When a hotel or a local business first hears "partnership platform," it's reasonable to picture something closer to a negotiation tool — proposals, counter-offers, signed terms, a history of who agreed to what. Stayhos Connect is not that, and being upfront about the gap between the assumption and the actual product saves both sides time. This post lays out exactly what a Connect partnership request does, and what it deliberately leaves outside the product.
The question both sides ask before starting
A hotel manager exploring hotel-curated local recommendations for guests often assumes that adding a business means some kind of contract workflow: send terms, wait for a counter-offer, finalize an agreement. A local business hearing that a hotel wants to "partner" through Connect assumes something similar in reverse.
Neither assumption matches what Connect actually is. It's a narrower, more specific tool, and the honest description of it is more useful than an inflated one.
What a Connect partnership request actually is
A Connect partnership request is the hotel activating a specific local business toward its Discover Near Us list — the hotel-curated set of local recommendations guests see in the Guest Hub. The hotel identifies a business it wants to feature (a restaurant, tour operator, transfer service, or similar) and activates a partnership request toward that business.
That's the scope of the action: activation, not negotiation. There's no back-and-forth proposal exchange built into the product, no field for counter-terms, no multi-round approval workflow. The hotel decides who it wants to feature, and Connect is the mechanism that turns that decision into an actual invitation.
How a business gets invited and onboards
Once a hotel activates a partnership request, the named business receives a secure invite link. The business uses that link to claim its own account — this is the same invited-business onboarding flow used across Discover Near Us partnerships. There's no public sign-up form a business fills out to insert itself into a hotel's list; onboarding is invitation-based, which keeps the recommendations hotel-curated rather than an open directory anyone can join by applying.
Once onboarded, the business's own dashboard is where it manages its presence — including, when guests submit leads, where Business Leads actually land. The business accepts, contacts, and confirms leads from there, entirely separate from any negotiation mechanic, because there isn't one.
What Connect deliberately does not do
This is the part worth stating plainly, because it's easy for "partnership" language to drift into implying more than the product delivers. Connect does not support negotiation between hotel and business. There's no counter-offer mechanism. There's no terms history — no record of proposed terms, revisions, or a signed agreement living inside the product.
If a hotel and a business want to work out commission splits, exclusivity arrangements, or any other specifics of their relationship, that conversation happens outside Stayhos — over email, a phone call, or however the two parties normally handle business terms. Connect's job starts after that conversation has already happened in substance: it's the mechanism for activating the relationship inside the platform once both sides are ready, not the venue for reaching that agreement.
This is a deliberate boundary, not a missing feature waiting to be built next quarter. Hotels and businesses evaluating Stayhos for its partnership capabilities should plan their actual commercial terms conversations separately, and expect Connect to handle activation, onboarding, and lead routing rather than deal-making.
Where commission tracking fits — and where it doesn't
A related question that comes up quickly once partnership requests are understood: does Connect calculate or process the commission a business might owe a hotel for referred business? No. Commission and settlement tracking in Stayhos is manual, read-only for reporting purposes. There is a CSV export some hotels use for manual accounting handoff — it is explicitly not an automated invoice, and Stayhos does not calculate commission amounts on its own or process any payment between the two parties.
That means the actual exchange of money, however a hotel and business have agreed to handle it, happens entirely outside Stayhos. What the platform gives both sides is visibility: hotels can see which leads went to which business and their status, and businesses can see leads land in their own dashboard with delivery status visible. Visibility and activation, not negotiation and payment processing, is the accurate way to describe what Connect and the surrounding lead-flow tools do.
Why the narrower scope is the honest answer
It would be easy to describe Connect in broader terms — "partnership management," "deal platform" — and let readers fill in the gaps with their own assumptions about negotiation and contracts. That's not how this product works, and describing it that way would set up both hotels and businesses for a confusing first experience.
The accurate description is narrower and, for the specific job it does, complete: a hotel activates a partnership request toward a business, the business is invited to onboard via a secure link, and once active, guest leads that are intentionally submitted land in the business's own dashboard. Everything else — the actual terms of the relationship — stays a conversation the two parties have on their own.
A practical next step
If you're a hotel wanting to see how activating a business into your Discover Near Us list works in practice, or a local business that's been invited and wants to understand what happens after you claim your account, contact Stayhos and we'll walk through the specific flow for your situation.