Remembering Returning Guests
Remembering returning guests, carefully
A guest who's stayed before is recognized on their next stay — with memory that's host-curated, visibility-scoped, and never a copy of the actual conversation.
Personalization and privacy usually pull in opposite directions. This shipped in the same week specifically to get the balance right before either guest memory or guest-contributed content went live.
Returning-guest memory
A per-host guest identity (keyed to a normalized email or phone — never shared across hosts) tracks stay history and lets a host attach memory items with an explicit visibility:
guest_safe— may be surfaced back to the guest on a future stay.host_only— for the host's eyes alone.- Never a raw transcript. Memory is always a short, deliberate summary — written or approved by the host, not silently harvested.
Guestbook
A lightweight, guest-contributed companion: a favorite moment, a local recommendation, an optional signature — submitted from the guest link or kiosk, held as pending until a host approves it, and optionally folded into HOWI's own recommendation intelligence once live.
The shared design choice
Guests can contribute (guestbook) and hosts can curate (memory items) — but nothing about a guest's presence in a world is ever inferred or stored without one of those two deliberate paths.
