What do short-term rental guests actually ask?

The list

Roughly in the order hosts report them, with the thing worth doing about each:

1. What's the wifi password? The undisputed first place. Put it on the wall, not only in a document — and somewhere the person on the sofa can read it without getting up.
2. How do I get in / what's the door code? Arrives the day before and again on arrival, often from someone who already has it. See the note on confirmation below.
3. Where do I park? Underrated, because the answer is usually spatial and hard to write. A photo of the actual spot beats a paragraph.
4. What time is check-out, and can we have late check-out? Two different questions. The first is a fact worth displaying; the second needs you.
5. Where does the trash go, and which day? The question that makes guests feel most like they're getting it wrong. Bin day is local knowledge no guest can guess.
6. How does the TV / thermostat / AC work? Where "guest asks a question" most often means "the remote does something unusual and nobody warned them."
7. Where should we eat? The one guests most want a human answer to — and the one most hosts answer with a list that's too long to use.

Then the second tier, which is house-specific and where your list starts to diverge from everyone else's: the beach gear and where it lives, the grill and whether there's propane, the hot tub, the washer, the one shower with a trick, and whatever your particular appliance does that no other appliance does.

Then the genuinely local: tides, ferry times, whether the street parking rules change on a Sunday, what's open on a Monday in February.

When they arrive matters as much as what they are

The volume is not evenly spread across the stay. It clusters hard around arrival — the day before and the day of — when the guest is dealing with parking, the code, and finding everything for the first time. There's a smaller second bump the night before check-out.

This is convenient, because it means a scheduled message sent at the right hour intercepts a disproportionate share of the total. It's also why arrival-day questions feel more urgent than they are: they're concentrated, not more numerous — though arrival has its own reasons for generating messages you thought you'd already answered.

Some questions are complaints wearing a costume

Worth reading carefully, because the phrasing hides it. Guests are reluctant to complain, so a fault often arrives as a how-to question.

"Where's the second set of towels" can mean the first set wasn't there. "Is there a fan?" in July is a temperature complaint. The rule of thumb: if a guest asks how to operate something that should be obvious, don't just answer — check whether it's working.

Your list is shorter than you think and different from this one

Hosts who keep a running note for a season are usually surprised twice. First by how few distinct questions there are — most find eight to twelve cover the large majority. Second by which ones lead, because it's rarely the ones they'd have guessed. A property with a confusing driveway generates parking questions forever. A property with an unusual lock generates arrival panic. Neither host would have put those first.

That's the actionable part. There is no general fix for "guests ask a lot of questions." There is a very specific fix for your top five, and you can only find those by writing them down.

How to keep the list

Low tech is fine. A note on your phone. One line per question, in the guest's words, no grouping or editing as you go — the grouping is what you do at the end of the season, and doing it early hides the pattern. Add a mark when a question came in after 9pm, because those are the ones worth engineering away first.

Then fix the top five properly: visible in the house, reachable from the guest's phone, and mentioned in a scheduled message at the hour it usually gets asked. Leave the long tail alone — a question asked once a year does not deserve a system.

Where these numbers come from

Being straight about it: this ordering is the consensus of what hosts report and what the hosting community discusses, not a controlled study. Most published breakdowns come from companies selling messaging or guidebook software, ourselves included, and should be read with that in mind. We've kept this list qualitative rather than dressing it in percentages we can't stand behind.

We do intend to publish real numbers once we have enough of them. If you'd like us to send that when it exists, say so.

Common questions

How we handle this

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

The season-long note described above is the part hosts don't manage to keep, so we keep it for them. When a guest asks the Home Concierge — by holding its button and speaking, or by typing on the Pocket Concierge page for their stay — the question and the answer are logged for you to read. That's your list, in your guests' words, without you having to remember to write it down.

The more useful half: when it didn't know an answer, we email you. A question your guide couldn't answer is the exact gap worth filling, and it's the one a manual note never captures — because the guest asked the panel instead of you, and you'd otherwise never know they wondered.

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.