How long should a short-term rental guidebook be?

Shorter than most hosts make it. Length is what stops it being used. Aim for the things only you can tell them: how this house works, its quirks, the emergency information, and a small number of local recommendations you would personally defend. Everything a guest could find on their phone in ten seconds does not need to be in your guidebook.

How many local recommendations should I give guests?

Fewer than you want to. A list of forty places is a search result, and your guest already has one of those on their phone. Three to five per category — coffee, dinner, a rainy day, one thing worth the drive — with a sentence on why you like each one is more useful than an exhaustive directory, because it answers the question the guest is actually asking, which is not what exists but which one.

Is a digital guidebook better than a printed binder?

Only if it is easier to reach at the moment of the question. A digital guidebook that lives behind an app download, an account, or a link buried in a pre-arrival email is often worse than a binder on the counter. The advantages that matter are that it can be in the guest's pocket while they are out, and that you can correct it the day the wifi password changes.

What should go in a welcome book for a rental?

The things that are true only of your house: how to work the heat, the trick to the shower, which bin goes out and on what day, where the beach gear lives, what to do if the power goes. Then the safety information, and a short list of local places you genuinely recommend. Leave out the county history and the twenty-restaurant directory.

Why doesn't anyone read my guidebook?

Q: Why doesn't anyone read my guidebook?

Because a guidebook is a document and a guest has a moment. Guests do not sit down and read a rental's welcome book cover to cover; they arrive with a specific question at a specific time — how does the shower work, where should we eat tonight — and they want that one answer. A document asks them to search for it. Most guidebooks fail on format rather than content, which is why making them longer makes them worse.

It's almost never the writing

Hosts who ask this question have usually written something good. The welcome book is thorough, it's been proofread, it has the wifi and the thermostat and a page about the farmers market. And guests still text at 9pm asking how the TV works.

It's tempting to read that as guests being lazy. It isn't. Nobody reads reference material in advance — not manuals, not terms of service, not the safety card in the seat pocket. People consult reference material at the moment they need it, and they abandon it fast if the answer isn't immediately visible. Your guidebook is competing with texting you, which takes four seconds and always works.

A guidebook has three jobs and is good at one

It helps to separate what you're actually being asked to do:

Arrival. The first twenty minutes — get in, find the lights, work out where to put the bags. A binder on the counter is genuinely decent at this, because someone is standing right there with nothing else to do.
Mid-stay lookup. One person, in one room, on day three, wants one fact. This is where binders die. The person with the question is rarely the person who read it on arrival, and the binder is two rooms away.
Going out. Standing in the kitchen at 6pm deciding where to eat. The guidebook isn't in the car, and the question isn't really "what exists here."

Most hosts write one artifact and expect it to cover all three. It can't, and the second and third are where the messages come from.

The recommendations problem is its own thing

The local section is usually the biggest part of a guidebook and the least used, and the reason is specific enough to be worth naming.

When a guest asks where to eat, they are not asking what restaurants exist. Their phone answers that better than you can, with hours, photos and a thousand reviews. What they want is the thing the phone can't give them: which one you would send your own friends to, and why.

A list of forty places is a search result. Your guest already has one of those. What they don't have is someone who lives there.

So the useful version is short and opinionated. Three to five per category — morning coffee, a good dinner, somewhere that works with kids, one thing worth the drive — each with a line about why. "Best biscuits within an hour, cash only, go before nine" is worth more than a page of names, because it makes the decision instead of handing it back.

Two practical notes. Say how far it is, because distance is what guests are actually weighing. And check the list every season — recommending a place that closed last spring is a small but real way to look absent.

What to do instead of writing more

Put the top ten facts where they can be seen without asking

The wifi password, check-out time, bin day, the door code — in practice, the short list guests ask about everywhere. These are not reading material; they are things that should be legible in the room, at a glance, the way a clock is. If they're in a document at all, they're already one step too far away.

Make the rest reachable from a phone, on their side

Whatever holds your house information, the test is whether a guest can get to it in the ten seconds before texting you becomes easier. A link they still have. No app to download, no account to make. If it's in their pocket while they're out, it also covers the third job above.

Keep the binder, shrink it

Don't throw it out — for the arrival job it's fine, and some guests genuinely enjoy it. Just cut it to the things that are true only of your house: the quirks, the emergency information, the beach gear, the one appliance that needs explaining. If a guest could find it on their phone in ten seconds, it doesn't need your page.

The honest limit

None of this gets you to zero messages, and you shouldn't want it to. Some questions should come to you — anything that's gone wrong, anything about money, anything outside the normal path. The goal is that the routine lookups stop arriving so you have attention left for the ones that matter.

Common questions

How long should a rental guidebook be?

Shorter than most hosts make it. Length is what stops it being used. Keep what's true only of your house; cut what a phone answers in ten seconds.

How many restaurant recommendations should I give?

Three to five per category, each with a sentence on why. An exhaustive list is a search result, and guests already have one.

Is a digital guidebook better than a binder?

Only if it's easier to reach at the moment of the question. One behind an app download or a buried email link can be worse than paper. The real advantages are that it travels with the guest and that you can correct it.

Should I put the wifi password in the guidebook?

Put it in the guidebook and on the wall. It's the single most asked question in short-term rentals; it shouldn't require finding a document.

How we handle this

This is the problem HiyaGuest was built for, so take the rest as interested rather than neutral.

Our answer to the guidebook is to stop making one. The Home Concierge is a small LED panel in the rental that cycles the facts — wifi, check-out time, weather, what's on locally — so the common lookups never become a question. Hold its button and ask out loud, and it answers from the guide you wrote.

For the local section specifically, hosts add picks: a handful of places per category with a line on why, and we show the distance from the house. Deliberately no star ratings on the guest side — a pick is your endorsement, not a crowd average, and the whole point is that it isn't a search result. The Pocket Concierge puts the same thing on a private page for each stay, so it's in their pocket at 6pm when the question is where to eat.

Last updated August 2026. Written by the team at HiyaGuest, who make a guest concierge for short-term rentals — so the last section is a pitch, and the rest is what we'd tell a host who wasn't buying anything.