Import a Guidebook

If the stay guide already lives somewhere else — a TouchStay or Everhost guest link, a designed PDF, a printed welcome book — Haven can read it and propose the same sections on this listing. Wi-Fi, check-in, house rules, custom pages, contacts, and local recommendations are sorted into the fields the guest guide already uses. Nothing is saved until you accept each item.

When to Use Import

You are moving off TouchStay, Everhost or another digital guidebook and want the same pages in Haven.
You already designed a Canva or InDesign guest book and do not want to retype it.
You have photos of a printed house manual and want those sections on the Arrival guide.

This is a one-time read. Haven does not stay connected to TouchStay or Everhost or keep the two guides in sync after you apply.

How to Import

Step 1: Open the importer

Open the listing's Edit Listing page.
Go to the Arrival tab. If an editor panel is open, click Home at the top of the Arrival list to close it and return to the phone preview.
Choose Import, the button directly under Add page to the right of the phone preview. (It is not a row in the sidebar: the two ways pages get made sit together beside the phone.)

The first time anyone on your account opens the Arrival tab, Haven offers to bring your existing guidebook in for free (once per account, on any device). Choose Import my guidebook to start, or Not now — the offer folds into the Import button, which keeps a shimmer until your account has run its first import.

The Import places button in Arrival → Local guide is a different import: it only adds places (restaurants, shops, things to do) to your local guide map, and ignores Wi-Fi, check-in and house rules. Its dialog has an Import a guidebook button that brings you here when you have a whole guidebook to move.

Step 2: Paste a link or upload a file

Link — paste a public guidebook URL. TouchStay guest links (guide.touchstay.com/guest/…, or a TouchStay guide on your own domain) are read through TouchStay's public guide API, including its chapters, cards, map pins and photos. TouchStay sometimes blocks Haven's reader; when it does, the import shows the guide's data link. Open that link in your own browser, save it (⌘S on a Mac, Ctrl+S on Windows), and upload the saved file — it brings in everything the link would have. Everhost guest links (everhost.io/…, or any page inside the guide) are read from Everhost's own guide data: every section your guests can see, in Everhost's order, plus each place you picked or saved under Nearby, matched to its exact Google listing with a map pin, address, website and a Google photo. Places and sections you hid or deleted in Everhost are skipped, and so are Everhost's template sections you never turned on. Embedded YouTube videos come through as links the guide plays. Other public pages work when the site returns readable text.
File — drop a PDF, photos of printed pages, or a TouchStay guide you saved from your browser (.json, or .html if your browser saved it that way). Design PDFs without a text layer are read page by page. A PDF or a set of photos is then given the same shape as a digital guide: its chapters, sections and topics are found from its headings, so they land as menus, sub-menus and pages the way a TouchStay guide's do, and a list of restaurants or shops inside it becomes places on your map. Lines a PDF wrapped mid-sentence are joined back into sentences.

You can attach a link, a file, or both in one run.

A PDF can become two different things

When you upload a PDF and choose Read my guidebook, Haven asks what the PDF should become:

Turn it into a digital guidebook — every page is read and sorted into your guide: Wi-Fi and check-in details go to their cards, house rules to House rules, everything else into pages guests can search. You approve each change before it saves. This is the import described on this page.
Keep it as a PDF page — the file goes into your guide as it is: one page guests scroll, like a custom page with the PDF attached. Nothing is read or rewritten. The page opens for you to name it and add a cover photo.

If all you want is the PDF itself in the guide, choose Add as PDF page at the top of the import sheet ("Want guests to see the PDF as it is, not rewritten?") and pick the file — or choose Add page → PDF beside the phone preview. Both are the same thing as Keep it as a PDF page.

Step 3: Preview it live, then add it

The run happens in the background: once it starts you can close the sheet or leave the page. Long design PDFs can take several minutes. When it finishes you get a notification — a toast on the dashboard and a card on the listing's dashboard — saying how many changes were found, with Review the changes. It opens the import sheet beside the phone preview, and the phone switches to an import preview: your guide exactly as it will look after you add the import — every tab, menu, sub-menu, page and place list in position — with a banner saying Import preview — nothing saved yet. Browse it the way a guest would; pages open in place. A toggle above the phone flips the phone between Import structure and Current guide, and the phone goes back to your current guide on its own when you close the sheet or when nothing is left to review. Open the sheet yourself at any time with Import under Add page.

The sheet itself leads with what needs a decision, then shows the shape of the import:

Built-in fields that already have a different value are flagged as a conflict under Needs your decision, below the structure; open it to compare each with what your guide has now. Leaving one ticked replaces the current text.
What this builds in your guide is the same structure the phone is showing, as a list: each tab with its menus, sub-menus and pages, the local-guide lists with how many places each gets, and the built-in cards, contacts and welcome text it fills.
Places and contacts that already match what is on the listing are flagged so you can skip them.
Each custom page says where it will go: the tab, and the menu on it when the guidebook filed the page under a chapter.
A TouchStay chapter that shares its name with one of Haven's built-in cards ("Check-in", "Wi-Fi", "House rules") is named after what is in it instead, such as Locks, Luggage & Parking, so the guide does not show two cards called Check-in.
Pages read from a PDF or a photo are created hidden from guests, so you can read what the model transcribed before anyone else does. Pages copied from a TouchStay or Everhost guide, or from a PDF's own text, are your own words, so they go live for guests with a stay when you accept them. The line above the list says how many of the proposed pages go live on accept and how many are saved as drafts.
At the top of the finished import, each link or file you gave says what came of it — Read 110 sections and 76 places · 116 imported · 3 left out — and What was left out opens to the list, each with the reason (an empty topic, a weather widget, a page about installing the old app, a section whose only content was a code that went to the Check-in card). If a section you expected is in that list, that is where to look first.
Sections that read like something guests book or buy — a fee for early check-in, a private chef, bike hire, the guide's own shop — are not made pages. They are handed to Offers, where a separate review proposes them as add-ons; the import sheet shows a note with a link when this happened. Nothing is sold until you review them there.

When it looks right, choose Import now at the bottom of the sheet. It imports everything ticked; anything you unticked is left out. The import then runs in the background: close the sheet and keep working, and you get a notification (a toast and a card on the listing's dashboard) when it is done. Nothing is written to your guide until you add it. Imported values also show under Review AI changes if you want to revisit them later.

Where Imported Pages Live

Everything the import created is on the Arrival guide tab of the listing editor, inside the phone preview. The preview is the editor — there is no separate list of imported pages to hunt for.

Pages arrive where the guidebook had them. Its three levels are kept: a chapter becomes a menu, a section a sub-menu, a topic a page.

A chapter with several topics becomes a menu under the chapter's own name ("Check-In: Locks, Contacts, Luggage & Parking"): one card that opens to the list of what is in it. A name too long for a menu is cut to the part before its list ("Inside the Apartment - Appliances, Coffee…" becomes "Inside the Apartment").
Inside that menu, each section becomes a sub-menu under the guidebook's own name for it: a row that opens to a page for each topic, each under its own title ("Electricity & entertainment" opens to Lighting, Music system and Televisions; "Garbage" opens to "Trash in San Francisco").
Two cases have no row worth opening, so they have none. A section that is one topic of the same name ("Baby gear") is that page, straight in the menu. A menu left with one section lists that section's topics itself.
Every row of the chapter is in its menu, in the guidebook's order. That includes a topic one of Haven's cards also holds (directions, check-in times, house rules, checkout steps, your contact details): the card is filled, and the topic is a page in its menu too, so the menu reads as it did in the old guidebook. The review list marks such a page; dismiss it there if you would rather keep only the card.
A topic that holds a door code, a lockbox code or the Wi-Fi password is never made a page. It goes to the Check-in or Wi-Fi card only, which guests see once their arrival window opens. A page is not held back that way.
A chapter that is nothing but what cards hold (a Wi-Fi chapter, a contacts chapter) is those cards and gets no menu. A chapter left with a single topic becomes a card of its own on Home or Property.
A page about the area that is not one place on the map (a list of favourites, bike hire) goes on the Explore tab, above your places.
A page the import could not place shows as a row under Quick info on the guide's Property tab.

Pages keep the shape the old guidebook gave them: line breaks, lists inside lists, and symbols such as → and ≥. A video attached to a TouchStay topic plays where the topic showed it. Photos come over at full size; a photo that sat inside a numbered step or a heading is placed on its own line beside it, because that is how Haven's page editor holds photos.

Links between pages of the old guidebook ("see Luggage storage") are rewritten to say where that page now is in Haven — for example Luggage storage (on the Luggage Storage page, in Check-In: Locks, Contacts, Luggage & Parking), or (on the Check-in card). Links to other websites are kept, minus ad-tracking codes.

To rename a menu, change what is in it, or take it apart, open Guide layout & tabs. See Guidebook Menus, Explore Pages & Videos.

Edit a page

Tap the page's card (or its Quick info row) in the phone preview to open its editor in the panel beside the phone. That is where you fix the text and photos the import transcribed. To make a new page by hand, choose Add page to the right of the phone preview.

Under the title is a row of three settings, each showing its current choice: Visibility, Where it shows and Icon. Select one to open it. Open Visibility to turn on Visible to guests and to pick the stages of a stay it shows in (leave out Not booked to keep it for guests with a stay) — the page stays out of the real guidebook, and the header reads Hidden from guests, until you turn it on.

Move, reorder, or remove a page

Press and hold any card in the preview. The cards start to jiggle, and from there you can:

drag a card to reorder it;
drag a card onto the Home or Property button in the phone's bottom bar to move it to that tab;
drag a card down onto Quick info to take it off the grid without deleting the page — or drag a Quick info row up into the grid to make it a card;
tap the ✕ on a card to remove it. It asks whether to take the page off the tab and keep it, or delete it;
tap the ✕ on a Quick info row to remove a page that is not on a tab. It asks whether to hide it from guests and keep the page, or delete it. A hidden page stays in your preview, greyed with a Hidden label, and guests no longer see it. To show it again, open the page and turn on Visible to guests under Visibility;
tap the pencil in the bottom bar to rename a tab;
tap Done when you are finished.

Arranging only works in the preview's Editing step. The other steps replay the guide exactly as a guest sees it, so a press-and-hold there just returns you to Editing.

What Gets Created

Source content	Where it lands
Welcome letter	Welcome message
Wi-Fi name and password	Wi-Fi cards
Check-in and checkout times, quiet hours	The listing's check-in time, checkout time and quiet hours
Getting here, transit, directions	Directions (shown on the guide's Directions page with the map)
Arrival, parking, lock instructions	Check-in instructions (and check-in method when the page names a smart lock, keypad, or lockbox)
Departure steps	Checkout notes (Edit Listing → Arrival → Checkout & tasks → Checkout details). The import review still titles this row Checkout instructions.
House rules, etiquette, pet policy	House rules
Safety information, emergencies, smoke detectors	A page of its own on the Property tab, not House rules
The host's phone and email	Contact phone and email
Named restaurants, shops, trails	Local recommendations, matched to the business's Google listing for its address, website and map, each in a list named as the guidebook names it
Lists of favourites, bike hire, days out	A custom page on the Explore tab
A video embedded in a page	A player in the same spot on the page
Emergency numbers	Contacts
Everything else (sauna, appliances, packing lists)	A custom page per topic, in a menu when the guidebook had a chapter for it

Sections that already match what is on the listing are not created again.

Places keep the guidebook's own lists

A guidebook groups its recommendations its own way: "Bakeries", "Coffee Shops", "Chinese & Dim Sum Restaurants", "Sightseeing". Each of those becomes a list of the same name in your local guide, in the order the guidebook has them, after any lists the guide already had. A place the guidebook shows under two headings ("Bakeries" and "Coffee Shops") is one place, shown in both lists. Only a heading that is one of Haven's four starting lists by name (Stores, Restaurants, Things to Do, Services) joins that list.

Limitations

The page or file has to be public, or uploaded by you. Haven cannot sign into another guidebook product on your behalf.
Some guidebook sites block server reads (a Cloudflare challenge is the usual case). For TouchStay, save the guide's data link from your browser and upload it (see Step 2). For other sites, export or print the guide as a PDF and upload it.
The import copies your words as written, with one exception: sentences about the old guidebook app itself — how to add it to a phone's home screen, where its print button is, that it refreshes every 24 hours, its map's bouncing house icon — are removed, because they tell your guests nothing about your home in Haven. Your own sentences beside them are kept. Read your pages after applying all the same.
A listing whose local guide comes from your library writes new places onto that library guide, then refreshes every listing attached to it.
Haven does not import weather widgets, booking-engine ads, or “add this guide to your phone” pages. They are named under What was left out so you can see they were seen.
Haven keeps a copy of what it read — the file you uploaded, the guide data a link returned, and what the import made of them — with the import, so if a page came out wrong the Haven team can look at exactly what was read and run the import again from it once the reader is fixed, without asking you for the file twice. It is kept privately with your account; nobody else can open it.

Once a page exists on one listing, you do not have to import or retype it anywhere else — pull it into another listing's guidebook from the Reuse tab, as a copy or as a linked page that stays in sync. See Reuse Guidebook Pages Across Properties.