Introducing Guest Requests
A clean way for guests to ask a question or report an issue — and a tidy place for you to track and resolve it. Separate from your private member discussions, and switched on only where you host guests.
Two Different Conversations
Co-owning a property involves two kinds of conversation, and they don't belong in the same place. There's the private one among the people who own and run the property — scheduling repairs, sorting out the budget, deciding who gets the Fourth of July. And there's the one with the people staying there, who mostly just need to tell you something: the hot tub won't start, where do the trash bins go, the Wi-Fi password isn't working.
Mixing those together is awkward. Guests shouldn't see your members' back-and-forth, and your members shouldn't have to dig through guest questions to find their own discussion. That's exactly what Guest Requests fixes.
Messages and Requests, Cleanly Separated
Messages is now a private back-channel for your admins and members only — guests never see it. Requests is the guest-to-host lane: a lightweight ticket system where a guest opens a request and your team responds. Think of it as the difference between a family group chat and a front desk.
The two never overlap. A guest can only ever see their own requests — not another guest's, and not your members' discussions. Someone staying months from now will never stumble onto a prior guest's conversation.
Built for Triage, Not Just Chat
A request isn't a message thread — it's something you need to resolve. So every request carries the things you need to manage it to completion:
- A status. Open, in progress, or resolved — so nothing slips through the cracks, and you can see at a glance what still needs attention.
- An assignee. Hand a request to a specific member or admin so it's clear who owns it. Filter the list by status or by who it's assigned to.
- A full conversation. Reply back and forth with the guest, with the original request and every response kept together in one place.
Replying to a resolved request automatically reopens it, so a follow-up question never gets lost after you've marked something done. And a badge on the Requests tab shows how many are still unresolved.
Off by Default, On Where You Need It
Plenty of shared properties aren't rented to outside guests at all — a family cabin used only by the co-owners has no need for a guest front desk. So Guest Requests is off by default and enabled per property. Flip it on under Settings → General and the Requests tab appears for your members; leave it off and the tab stays hidden entirely.
Only administrators can turn it on or off, and the setting is per-property — so a household with several properties can enable it only on the ones that actually host guests.
Who Can Do What
- Guests open requests and reply to their own — and see nothing else.
- Admins and members triage every request: respond, set status, and assign. They don't file requests themselves — that's what Messages is for.
- Nothing is lost. In keeping with how OurSharedPlace treats history, requests aren't deleted — they're resolved and kept for the record.