I kept a tally for a year: every guest message that arrived after 9pm, across two flats and about 130 stays. Two hundred and forty messages. What surprised me was how few distinct questions there were.
Here is the tally, roughly, in order:
- WiFi password — 41
- Some variant of "the heating/AC isn't working" — 33
- Door code, lock, key — 29
- Parking — 22
- Where to eat, right now, still open — 20
- How to work the TV — 18
- Check-out time and how to leave — 14
- Something is broken or missing — 12
- Everything else — 51
The long tail is genuinely long and genuinely unpredictable. The first eight are not. They are the same questions every night, in every property, in every city, and they exist because the answer was either absent, wrong, or somewhere the guest could not find at 11pm.
What each one is really asking
WiFi. Forty-one messages, and in maybe thirty of them the password was written on a card on the kitchen counter. It was still asked because the guest was in bed, the card was downstairs, and the network name on the router sticker didn't match the network in the list. Two fixes: put the password somewhere reachable from bed, and write the network name exactly as it appears in the phone's WiFi list, including the "-5G" suffix if there are two.
Heating. Almost never broken. Usually the thermostat is in a schedule mode the guest can't override, or the radiator valve in that room is closed, or the AC unit's remote is on "fan" instead of "cool". Write the override. Not "the thermostat is in the hall" — write "hold the centre button for three seconds to override the schedule until morning."
The lock. Covered elsewhere on this blog at length. The short version: write the confirm keypress.
Parking. At 11pm this is almost always "I can't find the space" or "am I going to be ticketed here overnight". Both need the answer written before the guest arrives, with a photo and the exact restriction hours.
Food, now. This is the question that most rewards preparation and that almost no guidebook handles. A list of twelve restaurants is useless at 10:50pm. What a guest needs is: what is open right now, within walking distance, that will actually serve me. Two entries beat twelve, if the two are the right ones. Write closing times, and write the Sunday exception, because Sunday is when this goes wrong.
The TV. Hosts consistently underestimate this. Modern TVs have three remotes, two input sources, and a soundbar that has to be on for anything to be audible. The fix is a photo of the remote with arrows, plus one sentence: "input 2 for the Fire Stick, input 1 for the aerial, and the soundbar remote is the small black one in the drawer."
Check-out. Asked late at night on the last evening, because the guest is planning tomorrow's train. Time, key drop, and whether they need to strip beds. Three facts.
Something is broken. Unavoidable, and the one category where you genuinely want to hear from the guest. Make it easy.
The 11pm test
Take any piece of information in your property and ask: can a guest get to it from bed, on a phone, with the lights off, in under fifteen seconds, without messaging me?
A laminated card in the kitchen fails this test. So does a welcome binder, an email from three weeks ago, and a message thread with forty messages in it. A link they can find and search does not.
This is the reason I ended up building a guidebook product rather than printing better cards. The physical binder is a fine object and a poor interface. It is in the wrong room at the wrong hour.
Rank your own tail
The "everything else" bucket in my tally was fifty-one messages and looked random at first. It wasn't entirely. Reading it back, eleven of those were about the washing machine, and I had written nothing about the washing machine at all.
Your tail has one of these in it. Scroll back through six months of your own messages, tally them by subject, and look for the cluster you never documented. It is usually something you consider self-evident because you have used it a hundred times — the shower that needs the dial pushed in before it turns, the oven that shows Celsius, the bin store that needs the fob.
That is an hour of reading and it is the highest-return hour of guidebook work available to you. You are not guessing at what guests want to know. You have the list already, in your own inbox.