A welcome book is the one place a guest looks when they have a question, which means it earns its keep in the first hour of a stay and again every time something is not obvious. A good one answers the question before it is asked. Here is what belongs in it, roughly in the order a guest needs it. You do not need all of it on day one; start with the essentials and add the rest as guests ask.
The essentials, before anything else
These four are what a guest reaches for first. If your book has nothing else, it should have these.
- Arrival and check-in. How to find the place, where to park, and how to get in. Write it as steps, not a paragraph, and name the landmarks a map will not. If there is a gate, a lockbox, or a tricky turn, this is where it goes. Keep the actual door code out of the book itself and send it in a private message close to arrival.
- Wifi. The network name and the password, exactly as typed. This is the single most searched thing in any welcome book, so make it its own page, not a line buried in a paragraph.
- House rules. Quiet hours, whether pets or events are allowed, smoking, the parking limit, trash and recycling day. Plain and friendly beats a wall of legal text. Guests follow rules they can find and understand.
- Checkout. The time, and the short list of what you want done before they go: start the dishwasher, strip the beds or not, where to leave the keys. A three-line checklist saves you a message on every stay.
The things guests actually thank you for
The essentials keep a stay from going wrong. The next few are what make a guest leave a warm review.
- How things work. The one appliance that is not obvious: the espresso machine, the fireplace, the pool heater, the fussy shower. A short how-to on each saves a late-night text and a broken part.
- Where to eat and what to do. Not a scraped list of everything nearby, but the handful of places you would send a friend to, with a line on why. This is the part a guest cannot get from a search engine, and it is the part they remember.
- The quirks of the place.The door that sticks, the light switch in an odd spot, the recycling that goes out on Thursdays, the neighbor's dog. Naming the quirks up front reads as care, not apology.
What to leave out
Two things do not belong in the book. The first is the door code or any other live security detail; a book lives at a link, so the safe place for a code is a message sent close to arrival. The second is anything for sale. A welcome book that shows a guest an ad or a paid upsell stops being hospitality and starts being a billboard. If you would not tape a flyer to the fridge, it does not belong in the book.
Make it easy to find, and to trust offline
The best welcome book is useless if a guest cannot open it. Put it behind a single link and a QR code, and leave the QR somewhere obvious: on the fridge, by the door, next to the router. Arrival information in particular should work without a signal, because the moment a guest needs directions or a door code is often the moment their phone has one bar at your front step. If you want a place to start, our guide for Airbnb hosts covers the same ground with Airbnb in mind, and the welcome book template gives you a structure to copy.