Guidebooks rot. Not dramatically — a restaurant closes, a bin day moves, a phone number changes, a door gets a new lock. Each individual decay is small and none of them announces itself, and after eighteen months a guest is following instructions that are quietly wrong in four places.
Here is an audit I run twice a year. It takes about half an hour and needs a phone, not a laptop, because that is what a guest has.
Set up
Open your guidebook on a phone, using the real published link, in a browser, logged out. A preview from inside your editor hides several of the problems below.
Facts that decay (10 minutes)
1. Your phone number. Read it digit by digit, out loud. Then call it.
2. The WiFi password. Type it into a device that is not already connected. Routers get replaced and passwords get changed at 9pm during an outage and nobody updates the guidebook.
3. The network name. Compare it character for character against the list on your phone.
4. Door codes and lockbox codes. Against the lock, not against your memory.
5. Bin collection days. Councils move these, usually in spring, and they move them for bank holidays. Check the council page.
6. Check-in and check-out times. Against your listing. These drift apart surprisingly often.
7. Emergency numbers. Plumber, electrician, and whoever your out-of-hours contact is. Confirm they are still trading and still your person.
8. Every restaurant and cafe in your recommendations. This is the big one. Search each name. Look for permanent closures and changed opening days. In an average year I find one closure and two changed hours per list.
9. Any price you quoted. Bus fares, museum entry, the overnight car park. Quote fewer prices, and say "about" when you do.
Things that changed in the property (5 minutes)
Walk through, holding the phone.
10. Is every appliance mentioned still the one that is there?
11. Do the photos show the current furniture, the current colour, the current lock? A photo of the previous lockbox is worse than no photo.
12. Has anything been added that has a quirk nobody has written down? New TV, new coffee machine, new blinds.
13. Has anything been removed that is still promised? The travel cot, the barbecue, the bikes.
How it reads (10 minutes)
14. Time to WiFi. From opening the link, how many taps to the password? More than two is too many.
15. Time to the door code. Same test, from the check-in message. On arrival day this is the only thing that matters.
16. Read it in daylight on a phone at minimum brightness. Poor contrast is invisible on a desk monitor and disqualifying on a seafront at 2pm.
17. Read one full section out loud. Anything you stumble over is a sentence a tired guest will abandon. Hosting prose accumulates subordinate clauses; read it aloud and they show up immediately.
18. Count the sections. If you have more than about ten, guests are scrolling past things. Merge the thin ones. A section with two sentences in it is a paragraph in the wrong place.
Three questions to close on
Does anything contradict anything else? Check-out time in two places, both different. Parking described one way in the listing and another in the guidebook. Contradictions are worse than omissions, because the guest now distrusts everything.
What is the most recent question a guest asked you? Is the answer in the guidebook? If not, that is your first edit, and it should take four minutes.
Is there anything in here that only exists because you were proud of it? The paragraph about the building's history, the note about the artist who made the prints. Keep it if you like it, but move it below the practical sections. Guests arrive needing a door code, not a narrative.
What people typically find
The pattern across hosts who run this is consistent. Most find:
- one closed or moved business in their recommendations
- one contact number that is out of date
- at least one photo showing a fixture that no longer exists
- a check-out time that no longer matches the listing
- something they were asked about last month that still is not written down
None of those is embarrassing. All of them are the kind of thing that gets noticed by exactly one guest, at exactly the wrong moment, and turns into a sentence in a review that you then spend a year explaining.
Put it in the calendar
The audit is only useful as a habit. Twice a year, thirty minutes, same two weeks each time — I do the first week of February and the first week of August, before the two busy seasons rather than during them.
Write the date you last audited somewhere you will see it. A guidebook that is eight months stale still looks perfect from the inside, and that is precisely the problem.