What to put in a holiday let welcome book

Most welcome books are written for the wrong moment. They open with a paragraph about how delighted we are to have you, and the WiFi password is on page four.

Think about when yours is actually opened. It is dark, it is raining, the guest has been driving for three hours, and they are standing on your doorstep with a bag in each hand. They do not want to be welcomed. They want to get in.

Write for that moment first, and the rest of the book can be as warm as you like.

The first ten minutes

Six things, in this order, before anything else:

1. How to get in. Key safe location, entry code, which door. If there is a trick to it — the handle needs lifting, the code needs a hash at the end — say so. This is where most "I cannot get in" calls come from.
2. WiFi network and password. Exactly as typed, with capitals shown. NorthernStaycations is not the same as northernstaycations and a guest cannot tell from a photo of a router.
3. Parking. Where, whether a permit is needed, and what happens if the space is taken.
4. Heating. Which control, how to turn it up, and what "normal" looks like. A cold house at 11pm produces more messages than anything else on this list.
5. Your contact details. How to reach you and how fast to expect a reply.
6. Check-out time and what to do with the keys.

Everything else — the recommendations, the house rules, the story of the building — comes after. It is not less important. It is just less urgent.

The sections that get read

From what we see in guidebook analytics, the pattern is consistent across property types:

• Arrival details get opened almost every stay, usually within a few minutes of the guest arriving.
• WiFi gets reopened repeatedly, often days later, when a second device joins.
• Local recommendations get read on day one and day two, then stop.
• Appliance instructions spike when something goes wrong — the oven, the hot tub, the log burner.
• House rules get the fewest opens of anything, which is worth knowing before you spend an evening writing them.

The sections that get skipped

Long welcome messages. One or two warm sentences land. Four paragraphs do not get read, and they push the door code below the fold.

A history of the building. Genuinely lovely, genuinely skipped on arrival. Put it further down and it will find its audience on a rainy afternoon.

Anything written as a rule that could be written as help. "Do not put anything down the toilet" reads as a telling-off. "The plumbing here is Victorian, so please bin anything other than paper — it saves us both a bad morning" reads as a person talking, and it gets followed more often.

Things people forget

• The bin day. Which bin, which day, where it goes out to. Guests want to be good about this and mostly are not told.
• How to work the shower. Especially if it is electric, or if there is a knack.
• Which windows lock and which stick.
• Where the stopcock and the fuse box are. Not for the guest's benefit — for yours, at 8am, on the phone.
• What to do if the hot tub goes cloudy. If you have one, you already know.
• The nearest walk-in NHS service and a pharmacy. Nobody thinks about this until they need it.

Keep it findable

A welcome book that has everything and no structure is a welcome book nobody uses. Two rules that hold up well:

One subject per section, and name the section what the guest would call it. "Getting in" beats "Access arrangements". "Bins and recycling" beats "Waste management".

If it can be answered in one line, answer it in one line. The checkout time does not need a paragraph.

Paper, PDF or a link

A laminated folder on the kitchen table still works. It also gets coffee spilled on it, goes out of date the day your WiFi password changes, and is no use at all to someone standing outside in the rain.

A PDF solves the rain problem and creates a new one: nobody re-downloads a PDF, so the version on their phone is the version from whenever they last opened it.

A link is a link. It is current every time it is opened, the guest can search it, and you can change the WiFi password once instead of reprinting eight folders. That is the case for doing it digitally, and it is really the only one that matters.

Whatever you choose, the test is the same: hand it to someone who has never been to your property and ask them to find the door code in under ten seconds. If they cannot, it is not the writing that needs work — it is the order.