Guides › Short Stay

Short Stay: a welcome screen for guests

For a holiday let or a guest room. The TV greets guests by name, shows the Wi-Fi, door code, parking and check-out time, and your house guide.

What this is

Short Stay turns the television into a welcome screen for whoever is staying. It shows their name and dates (read from your booking calendar), the local weather and what is on nearby, and gives them the answers you are asked twice a week: the Wi-Fi (with a code they can scan), the door code, parking, trash day, check-out time, and a house guide of your own notes. A PIN keeps them out of your settings.

Short Stay is part of Theatrium Pro, not a separate purchase. You can set it up and preview it for free; Guest Mode, the Guest Welcome screensaver and the Apple TV Home Screen tile need Pro.

What guests see

Setting it up

Most of the filling-in is quicker on a phone. The free Theatrium app for iPhone and iPad fills the same fields; see The Theatrium app for iPhone. Everything can also be done on the TV.

1. Short Stay is opt-in. Open Settings › Dashboard › More dashboard settings and switch on Guest welcome dashboard, under Short Stay. A Short Stay section then appears in the Settings list; open it. If you do not have Theatrium Pro yet, it says what Pro adds and shows an Unlock with Theatrium Pro button; everything else works without it.

   

2. Booking Calendar: paste your property's booking export into the Booking calendar link field. On Airbnb: Calendar, pick the listing, Availability, then under Connect calendars choose Connect to another website and copy the link. Vrbo, Booking.com and a plain calendar of your own work the same way. This drives the dates on the guest screen.
3. Open More Short Stay settings. Optional: under Local Events Calendar, add a second calendar of events for guests, markets, festivals, whatever is on while they are here. Usually a calendar you already keep and share.
4. Property: the property name, your name as host, an optional host phone number and the address. The address sets the map, weather, travel times and sunrise on the guest screen.
5. House Info: the Wi-Fi network name and password (the guest screen turns them into a code to scan), door code, parking, trash day, check-out time and house rules. Leave the door code or trash day blank and its tile is hidden. The house guide is typed in the Theatrium phone app.
6. Guest Access PIN: set a PIN of four to six digits. It keeps guests out of Settings, other dashboards and the card editor while they are on the guest screen.
7. Guest Screen Background: Theme, which borrows your dashboard's own soft glow, or one of four quiet color washes: Midnight, Slate, Sand or Forest.
8. Optional: photos of the property, chosen on your phone. In the Short Stay tab of the Theatrium app (it appears once Short Stay is switched on in the app's Settings), under Guest Screen Background, choose Choose Photos…. You can send up to ten, in any shape; each photo fills its frame and the edges are cropped. The shorter side needs to be at least 720 pixels. On the guest screen they turn in a card called The Place. Choosing again replaces the photos already there.
9. Optional: Simplify My Settings hides the settings a host does not need (your own music, Light Sync, visualizations, home alerts). Show All Settings at the foot of the list brings them back.

Before each guest arrives

1. Open Settings › Short Stay, find Guest Dashboard and choose Preview to check the screen. Preview needs no PIN and returns to your dashboard on its own.
2. Choose Start Guest Mode (it reads Set a PIN to Start until you have set one). The TV stays on the guest screen, even through a restart, until the PIN is entered. Guest Mode needs Theatrium Pro.
3. To come back to your own dashboard, press Back on the guest screen and enter the PIN.