Besty can be live the same day you set it up. This is the sequence that works, and it is worth following in order because several steps depend on earlier ones.

Your PMS connection pulls your listings and reservation data in. Confirm they arrived and look right before configuring anything else.

Under Listings you will see a count in the form of enabled over total. Toggling listings on and off is how you control cost, because billing is per active listing. A property you are not running through Besty should be toggled off.

In Settings, then General, decide on Auto-enable new listings when Besty detects them in your PMS. Turning it on means a newly synced property starts working immediately without anyone remembering to enable it, and it also starts billing.

Connect Stripe, or GuestyPay if you are on Guesty, so upsells charge automatically. Without it, every upsell has to be charged by hand from the ROI To do queue, which turns a revenue feature into a chore.

Stripe connections can sit in a Pending state with a reason such as requirements outstanding. Check for that rather than assuming it completed.

Set your language, your hosting company name and hosting agent, and connect your email.

Connect the email address you use on your PMS, because Besty pulls automated and journey emails sent from your PMS into your unified inbox from that mailbox. If your Airbnb resolution centre uses a different address, add it as a second account marked read only, so Besty receives those messages but never sends from it.

For notifications, escalation-only is the setting most teams want. Notifying on every new guest message is a lot of volume when Besty is handling most of them. If your team would rather review messages before they go out at first, Confirm send adds a second look, and it is easy to switch off later.

The recommendation is fully on, 24/7, across all listings.

The reason that is safe to do on day one: Besty only sends a message itself when it is completely sure. When it is not, it writes a draft and waits for you. You stay in control of everything it is uncertain about, and you get the benefit on everything it is not.

Do not configure your tone on day one. The model already has a warm, hospitable voice out of the box. Let it run for a week, see how it sounds against real guests, then tune Messaging Style, which can be scoped per listing rather than set globally.

One question drives most of this configuration: do you do same-day turns?

If you do not, set the blocking rules to always block the night before an early check-in and the night of a late check-out. That is the safe configuration, and it prevents a service failure where an early arrival meets a property that is still occupied.

Common starting values, which you can tune later:

Understand the fulfilment flow before you go live, because it is the step most often missed. When a guest buys an upsell, Besty blocks the night and puts a task in your ROI To do list. If it is not charging through Stripe you charge it, you update the reservation in your PMS, and you clear the block. Upsells do not finalise themselves in your PMS.

Create your listing sets early, grouping properties by whatever you actually manage by: pools, pet-friendly, tiers, regions. Almost every "apply this to only some properties" answer in Besty routes back to listing sets, so having them in place makes everything after this easier.

Then add two or three knowledge base entries so you learn the motion. Three rules:

Add users under Settings, then User Management, each with their own login and role. Nobody should be sharing an account.

Check the main admin email is the right one, because it cannot be changed later.

Field staff should install the mobile app from app.getbesty.ai/mobile on their phone during setup rather than later. Push notifications do not work without it, and tasks cannot be started without location sharing enabled.

Three things and your team is trained.

The colours. Purple is Autopilot, green is upsell offers, blue is manual, yellow is journey messages. That tells you at a glance who is handling a conversation.

The daily habit. Filter to unanswered messages once a day. That is the queue of drafts waiting on a human, and it is the whole job.

Upset guest? Pause Autopilot, journeys and upsells for that one conversation from the Automation card in the guest sidebar, without touching anything global.

Check the unanswered filter daily. Review the Suggested Host Notes queue at the end of the week and drive it to zero, because pending suggestions are not reliably used until approved. After a week of real conversations, revisit Messaging Style with actual examples in front of you.

Reach out via chat or at support@getbesty.ai.