A restaurant, tour operator, or spa that gets a call from a hotel about a partnership usually has one question before any other: what is this going to cost. It is a reasonable question, and it is often harder to answer than it should be, because most guidance on hotel-business partnerships focuses on what happens once a lead arrives rather than what the business is signing up for in the first place.
For businesses evaluating a Discover Near Us invitation from a partner hotel, the honest answer is straightforward: there is no fee to join, no subscription, and no public price list, because Stayhos does not sell listings directly to businesses at all.
Why this question comes up before the pitch even happens
Local businesses have learned to be cautious about anything that sounds like a directory or a marketplace. Plenty of listing services, review platforms, and local advertising products charge a monthly fee for placement, a commission on every referral, or both. So when a hotel mentions a guest-facing recommendation feature, it is a fair instinct to ask which of those models applies here.
The answer is neither. Discover Near Us is not an open directory a business can pay to appear in, and it is not a pay-per-lead advertising product. It is a hotel-curated feature: a business appears because a specific hotel chose to recommend it, not because the business purchased placement.
How a business actually joins
A business does not sign up for Discover Near Us on its own. The process starts with the hotel, which decides — based on its own judgment about fit, reliability, and guest experience — which local businesses it wants to feature. Once a hotel makes that decision, it sends the business a secure invite link.
That link is how the business claims its own account and gets set up in the hotel's Guest Hub. There is no application form to fill out, no waitlist, and no fee attached to accepting the invite. The invite itself is the entire joining process on the business side.
This structure means a business cannot buy its way into a hotel's recommendations, and it also means there is nothing to purchase to get started once a hotel has already decided to invite it.
What actually costs money, and what does not
It helps to separate two things that often get bundled together in a business owner's head: the cost of being listed, and the cost of the underlying partnership.
Being listed costs nothing. There is no signup fee, no monthly subscription to appear in a hotel's Discover Near Us section, and no charge simply for accepting an invite and setting up a Business Leads account.
The underlying partnership is a separate conversation, and it is one Stayhos deliberately stays out of. If a hotel and a business want to set up a referral commission, a discount for hotel guests, or some other arrangement, that is negotiated directly between the two of them. Stayhos does not process those payments, does not take a percentage, and does not calculate commission automatically — any commission or settlement tracking that exists is manual, recorded by the hotel, not generated or collected by the platform.
This is also why there is no public pricing page. A flat listing fee would only make sense if Stayhos were selling placement, which it is not. What a specific partnership involves, if anything beyond the free listing itself, depends entirely on what the hotel and the business agree to.
Who decides commission or referral terms
Because each hotel relationship is its own agreement, terms are not standardized across the platform. One hotel might invite a business with no commission expectation at all, treating the recommendation purely as a guest-experience benefit. Another might negotiate a referral fee tied to bookings the business closes with referred guests. Both scenarios are common in local business partnerships generally, and Stayhos does not dictate which model a given hotel and business should use.
What Stayhos does provide is a manual settlement and tracking layer businesses and hotels can use if they do set commission terms — visibility into lead status and read-only analytics, rather than an automated invoicing or payout system. If a business is being asked to pay something as a condition of appearing in Discover Near Us at all, that is a term the hotel is setting, not a Stayhos requirement.
What a business gets once it is in
Once the invite is accepted, the practical experience is the same regardless of whether a commission arrangement exists. The business appears inside the relevant hotel's Guest Hub, in the Discover Near Us section guests reach after scanning their room's QR code. When a guest views the listing and decides to reach out, that action creates a lead that goes straight to the business's own Business Leads dashboard — not a shared inbox, and not something that depends on hotel staff manually passing along a message.
From there, the business accepts, declines, contacts, or confirms the lead on its own, and can see whether the lead notification was delivered. None of that functionality is gated behind a paid tier. It is the same experience for every invited business, whether or not that business and the hotel have also agreed to a commission arrangement on the side.
A practical next step
If a hotel has already extended an invite, the next step is simply accepting it — there is no purchase decision to make before that happens. If a business wants to see what the guest-facing side of Discover Near Us looks like before responding to an invitation, the Guest Hub demo shows how guests browse local recommendations and submit leads.
For questions about a specific partnership, commission terms, or anything not covered by a general explanation, the direct route is to contact Stayhos, since pricing and partnership specifics are handled case by case rather than published as a fixed rate.