A guest sitting on their hotel bed, browsing local restaurant recommendations on their phone, is not necessarily thinking about where their information goes next. But if they did stop to think about it, the honest answer matters — both to the guest and to the hotel that put the recommendation in front of them.
This post is about that exact moment: what happens, data-wise, when a hotel refers a guest to a local business through Discover Near Us, and specifically when — if ever — the guest's contact details actually move. It's a question that matters more as guests become more attentive to how their information is handled at every stage of a stay, not just at booking.
The referral moment, broken down
Discover Near Us is the section of the Guest Hub where guests see local businesses their hotel has chosen to recommend: restaurants, tour operators, spas, transfer services. A guest reaches it the same way they reach everything else in the Guest Hub — by scanning the QR code on their Room QR Card, no account or app required.
From there, a guest can browse freely. They can look at every listing the hotel has curated, read descriptions, see what's being offered, and move on without any of that activity being reported anywhere or shared with anyone. Browsing is not the same as contacting, and the system treats that distinction as a hard line rather than a formality.
The moment anything changes is when a guest decides to submit a request — filling in a contact form to ask about availability, request a booking inquiry, or get more information from a specific business. That submission is the only event that creates a lead. Before that point, the business the guest was looking at has no idea the guest exists.
Why this design choice matters
It would be technically straightforward to build a system where every view of a local business listing generates some kind of signal back to that business — a view count, an interest flag, a partial lead. Plenty of advertising and marketplace platforms work exactly that way, treating attention itself as the product being delivered.
That is deliberately not how Discover Near Us works. A hotel that recommends a local restaurant to its guests is vouching for that business by name. Guests engage with that recommendation because they trust the hotel curated it, not because they expect to be tracked while browsing. Building the system around explicit, guest-initiated submission rather than passive activity tracking keeps that trust intact — the guest controls exactly when their information starts moving, and the answer to "did this business get my details" is always answerable with a simple yes or no tied to a specific action the guest took themselves.
What the local business actually receives
When a guest does submit a lead, it goes to exactly one place: the Business Leads dashboard belonging to the specific business the guest contacted. The business sees the information the guest chose to include in that submission — nothing more, nothing pulled from elsewhere in the guest's stay or hotel history.
From there, the business works the lead in its own dashboard: it can accept, decline, contact the guest, or confirm the outcome. Notification visibility is limited to whether the lead notification was delivered — not whether the guest opened or clicked anything afterward. That's a meaningful boundary, since open and click tracking is a step further into monitoring guest behavior than this system is designed to do.
Critically, a business only ever sees leads submitted directly to it. It has no visibility into which other businesses in Discover Near Us the same guest may have viewed or contacted. There's no cross-business profile being assembled anywhere in the system.
It's also worth stating plainly what does not happen anywhere in this flow: Stayhos does not build an individual guest profile that follows a guest across their stay, across properties, or across businesses. Any analytics a hotel or business sees are aggregate and read-only — patterns across many guests, not records tied to an identifiable individual beyond the specific lead they chose to submit. This matters for a hotel evaluating whether local business referrals introduce new guest-privacy exposure. They don't, in the sense that matters most: nothing is collected about a guest's behavior that the guest didn't explicitly choose to share by submitting a form.
Why this is increasingly a live question for hotel buyers
Hotels operating in markets with heightened attention to guest-data handling — across Europe and increasingly elsewhere — are fielding more direct questions from guests and from their own compliance-minded ownership groups about what happens to guest information at every touchpoint of a stay. A local business referral is exactly the kind of touchpoint that raises those questions, because it involves a guest's information potentially leaving the hotel's own systems and reaching a third party.
The honest answer for a hotel using Discover Near Us is straightforward: nothing leaves the guest's control until the guest submits it, and it only ever goes to the specific business the guest chose to contact. That's a materially easier position to defend to a skeptical guest, an ownership group, or a compliance-minded GM than a system where referrals happen passively in the background. For a broader look at how this consent-first approach applies to the Guest Hub generally, see what data a hotel collects when guests scan a room QR code.
What this means in practice for a hotel's local partners
For the restaurants, tours, and other businesses a hotel invites into Discover Near Us, this model has a practical upside worth naming: every lead that reaches them represents real, deliberate guest intent, not a passive impression. A business isn't managing a flood of low-quality signals — it's responding to guests who took the extra step of filling in a form because they wanted to hear back. Businesses can see how local business leads from hotels work from the other side of this same referral relationship.
What hotels should tell guests who ask
Front desk and reception staff occasionally get asked directly: "if I use this to contact that restaurant, who sees my number?" It's worth having a plain answer ready, because guests notice when staff can answer confidently versus when they shrug and say they're not sure.
The accurate answer is short: nothing is shared until you submit the form, and then it only goes to that one business. No other business in Discover Near Us sees it, the hotel doesn't retain a separate copy tied to your identity beyond what's needed to operate the referral, and there's no profile being built from your browsing. That's a complete, honest answer a hotel can give without qualification, which is not something every guest-facing technology vendor can say about its own referral or recommendation features.
A practical next step
If you're a hotel operator who wants to see exactly what a guest experiences browsing Discover Near Us and what data moves at each step, the Guest Hub demo shows the full flow on a fictional property, including the local business referral experience.
To talk through how this fits your property's guest-data practices, or to ask specific questions before a pilot, contact Stayhos directly.