The Local Guide lets you recommend nearby stores, restaurants, things to do, and services to your guests. This is different from paid upsells. The Local Guide is free, informational content that helps guests explore the area. Paid extras you fulfill yourself are native experiences and add-ons. An optional Host Co store can also list partner-fulfilled products.
The Local Guide is a curated list of your favorite local spots that appears on your property website and in your House Manual. Guests see your recommendations organized by category:
Haven includes a tour recommendation engine that suggests options based on your property's address. Click Generate recommendations and Haven will search for popular local spots and pre-populate your list with suggestions.
When you click Generate recommendations, choose what to generate:
If the guide already has places, pick Replace guide to swap your current sections and places for the new ones, or Add to guide to keep what you have and add the new sections alongside (a section with the same name as an existing tab is filled in rather than duplicated). On a guide that covers several towns, Haven searches each town separately; with one town selected in the area pills, only that town is regenerated. A custom guide takes a minute or two, longer on a multi-town guide.
You can also type in your own suggestions. If you have a favorite coffee shop, restaurant, or attraction, add it manually. Haven will then:
You can review and edit everything before saving. Place descriptions can be up to about 500 words (4,000 characters). Guests see a short preview on the card and the full write-up when they open the place.
Each place card also has a Host tip field, below the description. Whatever you write there shows as a Tip badge on the place's card and as a Host Tip box when a guest opens the place — in the guest guidebook's Local Guide tab, on your property page, and in the printed guide — and it powers the guests' "host tips first" sort. Keep it to the one thing only you would know: the table to ask for, the day the market runs, where to park. Places Haven generated for you may arrive with a tip already written; edit it or clear the field and the badge goes away.
If you have already written your recommendations somewhere else (a blog post, a page on your old site, a list in a document, the area pages of a PDF), click Import places next to Generate recommendations. This import is for places only — restaurants, shops, things to do — that go on your map. Paste the Link, paste the Text, or add a Screenshot or File, click Import (or Find places for a PDF), keep the places you want, and add them. Haven finds each place on Google Maps before adding it, so it arrives with its map pin, listing link and photo; a long list takes a few seconds. A PDF is read in full but only its places are kept — Wi-Fi, check-in and house rules in it are ignored here. An Everhost guide link pasted under Link brings in only its recommended places, each with its exact Google listing, and you review them before they are added. Your own wording comes across as the description, and an address or link your source gave is kept. Places that are already in your guide are left out, so you can import several posts one after another. If every place in a source is already in your guide, Haven tells you Nothing new to import and names them; nothing went wrong and there is nothing to retry.
If you want to bring over an entire guidebook — a TouchStay or Everhost guest link, or a PDF with Wi-Fi, check-in, house rules and recommendations — use Import a Guidebook instead: Edit Listing → Arrival → Home → Import (the button under Add page). The Import places dialog has an Import a guidebook button that takes you there. That import sorts every section into your guide, and places that are missing on this listing are proposed for review; applying them writes to this guide — or to the library guide this listing uses.
Guests see your lists (Restaurants, Activities, …) and the places in them in the order you set here, unless they temporarily sort the list themselves (nearest first, A–Z, or host tips first) on the property page or in the guest guidebook. That override does not change the order you configured:
Order carries everywhere the guide appears: the property page, multi-unit site tabs, and the printed House Manual. Guides in your library keep their order on every listing they're attached to.
Lists work like tags. A cafe that also serves the best breakfast in town can sit under Cafes and under Breakfast; a restaurant with a serious bar belongs in Restaurants and Cocktails. Guests browsing either list find it. The guide's AI chat reads the same lists, so a guest who asks where to get breakfast is pointed to it, and the offline search matches it by either name.
Open the place and look at the Lists row at the top of its card. Every list in the guide appears there as a chip, with the ones this place already belongs to ticked:
Collapsed cards show Also in followed by the other lists a place belongs to, which makes it easy to scan a list and see what is shared.
It is one place, not a copy. The description, photo, address and website are written once and appear identically in every list, so a correction made under Cafes is already made under Breakfast. For the same reason, searching for a venue that is already in your guide (from Add new location in a different list) adds the existing place to that list instead of creating a duplicate.
Two details are worth knowing when you tidy up. The trash icon on a shared place asks whether to remove it from the list you are looking at or from every list. Deleting a whole list never deletes a place that also lives somewhere else; only places found in no other list are moved or removed.
On the map, a shared place keeps the icon of the first list it was added to. In the printed House Manual and the guest's printed guide it is listed under each of its lists.
Direct link: /properties/{code}/manage?tab=edit-listing§ion=local-guide. Click Home at the top of the Arrival list to close the panel and return to the guide preview.
The section title guests see on property and group pages defaults to Host-curated local favorites (and Local Guide in the page nav). To rename it, open the Local recommendations editor and type a Name guests see. Leave it blank to restore the default. The same name is used on newly generated House Manuals.
Multi-unit site tabs have their own tab name (the pill in the collection nav). Rename that tab separately on the site editor if you want the tab label to match.
Local Guides are a reusable library, so you can curate a guide once and use
it across many listings instead of rebuilding it for each one. The central hub
is Grow your brand → Shared Page Content → Local guides in the host sidebar (or /host?tab=page-content&contentSub=local-guides),
with two inner areas:
Every listing's guide is a library guide. The first time you open Edit Listing → Arrival → Local guide, Haven adds that listing's guide to your library (named after the listing, e.g. Blue Fin Guide) and you edit it right there. The Source picker lets you:
An Open in library button deep-links to the same guide in the Local guides library, where you can rename it.
On a Multi-Unit Site edit page you can set a default local guide that its member listings inherit automatically — including listings you add to the site later. The resolution rule is the same as Haven's other libraries: a listing-level pin overrides the multi-unit site default, a listing with no pin inherits the site default, and if a listing belongs to two sites that imply different guides Haven flags the conflict instead of guessing.
Open the site's Local Guide tab → Manage guide. Use Create & generate (or New guide for this site in the source menu). Haven clusters listings that sit in the same travel market and builds one area per town — not one search halfway between them.
You can still attach an existing library guide from the source menu instead of creating a new one.
A guide is edited in place — on any listing it's attached to, or in Grow your brand → Shared Page Content → Local guides → Library — and your changes propagate to every listing and site it's attached to. Want a one-off version for one listing? Choose New guide for this listing; the rest keep the shared guide. A listing that inherits a multi-unit site default is read-only on the listing — pick Use own guide to take your own copy, which it.
This is the same library + attach + inheritance model used by Rental Agreements, FAQs, Blog, and Taxes — see Reusable Content Libraries & Inheritance.
| Local Guide | Native experiences & add-ons | Host Co store (optional) |
|---|---|---|
| Free, informational recommendations | Paid extras and packages you create and fulfill | Partner marketplace you can connect |
| Stores, restaurants, things to do, services | Retreats, chef dinners, late checkout, hot-tub fees | Host Co–fulfilled local products and services |
| Appears on property page and House Manual | Property page / checkout / guidebook Offers | Property page Guest Offers section and guidebook |
| You curate the list; Haven helps with blurbs and photos | You set photos, copy, pricing; 0% Haven commission | Host Co fulfills; Host Co's commission applies |
New to Haven?
Haven is the direct booking platform these guides are written for — a branded site, secure payments, and guest relationships you own. Build yours free.
Free to build · No credit card · Private until you publish