Picture the guest who's driven three hours, it's dark, their phone is at 15 percent, and the GPS pin drops them in front of a row of five identical townhouses. Now imagine what you've given them to work with. If it's a paragraph that starts "Once you turn onto Maple, continue past the church and look for the blue mailbox," you've handed them a scavenger hunt. If it's a photo of the building's actual front door with the house number visible, and underneath it one line — "Park in space 14, the one with the white line, right next to the dumpster enclosure" — they're inside in two minutes.
This is the whole idea: directions in words ask a guest to build a mental picture and then match it to reality while tired, lost, and possibly in heavy traffic. A photo skips that step. They just compare what's in front of them to what's on their screen.
What a paragraph can't do that a photo can
Write out "the building is grey with black trim" and every grey building on the block becomes a candidate. Show a photo of the actual building, taken from the angle a car or a pedestrian would actually see it, and there's no ambiguity. This matters most at the exact moments when guests are least able to process text: arriving after a long drive, in the rain, after dark, holding a phone in one hand and a suitcase handle in the other.
Three photos cover almost every property:
- The building or entrance, shot from the street, the way someone walks or drives up to it.
- The parking spot itself, with the space number or any marking visible, and something permanent in the shot for reference — a pole, a tree, a painted curb.
- The entry door guests actually use, especially if it's not the obvious front door. A lot of buildings have a "real" entrance for residents that isn't where a first-time visitor would look.
If your parking is off-site or shared, add a fourth: the garage or lot entrance itself, because those are often unmarked from the street and easy to drive past twice.
The number does the rest
A space number is the single most useful piece of information you can give a guest with a car, and it's the thing hosts most often leave vague. "Park in the lot" isn't a parking instruction, it's a suggestion to start guessing. Compare these two:
"There's parking available for guests behind the building."
"Space 14 is yours — it's the second row, third spot from the left, marked with a '14' painted on the ground. Don't use 12 or 13, those belong to the ground-floor unit."
The second one tells a guest exactly where to put their car and exactly which spots to avoid, which matters more than people think. Nothing sours an arrival like a text twenty minutes later asking a guest to move their car because they took someone else's space, especially if that someone is a neighbor who's now annoyed with you by proxy.
If your parking isn't numbered — street parking, a shared lot, a driveway — give the guest a substitute: "Pull into the driveway on the right side, there's room for two cars nose to tail" or "Street parking is free after 6pm on weekdays and all day on weekends; before that, use the lot two blocks north at 400 Harrison."
Build the route the way a stranger would actually experience it
Most driving directions in guidebooks are written from the host's memory, which means they skip the parts the host doesn't think about anymore. "Take the highway exit and you're basically there" is true if you've done it two hundred times. It's useless if you haven't, because "basically there" could be a five-minute drive through three turns you didn't mention.
Drive or walk the route once, pretending you've never done it before, and write down every decision point — every fork, every unmarked turn, every spot where GPS tends to get confused. A lot of hosts find their directions are fine for 90 percent of the route and then fall apart in the last quarter mile, right where it matters most, because that's the part the map app usually gets wrong: a private road with no street sign, a driveway shared by three buildings, an entrance around the back that doesn't match the pin.
For that last stretch, be concrete about what GPS will do wrong. "Google Maps will try to take you down Elm Court, which is a dead end — stay on Elm Street instead and the entrance is on your left just past the fire hydrant." That one sentence will save more confusion than an entire paragraph of general directions.
Getting around without a car
If a meaningful number of your guests arrive without one, the getting-around section needs the same treatment: specific over general. "Public transit is nearby" tells a guest nothing. "The 14 bus stops at the corner of 5th and Union, a four-minute walk, and runs every 15 minutes until midnight" tells them whether to bother waiting for it or just walk. Mention the actual walk time to the nearest grocery store or train station, not "close by" — five minutes and twenty minutes are both technically close by, but they mean very different trips.
If rideshare pickup is awkward at your address — a gated complex, a one-way street, a building that confuses drivers — say so and give the fix: "For pickups, use the address 220 Bay Street instead of your listing address, that's the side the cars can actually reach."
Where to put all this
Keep it where guests will actually look: in the check-in message sent the morning of arrival, and in the guidebook itself, grouped together as one section rather than scattered across "house rules" and "things to know." A guest trying to park outside your building at 9pm doesn't want to scroll past the wifi password and the coffee maker instructions to find the one photo they actually need. If you're using a tool like TouchGuides, this is one of the few places where attaching photos directly to a guidebook section, rather than embedding them in a wall of text, genuinely changes how fast guests find what they need.
The test for all of it is simple: could someone who has never seen your street, using only what you've given them, find the door and park the car without texting you? If the answer is yes, you've written it properly. If you're not sure, hand it to a friend who's never been and watch where they hesitate — that's exactly where your next photo needs to go.