An Airbnb house manual example, section by section

Every question a guest has to ask you is a small failure of the manual — not because questions are bad, but because the guest asked it standing in front of the thing, and waited. The manual’s job is to be faster than messaging you. That decides everything: it must be short, findable and ordered by when questions arrive, not by what feels complete.

It is also quietly a review machine. Guests rarely praise a house manual, but “great communication” and “everything was easy” in five-star reviews are usually this document doing its work.

A manual organised like a filing cabinet (Amenities, Policies, Miscellaneous) makes the guest do the sorting. Order it by the guest’s own clock instead:

• ·First hour — Wi-Fi, heating and cooling, where the light switches hide, water.
• ·First evening — TV, kitchen basics, coffee for the morning, quiet hours.
• ·During the stay — laundry, garbage and recycling, the appliance with the trick to it, house rules.
• ·Last morning — checkout time and the short list of what to do before leaving.

Written the way a section should read: short, specific, one trick each.

Yours will run to ten or twelve of these — the cards above show the register, not the full list. Here is the whole skeleton, in the order the questions arrive:

The lease-clause voice (“guests shall refrain”), the full appliance PDFs, the story of the neighbourhood’s gentrification, and any rule you wouldn’t actually enforce. Every paragraph a guest scrolls past to find the Wi-Fi teaches them the manual wastes their time — and the next question comes to your phone instead.

Local recommendations deserve their own page rather than a chapter here: at the moment a guest wants dinner they are not reading the laundry section. Keep the manual operational and the neighbourhood somewhere of its own.

Airbnb gives every listing a House Manual field, and it’s the right first move: free, and guests find it in the app. Its limits are real — one wall of text, no photos where you want them, out of reach once the trip ends — which is why many hosts graduate to a page of their own. Fill the field in tonight either way.

A printed binder can’t be read from the airport, a PDF is a download nobody keeps, and both are wrong the moment the Wi-Fi password changes. A web page, whatever tool makes it, stays current, travels in the guest’s pocket, and can be read before arrival. If you keep a paper copy for the kitchen counter, let it be a QR code to the page and the three things people ask barefoot: Wi-Fi, heat, coffee.