2025 was a milestone year for Guesty. We shipped 333 features and updates, each one shaped by your requests and the challenges that slow you down or add operational complexity. Keeping owners up to date, complex accounting workflows, payment processors that don’t quite get hospitality, or onboarding that can’t keep pace with your growth.
We built for all of it. And we started putting AI to work where it matters most – protecting your revenue, refining your automations, providing richer data, and building a foundation for more intelligent tools in the year to come.
Here are seven of our most impactful releases, and why they matter for your business in 2026.
1. Pay Suite: Control over every transaction
Generic payment processors weren’t built for hospitality, and it shows. High chargeback rates, blocked accounts, manual fraud reviews, and zero understanding of how short-term rental cash flows actually work. Every dispute, payout delay, and hour spent on reconciliation is time stolen from growth.
Guesty Pay SuiteTM was built to solve this exact issue. The suite now combines three powerful tools for complete confidence in your transactions:
GuestyPayTM centralizes payment management, fast-tracks payouts, and provides real-time transaction visibility – giving you absolute confidence in every transaction.
Pay ProtectTM harnesses machine learning to detect fraud before it hits your account. AI-powered, trained on STR data, and backed by Guesty’s risk experts to reduce unauthorized transactions and chargebacks.
GuestyCardTM centralizes expense management with real-time spend tracking, smart spending rules, automated vendor payments, and both digital and virtual cards for your entire team.
Pay Suite had a huge impact on our users’ operations in 2025, with Pay Protect reducing chargebacks from 1.43% to 0.50% in 12 months alone. One GuestyPay user described it not as a processor but “a partner that understands STRs.” Another user processing millions saw their chargeback ratio cut by more than half after one year.
Property management accounting is uniquely complex. You’re juggling owner payouts, vendor payments, trust compliance, tax documentation, and reconciliation across dozens or hundreds of properties, often using multiple systems that don’t talk to each other. Every manual handoff is a chance for error, delay, or compliance risk.
In 2025, we upgraded Guesty Accounting with native ACH payouts, so you can send bank transfers to owners and vendors directly from Guesty. We also added embedded check printing for recipients who prefer physical checks, annual owner statements with reservation-level breakdowns and live preview, and bulk disbursement selection so you can process payouts at scale.
Key additions this year:
- ACH payouts for direct transfers to owners and vendors directly from Guesty (U.S only)
- New owner statement template with reservation-level breakdown and live preview
- Bulk disbursement selection for faster batch processing
- Multiple cash account management with support for complex account structures
- Transaction categories so you can organize income and expenses
- Automatic Airbnb grouping for payments, refunds, and Resolution Center adjustments
3. Shield Suite now covers every step of the reservation cycle
Risk is the invisible ceiling on growth. Every operator has turned away a booking, hesitated to expand into a new market, or absorbed a loss to avoid long disputes or review retaliation. We built Shield SuiteTM to remove that ceiling. And in 2025, we expanded it to cover every step of the reservation cycle with new coverage options embedded in Guesty for faster claim processing without the friction.
Full portfolio coverage, one system:
- GuestVerifyTM screens IDs, matches facial recognition selfies, filters out risky or underage groups, and checks against criminal databases (U.S. only) before check-in.
- Damage ProtectionTM covers every reservation with up to $50K, and fast-tracks payouts with zero guest involvement (90% of claims are paid within 3 days). This smart replacement for security deposits removes booking hesitation, resulting in +8.9% rise in occupancy.
- Travel ProtectionTM redirects cancellations to the insurance provider and earns you commission on every policy sold. Guests can choose this policy directly from their direct booking flow, at zero cost to your operation. (U.S. and Canada only)
- Liability CoverageTM protects you from legal exposure due to bodily injury or structural damage incidents with $1M coverage per reservation.
4. Owners Portal: More control, less hand-holding
Owner relationships are foundational in this business, but keeping owners informed has traditionally meant fielding constant requests for updates, manually pulling reports, and managing expectations across dozens of communication threads.
In 2025, we made the Owners Portal smarter. The enhanced dashboard delivers clearer breakdowns of occupancy, revenue, and expenses per property. Owners can book their own stays for friends and family, managed as standard reservations. And custom reservation reports let you tailor exactly what owners see.
What this means for your operation:
- Fewer update requests flooding your inbox
- Self-serve access to statements, reports, and booking calendars
- Owner stays that flow through your regular workflow
- Real-time insights that position you as a strategic advisor
5. Guest App: Smoother arrivals, more personalized stay
Roughly 73% of travelers now prefer contactless, self-service check-in options. And they don’t want to juggle separate links for agreements, forms, and access codes. They want one smooth flow, on their phone, on their schedule, before they arrive.
Guest App delivers exactly that. One link for check-in forms, access instructions, emergency contact, and property details. Guests arrive stress-free. Every reservation comes with signed agreements, verified IDs, payment details secured, marketing permissions captured, and a complete guest profile before they even arrive.
Guidebooks take it further, allowing you to curate local recommendations for each stay. Think hidden gems: the actual best coffee in town, your favorite restaurant, the sunset spot no one posts about. The local tips that make guests feel like insiders from day one. Add your FAQs, and you’re eliminating countless repetitive questions.
What you can include:
- Property essentials: access codes, parking, WiFi, appliance guides
- House rules and checkout instructions
- Local recommendations: restaurants, attractions, hidden gems
- Emergency contacts and support information
6. Custom Roles: Perfect-fit access for every team member
As your team grows, so does the complexity of managing who can see and do what. Default permission sets rarely match the reality of how property management teams actually operate. Your revenue manager needs different access than your guest communications lead, and neither should see everything your accountant does. The workarounds get messy fast.
Custom roles was the #1 requested feature for a reason. We rebuilt the entire permissions infrastructure to give you complete flexibility. Now you can tailor every workflow and access level for more secure information sharing, standardize processes across teams with consistent role templates, speed up onboarding with pre-configured roles for new hires, and edit permissions in a few clicks as your business evolves.
What you can do:
- Create unlimited custom roles with granular permission control
- Standardize access levels across teams and locations
- Onboard new hires with pre-configured role templates
- Update permissions instantly as responsibilities change
7. Guesty Academy: Turn your team into platform experts
Every property management company hits the same scaling wall. Platform training takes time you don’t have, documentation is scattered, and institutional knowledge lives in the heads of your most experienced people. New hires can take months to get up to speed, and even veterans miss features that could save them hours.
Guesty Academy is your new central resource for faster onboarding and continuous skill development, built for independent learning at your team’s pace. Bite-sized video tutorials, expert tips, and interactive training courses help you unlock the full value of the platform without the growing pains. Learn by topic, complete full modules, or skip straight to what you need right now. Access the Academy anytime from your Help Widget.
What you’ll find:
- Self-paced video modules organized by feature and workflow
- Expert tips and best practices from power users
- Full learning paths for comprehensive training
- On-demand access directly from your Help Widget
What’s next for Guesty
As we move into 2026, we’re investing in AI-powered co-pilots, smart automation, more advanced revenue tools, and deeper data access to reduce friction and support growth at every stage. Expect to see AI surface revenue opportunities you’d otherwise miss. Tasks that create themselves. Reconciliation that handles itself. And new ways to get answers from your data without building a single report.
Stay tuned for all this and more with our monthly product update newsletter.
Tessa Eskin
Product Marketing Content Writer
Seasoned content writer with a passion for media, the written word, and crafting compelling narratives that educate, build trust, and deliver lasting value.
