Guide · 21 days · General Manager audience

Onboarding your hotel in 21 days with Guest Talk.

Guest Talk publishes this onboarding plan because there is a common failure pattern when independent hotels adopt a new PMS: onboarding is treated as a one-off software rollout instead of a change project. This 21-day plan treats it as change management, with day-by-day steps for the general manager, front-office team, housekeeping team and accounting owner. Every date assumes a working week; weekends are excluded to keep the plan achievable while still running a live property.

Week 1 — foundation and property setup

Day 1 (Monday). Kick-off call with your Guest Talk onboarding manager. Review of your operational profile (room count, board basis, seasonal calendar, distribution mix, current PMS, current channel manager, current accounting flow). Agree the go-live date and the parallel-run period.

Day 2. Property and legal-entity setup inside the workspace. Enter the property address, tax identifiers, invoice header, VAT rate, currency and the city-tax rules that apply to your municipality. Guest Talk pre-fills city tax for over 200 European cities to save on manual entry.

Day 3. Room types and physical units. Each room type has a name, a maximum occupancy, a default board basis, and a set of physical units (room numbers). Give each unit a code your housekeeping team will recognise; the PMS will surface the code across the operational stack.

Day 4. Rate plans and derivation. Enter your BAR (best available rate), any AAA / senior / mobile / member derivations, non-refundable rates, package rates (breakfast, half-board, romance packages), and long-stay rates. Guest Talk supports rate derivation so you edit only the base rate.

Day 5 (Friday). Import bookings from your current PMS. Guest Talk imports from Cloudbeds, Mews, Little Hotelier, Sirvoy, Beds24, roomMaster and CSV. Import runs overnight; you review the imported bookings on Monday morning.

Week 2 — distribution and payments

Day 6 (Monday). Review imported bookings, correct any that mapped to the wrong room type, and confirm cancellation policies flow through cleanly. This is also the day to send guest-facing communications about your new confirmation email design if you are changing it.

Day 7. Connect Booking.com. Guest Talk sends the XML certification request to Booking.com Connectivity Support; certification takes 3-5 working days.

Day 8. Connect Expedia. The Expedia certification runs in parallel to Booking's; typical certification takes 5-7 working days.

Day 9. Connect Airbnb (if you have unique inventory on Airbnb) via the API partner flow. Connect Google Free Booking Links (recommended for any property whose direct site is set up).

Day 10 (Friday). Payments onboarding with Stripe. Provide the beneficiary details, upload the ID of the account owner, and connect the settlement bank account. Card-present readers ship separately if you order them.

Week 3 — staff training and go-live

Day 11 (Monday). Front-office training. Ninety minutes over video, covering the tape chart, folio flow, split billing, group check-in, walk-in flow and end-of-day close-out. Recording provided.

Day 12. Housekeeping training. Sixty minutes covering the mobile flow for cleaners, room-status codes, inspection routine and reporting.

Day 13. Accounting training. Sixty minutes covering the export to your accounting tool of choice (Xero, QuickBooks, Zoho Books, or CSV), the daily sales report, the city-tax report and the year-end reconciliation.

Day 14 (Friday). Booking.com and Expedia certifications complete. Channel manager sync is enabled on a subset of inventory to run a controlled two-day parity test.

Day 15 (Monday). Full channel manager sync goes live. All inventory and rates flow from Guest Talk to the OTAs; new reservations flow back. Legacy PMS is placed in read-only mode.

Day 16. Go-live for direct bookings via the Guest Talk booking engine on your website. If you use WordPress, WooCommerce or Squarespace, the widget takes fifteen minutes to install; a custom theme takes a day of dev work maximum.

Day 17. Guest messaging templates are enabled. Pre-arrival confirmation, mid-stay check-in, review request post-stay, and any operational templates (fire alarm, breakfast time change) are activated in EN plus your top guest languages.

Day 18. Reporting review with your onboarding manager. Walk through the daily sales report, the pace report, the parity report, and the guest satisfaction dashboard. Confirm which reports go to which email addresses on which schedule.

Day 19 (Friday). First week live retrospective. Review the reservations that came in through Guest Talk during the past four days, address any staff questions, and document any missing functionality that needs follow-up.

Day 20. Legacy PMS is fully decommissioned. Export final data for archive, cancel the subscription, and update any external systems (accounting, chargeback tooling) that still point to the old system.

Day 21 (Monday). Handoff to your dedicated customer success manager. Your onboarding manager stays on standby for two more weeks; from day 22 onwards your CSM is the primary contact and books a monthly check-in.

Common variations

Peak season migration. If you must migrate during your peak season, the plan compresses to 14 days by running the training in the pre-shift briefing rather than as scheduled sessions. Guest Talk staff a night operator for your first weekend live so any issue is handled without disturbing your own team.

Hostel with 100+ beds. Add three days between Day 3 and Day 4 for bunk-level inventory setup and dorm-mix modelling. Guest Talk has a dedicated hostel-specialist onboarding manager who takes over from Day 3.

Multi-property portfolio. Property one takes 21 days; property two is a 10-day rollout because your team is already trained; property three onwards is 5 days. Rate plans and template libraries are cloneable across properties.

What we ask of you

Onboarding runs well when the general manager gives it thirty minutes a day for three weeks. That is roughly one Guest Talk meeting on the days marked with a call, and thirty minutes of self-serve work on the days without. Guest Talk provides a shared checklist in the workspace so both sides can see what is done and what is pending.

Checklist inside the workspace

Every task in this guide maps to a checkbox inside the Onboarding checklist in your workspace. When the last box is ticked, the checklist archives itself and unlocks the "post-live" checklist for the first three months of ongoing operation. That second checklist covers integrations you may not have wanted on Day 1 (accounting export, room-key issuance, back-office reporting) and can be worked through at leisure.