A digital house manual for your vacation rental
A house manual, a welcome book, and a digital guidebook are the same thing. House manual is the name Airbnb uses inside its app; other hosts call it a welcome book or a digital guidebook. Whatever you call it, it is the one place a guest looks when they have a question: the wifi, how to get in, the checkout list, the quirks of the place. FreshLinen is that, at one link, for every guest however they booked.
What a good digital house manual holds
- The wifi network and password, on a page a guest can find in one tap
- Arrival steps and parking, written as steps, that load with no cell service at the front door
- House rules, quiet hours, trash and recycling day, and how the fussy appliances work
- Your favorite nearby food and things to do, chosen by you, with a map
That is the practical half of hosting, the half Airbnb's built-in guidebook cannot hold, since that is a list of local recommendations with no room for your wifi, your check-in steps, or your rules. For the full section-by-section list, see what to put in a welcome book or copy the welcome book template, or download it as a free Word file.
Download a free house manual template
If you want a file first, start with ours. Where our welcome book template leads with the welcome note and local picks, this one covers how the house works, room by room. It is twelve pages: a cover, a quick reference page, where to find things, the kitchen, heating and hot water, TV and wifi, laundry and trash, the outdoors, what to try when something stops working, house rules, a checkout list, and a safety page.
The page for when something stops working answers the texts you would otherwise get at 10 PM, like a tripped breaker or a chirping smoke alarm, with the fix a guest can try first. Every page carries a short prompt for what to write. It opens in Word, Google Docs, and Pages, and prints clean in black and white. The door code row reads “sent to you privately before arrival,” because a printed manual gets shared and photographed, and the code should never be in it.
Free to use and share. No email asked, no signup.
Why a link and a QR code beat a printed binder
A printed binder is a real object a guest can flip through, and that is the whole of its case. It goes out of date the day you change the wifi password, it walks off or gets coffee spilled on it, and there is one copy for a house that might sleep eight. A FreshLinen house manual is a plain link and a QR code instead. When you fix a typo or change the trash day, every guest sees the new version at once, because there is nothing to reprint. Leave the QR on the fridge and by the door, and paste the link into your check-in message, so a guest reading on the drive in and a guest standing at the door both reach the same book.
Why it beats a PDF, too
A PDF fixes the always-current problem only halfway. You still have to re-export and re-send it every time something changes, and a guest who saved an old copy is reading stale directions. It is also a poor thing to read on a phone: no search, so a guest scrolls the whole file to find the wifi, and no page a host can point to. FreshLinen gives each section its own page, so “wifi” or “door code” is one tap away, and a guest can type what they are looking for and land on it. The arrival page saves to the phone and opens with no signal, which is exactly the moment a guest needs directions or a gate code at your front step. Touch Stay, the closest paid competitor, charges for offline: it is left out of their $99 a year Starter tier and only unlocks on the Growth plan at $139 a year for one property (checked July 2026). FreshLinen includes offline at its one flat price.
Only your content
A guest reading your house manual sees what you wrote and nothing else. FreshLinen has no ads, no sponsored picks, and no store, which also keeps the manual clear of Airbnb's off-platform rules. One flat price, $49.99 a year for every property you host, is the whole business. FreshLinen does not have your guests' contact details and never emails them; sharing is you pasting the link, or the QR left at the property.
Open a real example book first, read the welcome book guide for Airbnb hosts, or see what $49.99 covers.