A guest guidebook that earns its keep.
Bookable local experiences within minutes of your property. We build it free, because we earn from the bookings.
Your guests want experiences that are highly rated, close by, and trusted. We surface top-rated tours, dining, and activities within drive-time of your property, instantly bookable from their phone.
Built around your property’s exact location. No app to download. No PMS integration. No contract.
We only build free guidebooks where we can earn from experience bookings nearby. If your area isn’t covered yet, Orana Stay offers a paid version with the same features.
Takes 1 minute. We’ll tell you straight away whether your area qualifies.
The problem we solve
The way guests find things to do today is broken.
Your guest lands. They open Google. They type “things to do near my hotel” and get a wall of generic listings, mostly area-wide, mostly not actually within walking or short driving distance of where they’re staying.
They switch to a travel app. Same story. Results sorted by what’s in the area, not what’s actually close to your front door.
Some still keep paper brochures in the room. Those brochures don’t have ratings, reviews, photos, or instant booking. The modern guest expects all four.
So guests do what they’ve always done. They ask the front desk. Staff helps however they can, but the answer usually circles right back to Google. More tabs. More guessing. Time the guest will never get back.
The reality is, today’s guest expects the whole process to be instant, mobile, and proximity-based.
Hospitality hasn’t had a clean property-level tool built for that experience. Not at scale, not for free, not for properties of every size.
We fixed that.
Your guidebook surfaces the best nearby experiences within minutes of your property, sorted by drive time, ratings, and reviews. Instantly bookable from the guest’s phone. No download, no account.
The process has finally caught up with the way modern guests actually travel.
What used to take a guest an hour now takes about a minute.
How it’s free
You don’t pay. The experiences do.
Most guest-experience platforms charge the property a monthly fee. We don’t. We earn a small commission when guests book experiences through the guidebook — tours, dining, activities. The property pays nothing, ever.
That economic model only works where there’s enough bookable experience inventory near your property to make it commercially viable. Beach destinations, ski resorts, city centres, wine regions, popular cultural hubs — almost always yes. Remote outposts with no nearby tours, restaurants, or activities — sometimes no.
When you sign up, we run an instant check on your location. If we cover your area, we build your guidebook free and email you the link within five minutes. If we don’t, we’ll tell you immediately and point you at Orana Stay, our paid version with the same product but no commercial dependency on local experiences.
Either way, no surprise charges. No "free trial" that converts into a bill. No contract. No setup fee. We tell you the deal up front and we stick to it.
If we cover your area
Free guidebook from My Guidebook Buddy
No contract, no setup fee, no monthly cost. Built around your exact location. We earn from bookings; you keep everything else.
If we don’t (yet)
Paid guidebook via Orana Stay
Same product, paid monthly. Same guidebook, same features, same property-specific build — just on a different economic model because we can’t lean on experience bookings in your area.
What it removes
Eight things your guests do today that they shouldn’t have to.
Local experiences, instantly bookable
Top-rated tours, activities, and excursions sorted by drive time from your front door. Guests book in one tap. No more front-desk Google searches.
Dining that isn’t a tourist trap
Local insider recommendations with ratings and reviews. Where to actually eat, when to go, what to order. Your guests stop asking, your staff stops guessing.
Local services when guests need them
Grocery delivery, airport transfers, in-home chefs, where the system supports them. Guests get help on-demand without staffing it.
Built from your website automatically
We auto-generate the whole guidebook from your existing online content. Your property name, location, photos, the things you already publish. No data entry. No team time. No content for you to maintain.
Built around your exact location
Not generic area-wide listings. We use your lat/lng to surface only what’s genuinely close. A 5-minute walk vs. a 40-minute drive matters.
No app, no account, no friction
Guests open a link or scan a QR. That’s the whole onboarding. No downloads. No sign-ups. Works on every phone.
Offline-ready
Once a guest opens it on Wi-Fi, the guidebook works without a connection. Useful in spotty-coverage destinations and on planes home.
Set it once, refresh forever
We build it from your website. We refresh it monthly automatically. Your team has zero ongoing maintenance.
Common questions
Honest answers, no marketing fluff.
- Is it really free? What’s the catch?
- Really free. The catch is we earn a small commission when guests book experiences through the guidebook — tours, dining, activities. The property never pays. If your area doesn’t have enough bookable experience inventory for that model to work, we’ll tell you immediately and point you at Orana Stay’s paid version instead. No surprise charges, no trial-becomes-a-bill, no contract.
- How do you decide whether my location qualifies?
- When you sign up, we run an instant check against your property’s coordinates. We look at how many bookable experiences exist within reasonable drive time. If the answer is "enough to make this commercially viable", we build the guidebook free. If not, we tell you on the spot and link you to Orana Stay. The whole check takes seconds.
- How long does setup take?
- About a minute. You enter your property address, contact details, and primary website. We build the guidebook from your website automatically and email you the link within five minutes. No PMS integration. No software to install. No team training.
- Do my guests need to download an app?
- No. They open a link or scan a QR code and the guidebook works in any phone browser. No download, no account, no sign-up. We deliberately built it this way because guests on a three-day stay won’t install an app for it.
- What if my area isn’t covered today — will it ever be?
- We add new regions every month. If your area isn’t live yet, drop your email when you sign up and we’ll let you know when it is. In the meantime, Orana Stay’s paid version has the same product without the regional dependency.
- Who is behind this?
- Orana Software. We build guest-experience platforms for hotels, vacation rentals, condominium buildings, and inns. The Coastal Concierge is our Florida-focused sister brand on the same backend. My Guidebook Buddy is the worldwide version. Same product, same team, different brand for different audiences.
- Can I edit the guidebook content?
- Not at this stage. We control the content end-to-end. We build the guidebook from your website automatically, curate the local experiences based on your coordinates, and refresh it monthly. The upside is zero team time — you don’t maintain anything. Custom editing by the property is on the roadmap; for now what you see is what your guests get.
- How do guests find their guidebook?
- You get a unique short link and a printable QR code. Put the link in your booking confirmation, your pre-arrival email, your in-room cards, or anywhere else guests will see it. The QR goes on signs at the front desk or in rooms. Your guests get to it the same way they get to everything else — by tapping a link on their phone.
Get started
Let’s see if your area qualifies.
Takes about a minute. We’ll check your location and either build your free guidebook on the spot, or tell you immediately and point you at the paid version on Orana Stay.
Check my locationNo contract. No setup fee. No surprise charges either way.