Getting started

Isle Stay is where you keep your properties, the pages guests see, and the enquiries that come back. This walks through opening an account and the first few things worth doing.

Opening an account

Go to Get started and give us four things: your name, your business name, an email address and a password. The business name is optional but worth filling in - it is what appears on your public pages.

We send a verification email straight away. Click the link in it. Until you do, the account works, but we cannot reliably reach you when a guest enquires, which rather defeats the point.

If it does not arrive within a few minutes, check spam. The address it comes from is new to your mailbox, and new senders land there more often than not.

What the free plan includes

The free plan is not a trial. There is no clock on it, and nothing expires.

You get:

• One property, with its own public page and enquiry form
• Welcome books - the house guide a guest reads on arrival
• QR codes, including tracked ones

What you do not get is the branding. On the free plan your guest surfaces - welcome books, flipbooks, itineraries, your business card - carry a small "Powered by Isle Stay" line at the bottom, and a paid plan removes it. That is the honest trade: the free plan is genuinely useful for a one-villa host, and the first paid step is mostly about looking like your own business rather than unlocking a feature.

One exception worth knowing: the listing page itself carries a "Shared via Isle Stay" line on every plan, paid included.

The paid plans add more properties and more tools - the Pricing Assistant, Leads, Concierge Studio, your own domain - but none of that is worth paying for until the free version is doing something for you.

The first half hour

Three things, in this order.

1. Add your property and publish it. This is the one that unlocks everything else - the guest page, the enquiry form, the welcome book all hang off it. It takes about ten minutes. See Adding and publishing a property.

2. Claim your address. Under Settings, pick the web address your public pages live at - something like coral-cove.islestay.app. Choose carefully: once guests and printed cards start pointing at it, changing it costs you every link you have shared. See Your web address.

3. Write a welcome book. Even a rough one. It is the single thing guests thank hosts for most, and it is the reason you stop getting messages at 11pm asking for the wifi password. See Guest pages, welcome books and QR codes.

Where things live

The sidebar groups by what you are doing rather than by what the feature is called:

• Workspace - the dashboard and your numbers
• Listings - properties and rates
• Guest Tools - welcome books, QR codes, concierge, cards
• CRM - leads, messages, schedule, payments
• Connect - your plan, your team, settings, and help

Anything greyed out is on a higher plan. Clicking it tells you which one rather than pretending it does not exist.

If you get stuck

Open Help & Support in the hub. It comes through with the page you were on and your plan already attached, so you can describe what happened rather than explaining your setup first.