The Airbnb welcome book, done properly

A welcome book has one job: to answer the question the guest has at the moment they have it, without them messaging you. Everything about how you write one follows from that — including the order of sections, which should match the order the questions arrive, not the order that feels logical from the host’s side.

This is the structure that holds up across apartment, cabin and guesthouse hosting, with wording examples you can adapt. It applies whether your book is a PDF, a printed folder, or a digital guide — though we will be honest about where each format struggles.

Before arrival

1. Getting there

The first question of every stay is logistical. Cover the address as a guest actually uses it — what to type into the map app, which entrance, what the building looks like from the street. If parking exists, say exactly where and whether it costs anything; if it does not, say what to do instead. A photo of the building from the arriving guest’s viewpoint saves three messages a month on its own.

From the tram stop, walk back ten metres against the direction of travel. The green door between the pharmacy and the bakery is ours.

2. Check-in, step by step

Write it as numbered steps, one action each, with a photo per step for anything involving a lockbox, keypad or unusual door. Include the time check-in opens and what to do when arriving earlier or later. The test: could someone follow it at 23:00, tired, in the rain, without calling you?

Keep the door code itself out of the document if you can. A code in a PDF sent at booking is a code held by a stranger for weeks, surviving every code change you make. This is the one place a digital guide is structurally better: a door code on a timer joins the page only when check-in approaches, and leaves when the stay ends.

3. When are you arriving?

Not a section guests read, but a question the book should ask. Knowing the arrival hour is the difference between a warm handover and a guest on the pavement. In a printed book the best you can do is ask them to message you; a digital guide can ask directly and record the answer.

During the stay

4. WiFi

Network name and password, spelled in groups (“brazi-2026, all lower case”), positioned where a guest looks first — near the front of the book and ideally on a card by the router too. If your guide can show a QR code that joins the network on scan, use it; typing Tr7#kP9!x from a laminated card is nobody’s favourite arrival ritual.

5. How things work

The boiler, the induction hob, the washing machine, the air conditioning, the TV. One short entry per appliance, written for someone who has never seen that model. Photos of the actual controls beat generic instructions every time. This section grows from real questions: every time a guest asks one, the answer goes in.

6. House rules

Five rules, stated plainly, with reasons where the reason helps. “Quiet after 22:00 — the neighbours have small children” lands better than a list of prohibitions. If something carries a fee or a consequence, say so here, not in a dispute afterwards. Ten rules read like a contract; guests stop at five.

7. Local recommendations

The corner of the book only you can write. Skip the top-ten lists guests can find themselves; give the five places you actually go, one line each on why, with walking times. “The cafe on the corner does the best breakfast within ten minutes — ask for the omelette” is worth a page of maps.

Leaving

8. Check-out

Time, what to do with keys, and at most four or five tasks — realistic ones. A guest will run the dishwasher and close the windows; they will not strip beds to a hotel standard, and a demanding list sours the last impression a review is built on. If your guide supports it, make this a tickable checklist that surfaces on the last morning.

9. The emergency block

Short, findable, and written before it is needed: your number, an alternative contact, the address in the form an operator expects, where the water shut-off and fuse box are. Guests may never open it — it earns its place for the one time they do.

10. The goodbye

Two sentences. Thank them, say how to reach you about anything left behind, and — if reviews matter to you — say so once, lightly. Anything longer reads as a form letter.

Keeping it alive

The real failure mode of welcome books is not bad writing — it is January’s book answering July’s questions. The heating instructions are wrong by summer, the restaurant closed, the code changed. A printed book ages the day it is printed; a PDF is a printed book that lives in a chat thread.

Whatever format you choose, put one habit around it: when a guest asks a question the book should have answered, update the book that day. If the book is digital, the fix reaches every current and future guest the moment you save it — which, more than any feature, is the argument for keeping the guide in one live place rather than in a hundred sent copies.