Local Guide

Help your guests discover the best of the area around your properties. The Local Guide lets you create a curated collection of restaurants, cafes, attractions, beaches, shops, and activities -- complete with descriptions, photos, and map locations powered by Google Maps.

Why create a Local Guide

Great guest experiences extend beyond the front door. By sharing your personal recommendations, you:

• Save guests time -- They do not have to search for places to eat, things to do, or where to find a supermarket.
• Add a personal touch -- Curated recommendations show you care about your guests' experience and know the area well.
• Reduce repetitive questions -- Instead of answering the same "Where should we eat?" messages, point guests to your Local Guide.
• Stand out from competitors -- A polished local guide gives your listing a professional edge that guests remember.

Feature overview

The Local Guide includes a full set of tools for organizing and presenting local recommendations:

• Categories with icons and colors -- Group places into categories like Restaurants, Activities, or Shopping. Each category has a customizable FontAwesome icon, color, and optional cover image. Seven default categories are created automatically when you start.
• Tags for filtering -- Assign tags such as "Family Friendly", "Budget", "Walking Distance", or "Hidden Gem" to any place. Guests can filter by tag to find exactly what they need. Tags can be global (shared across all guidebooks) or specific to a single guidebook.
• Host Tips -- Mark your personal top recommendations with the Host Tip badge. These places are always shown first in results, making them stand out to guests.
• Featured Highlights -- Flag places as highlights and they appear in a featured carousel at the top of the guest view. Up to 10 highlighted items are shown at a time, selected randomly from all your published highlights, so the carousel feels fresh on repeat visits.
• Google Maps integration -- Paste any Google Maps link and coordinates are extracted automatically. Supports standard Google Maps URLs, shortened goo.gl links, and maps.app.goo.gl links.
• Multi-guidebook support -- Each place can be linked to multiple guidebooks independently. A beach restaurant might appear in both your beachfront apartment guidebook and your villa guidebook, without duplicating the content.
• Translations -- Every field (category names, place titles, descriptions, and full body content) supports translations in 22 languages, including English, Dutch, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Czech, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, Greek, Hungarian, Romanian, and Ukrainian.
• Image optimization -- Uploaded photos are automatically compressed and resized into three sizes (large, medium, thumbnail) for fast loading on any device.

How the guest experience works

When the Local Guide is linked to a guidebook, it appears as the "Nearby" section in the guidebook navigation. Here is what guests see:

1. Featured carousel -- If you have marked any places as highlights, a carousel of up to 10 featured items is displayed at the top of the page. Items are selected randomly from all published highlights that have a featured image.
2. Category browsing -- Guests can browse by category. Depending on your display settings, categories appear either as visual image tiles or as compact filter pills.
3. Tag filtering -- Within a category (or across all places), guests can filter by tags to narrow results.
4. Interactive map -- All published places with coordinates are shown as pins on an interactive map. Tapping a pin shows details, and guests can open directions directly in their preferred maps app (Google Maps, Apple Maps, Waze, etc.).
5. Place details -- Each place shows its title, short description, full body content (rich text), featured image, address, phone number, website link, and tags.

Display options per guidebook

Each guidebook that includes the Local Guide has two display settings:

• Category tiles vs. filter pills -- Category tiles show large image cards for each category, creating a visual browsing experience. Filter pills show compact buttons that take up less space, better suited for guides with many categories. This is controlled by the local_guide_category_tiles setting.
• Require category selection -- When enabled, the place list is hidden until the guest selects a category. This keeps the initial view clean and focused, especially useful when you have dozens of places. This is controlled by the local_guide_require_category setting.

Visibility rules

For a place to appear in a guest-facing guidebook, all of the following must be true:

1. The guidebook has its Nearby navigation enabled (show_nav_nearby).
2. A Nearby page exists in the guidebook (system page type).
3. The place is linked to that specific guidebook.
4. The place is published (is_published is on).

If any of these conditions is not met, the place will not appear to guests in that guidebook.

TIP

Start with your top 5-10 recommendations across 2-3 categories. You can always add more later. Guests appreciate a curated list more than an exhaustive one -- focus on the places you genuinely recommend.

Getting started

1. Set up categories -- Create the categories that make sense for your area, or use the seven default categories that are pre-loaded for you.
2. Add places -- Fill each category with your recommended spots, including photos, map pins, tags, and descriptions.
3. Link to your guidebooks -- Connect the Local Guide to one or more guidebooks and configure display settings so guests can see your recommendations.

Admin tools

The Local Guide admin view gives you tools to manage your content efficiently:

• Search by place title or city across all categories.
• Filter by category, publication status (published/draft), tag, highlight status, or host tip status.
• Sort by title, category, city, publication status, highlight, host tip, or creation date (ascending or descending).
• Drag and drop to reorder categories and places within categories.

Related

• Setting Up Categories
• Adding Places
• Linking to a Guidebook
• Guidebooks -- Create the guidebook that displays your local recommendations
• Automated Emails -- Send the guidebook (with Local Guide) to guests before arrival