich embeds on Premium; there is no booking widget because BetterSTR takes no bookings, as of November 2026.
No per-booking commission and no guest service fee on any plan (standard Stripe fees apply).
No booking commission because it processes no bookings; a 7% platform fee (3% on Premium or Simple) on upsells and Website Builder sales, plus Stripe, as of November 2026.
Search answers come from the calendar and rates you sync, checked against your own rules, and the total on the card is the total at checkout. Prices are never shown without dates.
The listing page links out to Airbnb, Vrbo, or your own site; no calendar, dated quote, or checkout, as of November 2026.
Native two-way connectors for Hospitable, Guesty, Lodgify, Hostfully, OwnerRez, Track, Hostex, and Uplisting. Any other PMS — Hostaway, Smoobu, Beds24, Avantio, Octorate, AvaiBook, Hosthub, Zeevou, Hostify, Smily (BookingSync), Elina, Resly, Homhero, Streamline, Escapia, CiiRUS, and essentially every Airbnb-connected system — syncs listing content, photos, prices, availability, and reservations through Haven’s direct Airbnb integration: the same data the PMS already publishes there. The only via-Airbnb difference: Haven bookings and manual blocks close dates via the Haven iCal feed added in the PMS, not a reservation-write API.
A genuine strength: around forty integrations — Airbnb Direct, Hospitable, OwnerRez, Guesty, Hostaway, Lodgify, Hostfully, Smoobu, Uplisting, Beds24, Zeevou, Mews, and more — bring properties and reservations in, most over webhooks; nothing writes back because BetterSTR takes no bookings, as of November 2026.
Beautiful, design-forward branded pages built to convert — no theme picker. It just works.
Guide theme colors on the free plan; custom fonts and styling and branding removal need Premium or a paid domain. Reviewers praise the setup; one notes the revision interface is difficult to navigate, as of November 2026.
Guest identity verification, a rental agreement with digital signatures, and security deposit holds or charges, all run from the booking.
ID-plus-selfie checks ($1.50–$2.50 each), phone verification (10¢), and Stripe deposits captured and released from the guide; a signed rental agreement is not documented, as of November 2026.
Lodging taxes itemized on every booking and aggregated for filing, taxes shown before checkout, and a guest display currency picker.
No lodging-tax tooling; it processes no bookings.
One Click Ads: Haven writes short-term-rental-tuned Google Search and ChatGPT ads, you set the daily budget, and Haven runs them for you (Meta rolling out) — no agency retainer.
Not documented on BetterSTR’s site as of November 2026.
Import reviews from OwnerRez, Airbnb, Vrbo, or a file, collect testimonials, and link a Google Business Profile so guests are asked for reviews that show on your site.
Review capture asks guests who rate four stars or more to post on Google, Trustpilot, or TripAdvisor by SMS or email, and the TV screen prompts for reviews; there is no booking site to show them on, as of November 2026.
Haven Communities: shared regional pages that list member stays and exchange reciprocal backlinks with your site.
Not documented; the marketplace lists stays by destination without a backlink exchange, as of November 2026.
Discount codes, weekly and monthly, early-bird, last-minute and direct-booking discounts with a “Saving $X booking direct” pill; branded e-gift cards sold in the guest portal and redeemed at checkout; stay credits instead of refunds.
Not documented on BetterSTR’s site as of November 2026; any offer is redeemed wherever the booking is made.
Revenue, occupancy, ADR and RevPAR against last year, booking pace, pricing health, gap and orphan nights, booking sources, a report builder with CSV exports, and a weekly digest.
Owner Reports with customizable fee structures and monthly email delivery; Revenue Analytics with occupancy and revenue trends is listed as coming soon, as of November 2026.
Localized pages in up to 8 languages with per-language URLs and hreflang for structured indexing.
Guides translate into 18 languages at $2 per full guide translation; the host dashboard is English only and there are no booking pages, as of November 2026.
Group sites with room types and property profile pages, custom domains, and professional email on your domain.
A Folio portfolio page for all listings; a branded subdomain is $9.95 a year and a custom domain $14.95 (one included on Simple); professional email is not documented, as of November 2026.
Partner mode: manage clients’ listings and sites from one console, with client billing and a shared or separate PMS connection.
Owner Reports with fee structures and Simple volume discounts from 51 properties; a console that bills each owner-client separately is not documented, as of November 2026.
PriceLabs dynamic pricing integration plus a Calendar AI assistant that changes rates, minimum stays, and blocks from a plain-language request.
Does not manage rates or calendars.
Haven’s phone web app — bookwithhaven.com on a phone, added to the home screen, with nothing to install from an app store — runs the same plain-language stay search on the same API as bookwithhaven.com/stays.
The book-direct marketplace is a website; a traveler app is not documented as of November 2026.
Paste a BetterSTR guest link (or a Touch Stay link, an Airbnb guidebook, or a PDF) and Haven proposes the same sections and places; you accept each item. One-time read, free.
AI guide generation writes a guide from scratch at $1 per generation; importing an existing guide from another product is not documented, as of November 2026.
Free to build for as long as you like; pay only when you publish.
The guidebook is free forever with no card required, and every new account gets two weeks of Premium; add-ons bill as used, as of November 2026.
Choose Haven if…
- You want the booking site, checkout, and calendar sync, not a listing page that links guests back to Airbnb.
- You want every guest — direct, Vrbo, Booking.com, Airbnb — to get a guide automatically, without adding reservations by hand or paying per reservation.
- You want upsells at 0% commission instead of 7% (or 3% after you pay for Premium).
- You want the emails you capture to do something: a CRM with segments, broadcasts, and AI remarketing on local events, gap nights, price drops, and listing updates.
- You want screening, ID verification, agreements, deposits, smart-lock codes, taxes, turnover tasks, and loyalty points included rather than metered.
- You want a guest AI you can see — every reply graded, gaps grouped, fixed once across every site.
Consider BetterSTR if…
- You only want a free digital guidebook and nothing else, and you already book direct somewhere you like.
- You want an in-room tablet with a noise monitor or a TV welcome screen at the property.
- You run UniFi or Omada access points and want a WiFi captive portal with device-count alerts.
- You run a hotel on Mews, Apaleo, Preno, or Oracle OPERA Cloud and need a guide per room.
Haven vs BetterSTR
Frequently asked questions
Build your direct booking site free
Configure your Haven site as long as you like — you only pay when you’re ready to publish and take bookings. No per-booking commissions.
Comparison based on publicly available information about BetterSTR as of November 2026. Product features and pricing change frequently — check BetterSTR’s public website for their latest details. BetterSTR is a trademark of its respective owner; this page is not affiliated with or endorsed by BetterSTR.