Practical guide · ordered by real questions
What to put in your guest house manual
Host forums have debated 'comprehensive or brief?' for years. The better question: in what order do doubts occur to a person who just dragged a suitcase through your door?
The eight sections, in the right order
The order mirrors the first hour of a stay. The first three answer most of the messages you get today.
- 1. Wi-Fi — network and password, verbatim, at the absolute topBefore any welcome note. Exact capitalization; a QR that joins the network is even better. It's hospitality's #1 question and has no business living on page three.
- 2. Getting in (and out) — gate, intercom, lock, safe codeWith a photo of each obstacle: the gate you pull before turning, the small gold key, the right floor. Self check-in gets its own page for the full walkthrough.
- 3. The two appliances that confuse peopleEvery home has two: the inverted shower valve, the AC that lives on a breaker, the induction stove. Photo plus three lines. Don't document the fridge — document what generates messages.
- 4. House rules — five, maximumQuiet hours, smoking, pets, visitors, parties. Twenty rules are zero rules. The wording that gets rules followed has its own guide.
- 5. Trash and building rhythmsWhere the bins are, recycling day, what the building imposes (post-10pm quiet, pool hours, parking). The section that prevents the building-manager complaint.
- 6. Emergencies and contactsYour number with response hours, a local backup contact, the nearest 24h hospital, local emergency numbers. Two lines nobody reads — until the day they rescue the stay.
- 7. Checkout — time, keys, trashThree instructions at most. 'Leave the keys on the table and pull the door shut' beats a cleaning-chore list that breeds resentful reviews.
- 8. The neighborhood — only what you'd tell a friendSupermarket, bakery, 24h pharmacy, two restaurants with an opinion. Nobody reads a full tourist guide; six picks with personality, they do.
The three mistakes that get manuals ignored
Owner's order, not guest's order. The manual that opens with a two-page welcome letter and the flat's history buries the Wi-Fi on page three — and dies there. A guest isn't reading a book; they're clearing a queue of doubts. The structure above exists to match the queue.
Completeness as the goal. Documenting every appliance, every building rule and every restaurant within two kilometers produces the encyclopedia effect: intimidating size, and critical information diluted by decorative information. The cutting rule: has this ever generated a guest message? No? Cut it.
A format that doesn't arrive. The content can be perfect — if it lives in an 8 MB PDF attached to a confirmation email skimmed at the airport, it doesn't exist. The format that works opens in one tap from inside the conversation the guest is already in — which in Brazil means WhatsApp, and is precisely the bet Guest Manual is making.
A manual decays. Restaurants close, the Wi-Fi password rotates, the building changes its pool hours — and every stale line teaches the guest to distrust the fresh ones. The maintenance that works is a two-minute quarterly audit: skim the eight sections, fix what changed, and add whatever question actually reached your chat since the last pass. A manual that absorbs each new question stops being a document and becomes a filter — this quarter's interruption is next quarter's silence.
Prefer to start from a template?
The eight sections above, pre-structured in Markdown with blanks to fill — free, no signup, in our house manual template.