If you instrument a digital guidebook and watch what guests do with it, one thing is immediately obvious: the WiFi details are opened more than everything else combined, and they are opened repeatedly: five or six times across a stay, because a second phone joins, then a laptop, then a tablet, then someone's parent.
It is the highest-traffic forty words you will ever write. It is worth getting exactly right.
Why guests ask anyway
The password is on a card on the counter. They still message you. The reasons are boring and fixable:
The network name doesn't match. Your card says "Marden House". The phone's list shows "BTHub6-KX9P" and "BTHub6-KX9P-5G". The guest has no way to know which is yours. Write the SSID exactly as it appears, character for character, and if there are two bands, name both and say to prefer the 5G one when close to the router.
The password is ambiguous in print. Handwritten or in the wrong typeface, l, I and 1 are indistinguishable, as are 0 and O, and rn reads as m. Router-generated passwords are full of these.
They are not in the kitchen. The card is downstairs. The guest is in bed. This is most of it.
There are two networks and the guest is on the neighbour's. More common in flats than you would think, especially where an old tenant's network name is still remembered by a device.
What to write
Network:
MardenHouse(there's alsoMardenHouse-5G— use that one if you're in the living room or kitchen, it's faster) Password:seagull-harbour-92(all lower case, hyphens included)The router is the white box on the bookshelf in the hall. If the internet drops, switch it off at the wall, wait thirty seconds, and switch it back on — it takes about two minutes to come back.
Speed is around 65 Mbps down, which handles video calls and streaming on several devices at once.
Five things there, each earning its place:
- Both network names, with a reason to choose between them
- The password, with the casing spelled out
- The location of the router, because the guest who needs it is looking for a box
- The restart instruction, because that fixes four out of five outages and the alternative is a message to you
- The actual speed, because a guest working remotely wants to know before they take a call, and because it prevents the "WiFi was slow" review from someone who expected gigabit
Change the password
Router-generated passwords are the wrong tool for a property strangers type into. Change it to three lowercase words and a number: seagull-harbour-92. It is easy to read off a screen, easy to dictate over the phone, easy to type on a phone keyboard without switching layouts three times, and no less secure in any way that matters here.
Avoid capital letters entirely. Avoid the characters that phone keyboards bury behind a second shift. Avoid anything a guest could mistake for punctuation in your sentence.
The setup that removes the question
If you are willing to spend a little, two changes do more than any amount of writing.
A guest network. Most modern routers support one. It isolates guest devices from anything of yours on the network, and it lets you set a friendly password without touching your own. If you run anything on the home network — a NAS, a camera, a printer, a work laptop — this is not optional.
Mesh, if the property has stone walls or more than one floor. The complaint "the WiFi didn't reach the bedroom" is a hardware problem that no wording solves. Two or three mesh nodes cost less than one bad review's worth of nightly rate, and they present a single network name, which also removes the band-choosing problem above.
A QR code helps, with a caveat
A WiFi QR code — the kind that joins the network when scanned — genuinely works, and printing one and putting it somewhere visible is a good idea.
The caveat: they do not work universally. Older Android devices and some camera apps need a separate scanner, and any guest whose phone fails on the code will conclude the WiFi is broken rather than that the code is. Always print the network name and password underneath the code in readable type. The code is the fast path, not the only path.
Where to put it
Three places, because guests are in three different situations:
- On the phone, in the guidebook, searchable and one tap to copy. This is where the 11pm request is served.
- Physically in the property, near where people sit, printed large enough to read without glasses.
- In the check-in message, because a guest with no mobile data needs the password before they can open anything online.
That third one catches an edge case that is more common than it sounds: international guests with no roaming, standing in the hall, unable to load the guidebook that contains the WiFi password needed to load the guidebook. Put the network and password in plain text in the arrival message and the loop never closes on anyone.
One test
Hand your phone to someone who has never been to the property, open your guidebook, and ask them to get online. Time it. If it takes more than fifteen seconds or produces a single question, you have found the edit.