5 Checkfront Features Most Operators Don’t Know They Have

Every account has some undiscovered settings that fix a problem you have been solving by hand. Our support team fields the same questions all season long, and a surprising number of the answers are: Checkfront already does that. These five Checkfront features come up constantly in support tickets from operators who did not know they were included, and each one replaces a manual workaround most teams have quietly accepted.

The five Checkfront features, and what each one replaces

If you read nothing else, read this:

1. Partner Accounts replace the spreadsheet you use to track agent and hotel referrals.
2. Cutoff and Booking Windows replace the phone call telling a guest you cannot actually run their 8am departure.
3. Scheduled Email Notifications replace the reminder and follow-up emails you send by hand.
4. Guest Forms replace the pre-trip email chase for names, sizes, and dietary needs.
5. Staff Account Permissions replace giving a seasonal hire your personal login.

Make sure to find where each one lives and what it changes. It is worth the hour. Only 33% of experiences were booked online in 2025, against 64% of the travel market as a whole, so this is still a sector running a great deal of its admin by hand.¹

Partner Accounts: let agents book for you without giving up your back office

Hotels, concierges, and local agents send you business. Most operators handle that with a phone call, a held spot, and an invoice at the end of the month. That channel is getting more valuable, not less. OTAs surged to 37% of operator bookings in 2025, direct website bookings saw their steepest decline yet, and trade channels are on the rise.² A Partner Account is how you take the agent business without handing over an OTA commission on it.

A Partner Account gives that agent their own login and private dashboard. They book on your behalf, track what they have earned, and can embed a booking portal on their own site. What they cannot do is see your inventory, your company reporting, or your settings, and they cannot modify your account.

Commission is set per partner, and a “Calculate Commissions After Booking Discounts” setting decides whether the commission is figured before or after a discount lands. The Commission Report tracks what every partner is owed and lets you mark it paid, so you are not keeping that tally yourself. It does not send partners their money for you, so you still settle up the way you always have. Checkfront cites 17% more business through channel partners for operators using them.³

Find it at Manage > User Accounts > Partner Accounts, then New Partner. NextGen has no Manage menu, so on that version the same screen lives at Account > User Accounts > Partner Accounts. Two limits to know: your plan caps how many partner accounts you can add, and partners can only work in a browser.

Cutoff and Booking Windows: stop taking bookings you cannot staff

A booking that lands at 7:58am for an 8am departure is not a win. Neither is the one that arrives eleven months out for a season you have not priced yet.

Draw the line deliberately, because same-day demand is real money. Depending on the type of experience, 12% to 30% of experiences are booked on the day itself.¹ That is why the setting that matters most below is the one that closes your public booking page while leaving your own team free to take the call.

Both are one setting each, and both sit a level deeper than most operators expect. On the Products edition, open Inventory > Products, edit a product, and go to the Availability tab. The rules are not on the tab itself. They live inside each availability event you create there, and every event has a Booking Rules toggle you have to switch on before any of the policies below take effect:

• Cutoff Window stops bookings landing too close to the start time. Set it for minutes, hours, days, or weeks.
• Booking Window sets how far ahead someone can book at all.
• Min Duration and Max Duration hold the line on how long a rental or nightly stay can run.

The part operators miss is the last dropdown. Each rule can apply to customer bookings only, staff bookings only, both, or neither. So the public booking page can close at 24 hours while your team keeps taking the 7:58am call when you know you can run it.

On Classic Items the same job is done by Item Rules at Inventory > Rules, where triggers like date, day of week, or booking window fire an action such as turning an item off, adjusting a rate, or hiding availability. Seasonal Item Events let each item carry its own ruleset, so cutoff rules can be tailored item by item instead of applied across the board. Items are fiddlier than Products here, so it helps to watch it done once: Checkfront has a walkthrough on avoiding last-minute bookings on Items.

Scheduled Email Notifications: the follow-up you keep forgetting to send

Most operators know Checkfront can send a booking confirmation email. Fewer know it will also send an email a set amount of time before or after a booking, on its own, forever.

Go to Manage > Notifications > Email > Email Notification, choose New Notification, and pick the Scheduled delivery option. From there you set the interval in hours, days, weeks, or months, and anchor it to the booking’s start date, end date, or the date it was created.

That covers the three emails teams write by hand all season: the what-to-bring note two days before, the review request the morning after, and the come-back-next-season nudge eleven months out. Messages go out at the same hour they were created. One limit to plan around: if you schedule in hours, the range is capped at 48 hours either side of a booking, so anything further out than that has to be set in days, weeks, or months instead.

Guest Forms: the reason your Daily Manifest only shows one name

Here is the most surprising one. If your Daily Manifest lists a booking for six and a single name, nothing is broken. Guest information only reaches the manifest when a Guest Form is switched on.

The Booking Form collects details from the person who paid. The Guest Form extends it to everyone else on the booking: first name, last name, email, phone, and whatever else you need before they arrive. Checkfront’s documentation is direct about the dependency, stating that the Guest Form integration “is required to collect and include Guest information within your Daily Manifest.”

Turn it on at Manage > Integrations > Guest Management > Guest Forms, then choose your fields at Manage > Layout > Guest Form. The results show up under Booking > Daily Manifest, including which guests still have not filled theirs in. That is the list your morning staff actually wants. It works on both Classic Items and Classic Products.

One caveat worth hearing from our support team: the Guest Form asks your guests to do the work, and some find that flow clunky enough that operators switch it off. If that is you, the Booking Index gives you a second route. Put the questions you need on the Booking Form instead, then go to Booking > Booking Index and use the Booking Form Fields filter to pull up every booking in a date range that answered a given way, whether that is an accessibility need, a special occasion, or a newsletter opt-in. The same screen lets you change statuses, check guests in and out, and add booking notes in bulk, which is the tool you want on a weather day.

Staff Account Permissions: seasonal access without the whole account

A June hire does not need to see your revenue, and they definitely do not need to issue refunds. Handing out a full admin login because it is faster is the most common version of this problem.

At Manage > User Accounts > Staff Accounts, open an account and go to Permissions. Turning Admin off reveals the restricted set, and a restricted user loses the Manage menu entirely. From there, permissions run across ten categories, and the useful detail is how far down they go:

• Payments treats processing a payment and issuing a refund as two separate toggles.
• Reports and Booking Data has a toggle per report, plus its own switch for exporting anything at all.
• Bookings separates create, modify, and void, and controls who can overbook an item.
• Calendars governs access to calendar views and to RSS and iCal feeds.

The practical version: a guide gets the Daily Manifest and check-in, a lead gets bookings and payments, and only you keep refunds and revenue reports.

Where to start

Pick the one that matches the manual job you did most this summer. If you spent the season chasing guest details, start with Guest Forms. If you spent it apologizing to agents about commission, start with Partner Accounts.

Sources

1. Arival and Phocuswright, in partnership with Civitatis. Travel Experiences 2026: Market Sizing, Operator and Consumer Behavior Highlights, 2026. Figures as reported by Arival in 4 Findings for the Experiences Market in 2026.
2. Arival. Global Operator Landscape (4th Ed.): The State of Experiences, 2026, based on a survey of more than 5,000 operators worldwide. Figures as reported by Arival in Direct Bookings Dive, OTAs Rise.
3. Checkfront customer outcome figures, published at checkfront.com.

FAQ: Are these features available on every Checkfront plan?

ANS: Availability varies by plan. Partner Accounts are capped by plan, so the number you can create depends on which one you are on, and other features can differ between plan tiers. Check your account or ask support before you build a workflow that depends on one.

FAQ: What is the difference between the Booking Form and the Guest Form?

ANS: The Booking Form collects information from the person making and paying for the booking. The Guest Form collects information from each individual guest on that booking, which is what allows the Daily Manifest to show every guest rather than only the lead name.

FAQ: Does Checkfront pay my partners their commission automatically?

ANS: No. The Commission Report tracks what each partner is owed and lets you mark commissions as paid once you have settled them, so the record lives in one place. Sending the money itself is still something you do outside Checkfront.

FAQ: Can a partner see my other bookings or my reports?

ANS: No. A Partner Account has its own private dashboard for their bookings and their commission. It does not give access to your inventory, your company reporting, or your account settings.

FAQ: I cannot find the Availability tab on my products. Where are booking rules?

ANS: You are most likely on Classic Items rather than Classic Products. The equivalent lives under Inventory, then Rules, as Item Rules, where you set a trigger such as date, day of week, or booking window, and an action such as turning an item off, adjusting a rate, or hiding availability.

FAQ: Can I stop taking online bookings close to departure but still let staff book?

ANS: Yes. Each booking rule has an application setting with four options: do not apply, apply to staff bookings only, apply to customer bookings only, or apply to both. Setting a Cutoff Window to customer bookings only closes the public booking page while leaving your team able to add a late booking.

FAQ: Do partners work in the Checkfront mobile apps?

ANS: No. The mobile apps do not support Partner Accounts. Partners need to work from a desktop or mobile browser instead.