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Digital welcome book for Airbnb: what belongs in it (and what doesn't)

Updated 2026-08-25

A digital welcome book should hold three kinds of thing and nothing else: the facts a guest looks up in the first ten minutes (door code, Wi-Fi, times, address, parking, rules, check-out, contact, one notice), the explanations that take more than a line (how the heating works, where the recycling goes), and the information that changes from week to week (a road closure, a market on Saturday). The first two can live on paper. The third is the reason to have a digital one at all. Below: what goes in each layer, what to leave out, and how the paper and the phone versions should differ.

A phone on a bedside table showing a guest page

Three layers

Layer 1 — nine facts, first screen. Door code, Wi-Fi, check-in and check-out times, address, parking, house rules (three lines), check-out tasks (three lines), contact, and one notice line for anything unusual today. This is the whole reason a guest opens the book on the first evening. If a value is missing, the guest asks; if it is on the second screen, the guest asks anyway. Contact goes last on purpose: it is the answer to "I looked at everything else and it didn't work," and if it is first, the guest calls before reading.

Layer 2 — seven sections, one screen each at most. Check-in guide, facility usage, house rules, extra fees, trash disposal, check-out guide, and a catch-all. Fixed headings, in that order, for every property. A guest who has used a book with this shape once knows where to look next time. Each section is short prose or a numbered list; if a section runs longer than one phone screen, it is two sections or it has a neighbourhood guide hiding in it.

Layer 3 — this week. Things with a date on them: the water shut-off on Tuesday, the festival that closes the street, the café downstairs that is shut for renovation until the 20th. These belong in a digital book and only in a digital book, because they expire. On paper they go stale silently — the guest in October reads about a market in July and trusts the book a little less. In a digital book each item carries its date and drops off when it passes.

What doesn't belong in a welcome book?

  • A neighbourhood guide of restaurants and cafés. It goes stale faster than anything else in the book and it makes the book long. Keep it, but keep it separate — a second page, a map link — so that the door code isn't below it.
  • A welcome letter longer than a line. Guests skip it to find the Wi-Fi. Write it in the booking message instead, where it will actually be read.
  • The listing description again. They read that when they booked. The book is for after arrival.
  • Rules written as threats. State the rule and the fee once, plainly. A host quoted in Airbnb's own hosting guide said it well: "You don't want guests to feel like they have to walk across a minefield to keep the host happy."
  • Everything, in case. A host on Airbnb's forum who spent a week as a guest in a house with "a large binder of rules and information. I could not digest, let alone, remember ALL the rules and I had to constantly reference the binder." A book that must be constantly referenced is a book that wasn't organised.

Should the paper booklet and the digital book carry the same things?

Hosts often print the digital book and put it on the table. That is fine, with one rule: the paper version leaves out layer 3. Anything with a date on it does not go on paper. The paper book carries the nine facts and the seven sections — the things that are true in October and in July — plus a QR code to the digital one, which is where the guest goes for this week.

Sonnim's own printed booklet is built that way and it is a deliberate omission, not a gap: the A5 booklet has the facts and the sections and a QR on the cover, and no news page, because a news page printed in spring is wrong by summer.

Content Digital book Paper booklet Why
Nine facts (door code, Wi-Fi, times…) Yes, first screen Yes, first page Looked up constantly
Seven sections Yes Yes True all year
This-week items with dates Yes, dated, expire on their own No Paper goes stale silently
Neighbourhood guide Separate page Separate sheet, or not at all Changes fast, makes the book long
Photos of the boiler panel, the lockbox Yes Yes One per decision point
Photos of the apartment No No The guest is already in it
Languages Guest's language Host's language, or one print per language Digital can switch; paper can't

What hosts do that works

From the forum thread above, a host who runs a house manual "in five languages" describes the routine: "a list of our 10 main rules on the wall, written briefly and in simple English," a detailed manual "with more rules (but not too many, as we don't want to overwhelm them)," a table of contents at the front, and messages before and during the stay that point to the page: "Yes, we have a barbecue... details of how to use it can be found in our house manual on page 14." That is the three layers, done by hand: the wall is layer 1, the manual is layer 2, the messages are layer 3.

The digital version does the same with less handling — the guest opens the same link every time and the host edits one place. The layer that changes is the one that benefits most.

One line at the end

If you have this written already — a note, a PDF, a binder — pasting it into Sonnim gives you the digital version with the nine facts on the first screen, a dated place for this week, and the same book in the guest's language.

For the paper side, the free printable signs cover check-out time, recycling, no smoking, quiet hours and an emergency contact — five cards, five languages, four to an A4 sheet.

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