Two releases this month, both of which end with something coming out of a printer. For a product whose entire argument is that binders belong in 2009, that deserves an explanation.
The problem paper solves
A digital guidebook has one structural weakness: the guest has to know it exists and have the link.
In practice the link arrives in a message a week before arrival, then sinks under eleven other messages, and on Tuesday evening the guest is standing in the kitchen with a question and no idea that a guidebook exists at all. They message the host, who sends the link again. This happens constantly.
What fixes it is an object in the room: a single sheet with a code on it, in the place where the question gets asked. A binder is too much paper for one job.
The QR sheet
You can now print an A4 or Letter sheet for any guidebook. It carries four things:
- a QR code that opens the guidebook
- the short web address, typed out, for anyone whose camera does not cooperate
- the WiFi network and password
- your accent colour, if you are on a plan with branding
Four things, one page, large type. The design constraint was that it should be readable from about two metres, because that is where someone standing at a kitchen counter is.
The typed address matters more than it looks. QR scanning is close to universal but not universal — older devices, certain camera apps, a cracked lens — and a guest whose scan fails concludes the system is broken rather than that their phone is. A printed address means there is always a second route.
We put the WiFi on it after watching what hosts were doing with the first version, which was printing our sheet and keeping their own handwritten WiFi card. Two objects doing one job. Now it is one.
The PDF
The whole guidebook now exports as a PDF, laid out for print rather than dumped from the screen.
This sounds trivial and was not. Screen layouts print badly: colours that work on a bright screen turn to grey mud on paper, photographs designed to fill a phone waste half a page, and anything that depends on tapping is meaningless in ink.
The work was mostly in deciding what a printed guidebook is for, which turned out to be two things: a binder copy for guests who prefer paper, and an attachment for a welcome email to someone with poor connectivity. Both want the same thing — everything legible, nothing that assumes a tap.
Recommendations were the hard part. On screen a place card shows a photograph, a rating, the walking distance and a pin on the map. On paper there is no map to pan, so each place carries its opening hours and its distance, and the whole set gets one static map with the pins drawn on. Having tested the result on a domestic laser printer and then on a photocopy of that print, I can report that it survives both, which was the bar.
Where to put the sheet
From hosts who have been running it:
The fridge works best. It is the most-visited surface in any rental and the one people stand at while thinking.
Beside the bed is the second, and it is the one that catches the 11pm question — which is the question the whole product exists for.
Inside the front door, at eye height, catches the arriving guest before they have unpacked.
In a frame on the desk looks better than tape and costs about £4. Several hosts print two and do both the fridge and the bedside.
What does not work is putting it in a drawer, in a welcome folder, or anywhere that requires a guest to already be looking for it. The entire value is that it is visible to someone who is not looking.
An honest note on what it does not do
The sheet does not track anything. Scanning it opens the guidebook, and the guidebook's own analytics count the visit like any other. There is no per-sheet code, no way to tell which of your two printed copies got used, and no plan to add one.
It also does not change per guest. It is a property-level object with a property-level link. Making it per-stay would mean reprinting between every booking, which is precisely the failure of the paper binder we were trying to avoid.
Small print
Both are available on every plan. The brand colour and logo on the sheet, and dropping our badge from the guest view, remain part of the paid plans. There are no add-ons to buy — the ones that existed earlier this year have been removed, and nothing described here costs extra on top of what you already pay.