How to write a guest guide people actually read
A good guide answers before anyone asks. The structure, tone and order that stop guests from texting you about the wifi password.
By Rodrigo Hernández
Co-founder of HostCompass. Builds the product with LatAm hosts: fewer midnight WhatsApps, better communication reviews.
In one sentence
A guest guide works when it follows the arc of the trip (arriving, settling in, living in the house, leaving) instead of listing categories of objects, because nobody looks up "appliances": they want coffee at seven in the morning in a kitchen they have never used.
The root mistake: sorting by things instead of moments
Almost every guide I have seen opens the same way, with a table of contents that reads like a property inventory. Appliances. Rules. Area. Contacts. That order makes sense to the person writing it, because it mirrors how you walk through your own place mentally. It makes no sense at all to the person reading it.
Your guest arrives at night, with a suitcase, after a flight. They do not have an abstract question about appliances: they need to open the door. The next morning they are not browsing the rules section; they want to know whether they can run a load of laundry before heading to the beach. A guide that works follows that timeline and no other.
Sorting by moments has a useful side effect: it forces you to admit how much of your guide nobody needs. If a section does not belong to any moment of the trip, it probably does not belong at all.
The four moments, and what goes in each
Before arrival. Exact address, how to get there from the airport or station, where to park, and the earliest check-in time. This gets sent the day before — it is not something to leave lying around for them to find. It is the only section that does its work outside the house. Booking.com tells its own hosts the same thing: remind guests of the check-in time and give them directions and parking before they leave home.
On arrival. Access, wifi, lights. Nothing else. This is the section people read with one hand full, which is exactly why it has to be the shortest one you write: a copyable password, a door number, a light switch. Put the air conditioning manual here and you have lost your reader.
During the stay. The house itself and the neighbourhood. Appliances belong here, but only the ones that are not obvious. Nobody needs instructions to open a fridge; plenty of people need them for a thermostat with three modes and a display in German.
On departure. Checkout time, what to do with the keys, the bins, the sheets. Writing it down avoids the awkward last-morning conversation, which is the one that most often ends in a lukewarm review.
Write the way you speak, not the way you draft policy
There is an enormous gap between "guests are kindly requested to maintain moderate volume after 22:00" and "after ten the neighbours are asleep, so keep the music down". They say the same thing. Only one sounds like a person.
Tone matters more than it looks, because a guest cannot ask you for nuance. If a sentence can be read two ways, they will pick whichever suits them — or they will message you to check, and avoiding that message was the entire point.
Three things help more than anything else:
- Short sentences. One idea each. If you need a comma to chain two instructions together, that is probably two sentences.
- Second person. "Leave the keys on the table", not "keys must be left on the table". The passive voice reads like a contract.
- The reason, when there is one. "Please don't flush paper, the septic tank is old" gets followed. "No paper in the toilet" gets argued with.
Five sentences worth more than five paragraphs
Some details feel obvious to a host and are impossible for a guest to guess. They are worth writing down even when they sound trivial:
- Which of the two keys opens the street door.
- That the hot water takes a minute to arrive.
- That the coffee machine takes one specific pod format, and there are three in the drawer.
- That the wifi is weak in the back bedroom.
- That the doorbell does not work and you have to call instead.
None of those appear in a generic template. All of them come from receiving the same message twice.
Add a photo where a sentence will not do
The façade at night, the fuse box, the thermostat panel. A photo does not replace the text, it anchors it: your guest compares what they see with what is in front of them and stops second-guessing. Airbnb recommends preparing the arrival with clear instructions, and an image is the cheapest way to do it.
If you would rather start from something than from a blank page, which manual sections guests actually open has the full structure as a table, ready to copy and fill in.
How to tell whether your guide works
The signal is not praise in a review. It is silence: if you answered the wifi question three times last week and none this week, the guide is doing its job. That is the only indicator that matters, and it needs no tooling to measure.
And when a new question does arrive, do not just answer it in chat — answer it and add it to the guide. A living guide is written from the messages you receive, not in one sitting the day you list the property. For the most delicate moment of all, arrival, automating check-in is the next step.