Most advice aimed at restaurants, tour operators, and spas that partner with hotels focuses on getting listed: how to get a hotel's attention, how to make it onto a recommendation list, how to pitch a front desk manager on a partnership. Once a business clears that step and is actually featured in a hotel's Discover Near Us section, the practical question changes. Leads start arriving. What does a business do with them, day to day, once they're already a partner?
That's the gap this post covers. Not how to get invited — how to run the dashboard once the invitation has already turned into real leads.
Where a lead comes from before it reaches the dashboard
A guest staying at a partner hotel opens the Guest Hub by scanning the QR code on their Room QR Card. Inside, alongside service requests to the front desk and housekeeping, the guest finds Discover Near Us — a section of local businesses the hotel has chosen to recommend. No business appears there by signing up on its own; a business shows up because a specific hotel activated it as a partner, usually by sending a secure invite link the business claims to set up its account.
Browsing the list doesn't create anything for the business to act on. A lead only exists once a guest submits a request — asking about availability, requesting a reservation, or asking a question directly through the listing. That distinction matters because it's the same line Stayhos draws everywhere in the product: contact details move only when the guest chooses to share them, never before.
What lands in the Business Leads dashboard
Once a guest submits, the lead appears in the business's own Business Leads dashboard — not the hotel's system, not a shared inbox both parties have to check. The lead carries what the guest actually submitted: their request and the contact details they chose to include.
Businesses and hotels can also see whether the lead notification was delivered — sent, failed, or skipped. That's a narrower thing than engagement tracking. It answers "did our system reach the business," not "did the business open it, and when." Stayhos has no marketing email tracking and doesn't build individual guest profiles behind the scenes; the visibility here stops at delivery status.
On the hotel side, the property that sent the referral retains its own oversight — it can see which leads its Discover Near Us recommendations produced and which partner received each one, in aggregate. That's part of why hotels keep curating: it's the mechanism that lets a hotel notice which partnerships are actually generating guest interest.
Working a lead once it arrives
From the dashboard, a business has four actions available: accept the lead, decline it, contact the guest, and confirm the outcome. There's no additional step that routes back through the hotel first — the business owns the lead the moment it lands, and follows up directly.
That ownership is worth being explicit about because it's easy to assume a hotel-sourced lead comes with hotel-managed process attached. It doesn't. The hotel's role ends at the recommendation; what a business does with the guest's request afterward is entirely the business's own workflow, on its own timeline.
The same dashboard, different kinds of businesses
The mechanics don't change much across the types of local partners a hotel typically features. A restaurant receiving a dinner inquiry, a tour operator fielding a question about an excursion, a spa getting a treatment request, and a transfer company handling an airport pickup ask all see the same shape of lead: a guest-submitted request landing in their own Business Leads dashboard, with the same accept, decline, contact, and confirm actions available.
What differs is the follow-up itself. A restaurant might need to confirm table availability for that evening. A tour operator might need to check whether a slot on tomorrow's excursion is still open. A transfer company might need a flight number before it can commit to a pickup time. Stayhos doesn't prescribe any of that — the dashboard hands the business a lead with the guest's submitted details, and the business runs its own process from there, exactly as it would with a lead from any other channel.
Why the follow-up window is worth taking seriously
Independent of any specific platform, response-time research across service and hospitality-adjacent businesses is consistent on one point: how quickly a business responds to an inbound inquiry has an outsized effect on whether that inquiry turns into anything. Industry benchmarking on lead response has repeatedly found that businesses contacting a lead within the first few minutes convert at meaningfully higher rates than those who wait hours, and that the odds of making contact at all drop sharply the longer a lead sits unanswered.
None of that is specific to hotel-sourced leads, and Stayhos doesn't measure or promise anything about a business's own response time. But it's the practical reason the Business Leads dashboard is worth checking on a regular cadence rather than treating hotel referrals as a background channel. A guest who submitted a request through Discover Near Us is often still at the hotel, still deciding on a restaurant for tonight or an activity for tomorrow — the same reasoning that makes any inbound inquiry time-sensitive applies here, arguably more so given how short a hotel stay usually is.
What this dashboard is not
It's worth being direct about the boundaries, since a business evaluating any hotel-sourced lead channel should know what's included and what isn't.
Discover Near Us is not an open marketplace. A business can't sign itself up and start receiving leads from every hotel running Stayhos — visibility is hotel-by-hotel, decided by each property. There's no guarantee attached to any of it: not a guaranteed number of leads, not a guaranteed booking rate, not a guaranteed response time from either side.
Stayhos also doesn't sit in the middle of the money. It doesn't process payments, payouts, or invoices between a hotel and its local partners, and it doesn't calculate commission automatically. Where a hotel tracks commission on a partnership, that tracking is a manual record the hotel keeps, exportable as a CSV for its own accounting — not an automated billing system running in the background.
A practical next step
If you're a local business already featured in a hotel's Discover Near Us section, the leads arriving in your dashboard are worth a consistent check-in, not an occasional glance — the same logic that applies to any inbound inquiry applies here. If you're not yet partnered with a hotel and want to understand how this would work for your business, visit the local business page for the full picture of how the partnership starts.
For hotels wanting to see how Discover Near Us and the guest-facing side of this fit together, the Guest Hub demo shows it on a fictional property with no real guest data involved. For anything specific to your hotel or business, contact Stayhos directly.