For hosts
Put the answer where the guest already is at the moment they wonder. A short list of questions accounts for most of your inbox, and a longer guidebook almost never shortens it — the guest asking about the wifi at 9pm is holding a phone, not a binder.
Ask any host what their guests message about and you get the same list, in roughly the same order: the wifi password, the door code, where to park, what time check-out is and whether it can be later, where the trash goes, how the TV works, and somewhere to eat tonight. After that come the house-specific ones — the beach gear, the grill, the shower with the trick to it.
That consistency is the useful part. You are not facing an endless variety of questions. You are facing eight or ten, over and over, from different people who have no way of knowing the last four guests asked the same thing.
Most hosts respond to message volume by writing more. A longer listing description, a fuller welcome book, a laminated card by the door. It rarely works, and the reason is worth being precise about: the problem is almost never that the answer was missing. It is that the answer wasn't where the question happened.
A binder is read once, on arrival, by whoever picks it up — usually the person who booked, usually while three other people are carrying bags in. The wifi question comes two days later, from someone else in the party, in a different room. A PDF sent before the trip is read on the plane, if at all. By Wednesday it's eleven emails down.
The test for any guest-facing information isn't "did I write it down?" It's "can they get to it in the ten seconds before they decide to text me instead?"
Three things, in order of effort:
Directions and parking a few days out. Door code and check-in instructions the day before. A check-out reminder the evening before. Every major booking platform and property manager will send these on a trigger. This is the cheapest win available and it removes a meaningful share of pre-arrival messages, because those questions arrive on a schedule you already know.
The wifi password, check-out time, and the bin day are facts that should be readable in the house, at a glance, without anyone hunting for a binder. A card on the fridge does some of this. Anything that can update itself does it better — the printed card is wrong the day you change the password, and no one tells you.
The remainder are the ones you can't predict: the specific quirk, the thing only this house does. These are the messages that arrive at 10pm. The only real fix is a place a guest can ask and get your answer — your words, about your house — without waiting for you to wake up.
Worth saying plainly, because the advice usually stops at "automate everything." Keep a person on:
Automation should clear the routine questions off your desk so you have attention left for the three that actually need you. If it starts answering the hard ones, you've built something that costs you reviews.
Two reasons beyond your evenings. Airbnb asks hosts to reply within an hour to messages received during daytime hours close to check-in, and your response rate is visible on your listing — so volume has a cost even when you keep up with it. And a guest who has to ask is a guest who was, briefly, stuck. Most won't mention it in the review. Some will.
The highest-value thing you can do is stop guessing. Keep a note of every question a guest asks for one season. The list will be shorter than you expect and it will not match what you assumed. Then fix the top five properly — in the house, on their phone, and in a scheduled message — and leave the long tail alone.
Wifi password, door code and how to get in, parking, check-out time and whether it can be later, trash and recycling, how the TV or thermostat works, and where to eat nearby.
Some do, most skim it. A binder gets read once, on arrival, by one person in the party — not by whoever wonders about something two days later in another room.
Airbnb asks for a reply within an hour during local daytime hours close to check-in, and roughly 12 hours during a stay. Response rate and time show on your listing.
Only if you automate the wrong things. Guests do not want a handwritten answer to "what's the wifi" — they want the wifi. Save the personal touch for the moments that carry it.
This is the problem HiyaGuest was built for, so take the rest as interested rather than neutral.
The Home Concierge is a small LED panel that sits in the rental and cycles the facts guests keep asking for — wifi, check-out time, the weather, what's on locally — so most of them never become a question. Hold its button and ask out loud, and it answers from the guide you wrote about your house. The Pocket Concierge is the same thing as a private web page for each stay, so the answers travel with the guest when they're out.
The part we think matters most for this particular problem: it keeps a log of what guests actually asked, and tells you when it didn't know the answer. That's the season-long note from the section above, written for you.
Hiya Concierge shows the wifi, the times and tonight's weather without being asked — and answers the rest out loud, from your own guide.
See Hiya Concierge →