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Owner

Owner setup, part 1: create your account and trial

Sign up as the hotel's Owner, choose a plan, start the 14-day free trial, and find the checklist that guides the rest of your setup.

By The Xenia team · · 4 min read

The Xenia overview with the six-step checklist for getting a new hotel ready for its first booking

This is part 1 of 7 of the Xenia owner setup guide: 1. Your account · 2. Hotel details · 3. Rooms and rates · 4. Roles and staff · 5. Payments and security · 6. First booking and going live · 7. What to do next.

When you sign up for Xenia you become the hotel's Owner. The Owner is the one person who can do everything: change roles, invite staff, see billing and set where guest payments go. This six-part guide takes you from nothing to a hotel your staff can sign in to and use. It uses a made-up hotel, Sunrise Hotel in Lagos, so every screen you see is a real Xenia screen, but none of the people or figures is real.

Before you start

  • An email address that only you use. It becomes your sign-in and it receives the alerts about your hotel's money.

  • The name of the company that owns the hotel, and the name of the hotel itself. They can be the same.

  • A password of at least 10 characters with upper and lower case letters and a number.

Step 1: start with your email

Open the Xenia sign-up page and type your work email. Tick the box to agree to the terms of service and privacy policy, then choose Send me a code.

Xenia sign-up page asking for a work email and agreement to the terms

Step 2: confirm the code

Xenia emails you a six-digit code to prove the address is yours. Type it in and choose Confirm email. If it does not arrive within a minute, check your spam folder, then use Resend code. If you typed the wrong address, choose Use a different email.

Xenia asking for the six-digit code sent to the owner's email

Step 3: tell Xenia about you and your hotel

Fill in your first and last name, your phone number with the country code (for example +234 for Nigeria), the business name that owns the hotel, the hotel name, and a password. Choose Create account.

Sign-up form with name, phone, business name, hotel name and password filled in

Step 4: choose a plan and start the trial

Xenia charges per room per month, so a small hotel pays little. Pick a plan, type how many rooms you have, choose monthly or yearly billing, then Start my 14-day free trial. The plans differ by what they include:

  • Essentials: rooms, bookings, bills and the tamper-proof audit trail for one hotel, with up to 5 staff accounts.

  • Standard: everything in Essentials, plus alerts that tell the owner when something looks wrong, with up to 15 staff accounts.

  • Pro: everything in Standard, plus door-lock card issuing, several hotels and unlimited staff.

You can change the plan or the number of rooms later from Billing, so do not worry about choosing perfectly.

Plan choice page with the Standard plan selected for 12 rooms

Your checklist

You land on the Overview. At the top is a checklist called Get your hotel ready for its first booking. It has six steps and each one has a button that opens the right screen. It looks at your hotel itself, so a step is ticked as soon as it is really done, however you did it. It disappears once the required steps are finished, and you can hide it at any time with Hide this guide.

The Xenia overview with the six-step checklist for getting a new hotel ready for its first booking

The next five parts of this guide follow the same order as the checklist, with a few extras that make the hotel safer to run.

Next: Part 2: your hotel's details and business rules.

See your own hotel in Xenia

Start free for 14 days with no card. Add your rooms, invite your staff, and watch the money in one place.