Guests

What a guest is

A guest is a person who has interacted with your space through your public website without being a full member. In Deskie, a guest is a real user account that holds the GUEST role in your workspace, rather than the MEMBER role that signed-up members hold. Guests are created automatically when someone uses your public site to book a resource, buy a pass, or purchase an event ticket. You do not create guests by hand. They appear because someone transacted with your space.

The practical difference between a guest and a member comes down to status. A guest has a record in your workspace and a history of what they booked or bought, but their underlying member profile is created as inactive. Members are the people you actively manage, and they show up in your active-member lists. Guests sit in a separate bucket so you can see one-off and occasional visitors without them cluttering your member rosters. For the bigger picture of how members work day to day, see Managing members.

How a guest record is created

Guest records are generated by the public-facing flows on your public website. When someone completes a public booking, pass purchase, or event ticket purchase and they are not already a signed-in member, Deskie creates the guest behind the scenes. The process works as follows:

• User account. If no user already exists for the email address provided, Deskie creates one using the first and last name entered at checkout. New guest accounts are flagged so the person must change their password the first time they log in.
• Login credentials. If the person has a user account but no way to log in yet, Deskie creates login credentials with a temporary password and marks the account as needing a password change.
• Member profile. A member profile is created for the guest in your workspace, storing their phone number. This profile is created as inactive by default, which is what keeps the person in the guest bucket rather than in your active-member lists.
• Workspace role. A workspace relationship is created with the GUEST role, marking the person as a guest of your workspace.
• Location. The guest's profile is anchored to a primary location. The public flows anchor it to the location of the resource, pass, or event the person is transacting against, with your workspace's default location available as a fallback. This keeps location-scoped rosters accurate.

When a new guest is created this way, Deskie notifies your admins of the new signup through push notification, SMS, and email so you know someone new has come through the door.

What you can see on a guest record

Each guest record collects the person's activity in one place. From the guest's detail view you can see:

• Identity. Name, email, phone number, and profile image.
• Onboarding status. Whether the guest has completed their initial setup. This is derived from whether they still need to change their password. A guest who still needs to change their password reads as not onboarded.
• Bookings. Their booking history, including the resource booked, the location, the start and end times, the status, the payment status, and the amount.
• Pass purchases. Any passes they have bought, with the pass type, location, total and remaining uses, purchase price, payment status, purchase date, and expiry where one applies.
• Event tickets. Tickets they hold, including the event title and status, location, event times, quantity, ticket price, total amount, payment status, ticket status, and check-in time if they have checked in.
• Email and SMS history. A log of emails and text messages sent to the guest, including the subject or message, whether it was sent or failed, and who sent it. This history is tied to the guest's member profile, so it is available for guests created through the standard public flow.

The guest list itself is sorted by recent activity, most recent first. Each guest's last active time is based on their most recent booking, falling back to when they first became a guest if they have no bookings on record.

Editing and contacting a guest

You can update a guest's name, email, and phone number from their record. Updating the name and email changes the underlying user account, and the phone number is stored on the guest's member profile. If a guest does not yet have a member profile and you add a phone number, Deskie creates a profile for them and anchors it to your workspace's default location so the guest stays visible in location-scoped views.

You can also resend a welcome email to a guest. This generates a fresh password reset link, valid for one hour, and emails it to the guest using your workspace context so the link points at your sign-in. This is useful when a guest never set their password or needs to regain access. To learn more about the look and content of these emails, see Branding and custom emails.

Guest access to doors

Guests can be granted physical access to your space based on what they have booked or bought, without being full members. When a guest is signed in, Deskie works out which doors they should be able to open right now by looking at their current activity:

• Active bookings. Confirmed bookings that are happening now, where the booked resource has door access enabled, grant access for the duration of the booking.
• Passes for today. Pass usages scheduled or checked in for the current day, on pass types with door access enabled, grant access for that day. Single-use passes scheduled for today that still have remaining uses do the same.
• Events happening now. Confirmed event tickets for an event that is currently underway, where the event has door access enabled, grant access for the duration of the event.

Each of these produces an access window with a start and end time, and the relevant doors are unlocked to the guest only within that window. This works through the Kisi door access integration. If Kisi is not configured, no doors can be returned. For the full picture of access control, see Door access overview and Passes, events, and access.

Converting a guest into a member

When a guest becomes a regular, you can convert them into a full member with a single action. Converting a guest does the following:

• Promotes the role. The guest's workspace role is changed from GUEST to MEMBER.
• Activates the profile. Because guest profiles are created inactive, conversion flips the member profile to active. This is what makes the person show up in your active-member rosters and lets the in-app billing views render correctly.
• Creates a profile if needed. If an older guest has no member profile, conversion creates one, anchored to your workspace's default location, and activates it.
• Sends an onboarding email. Deskie emails the new member a link to begin onboarding, respecting your workspace's welcome email settings. If you have customized your welcome email content, that content is used, and if welcome emails are turned off for your workspace, the email is skipped. A failure to send the email does not undo the conversion.

The conversion keeps the person's history intact. Their past bookings, passes, and event tickets carry over, since they remain the same underlying user and profile. After conversion, manage them like any other member, including onboarding and billing. See Inviting and onboarding and Plans and memberships for next steps.