How to write Airbnb check-in messages guests actually read

Most Airbnb check-in messages fail for the same reason: they try to say everything at once. Wi-Fi password, parking instructions, house rules, trash day, the neighbour's dog, all in one wall of text, sent the morning of check-in when the guest is already juggling directions, luggage, and a flight delay.

Guests don't read walls of text. They skim for the one thing they need right now, and everything else gets lost. Then they message you asking for the thing you already sent, and it's easy to read that as the guest not paying attention. It isn't. It's a message written for a reader sitting still, delivered to a reader who is not.

Split it into two messages, not one

Send the essentials the day before check-in: door code or key location, parking, and the address if it's not obvious. That's it. Nothing else competes for attention.

Send the extras after they've actually arrived and settled in: Wi-Fi password, trash day, quiet hours, your favourite coffee spot down the street. By then they're not stressed about logistics anymore, and they'll actually read it.

The day before matters more than it sounds. A guest who gets the door code the morning of check-in may already be on a plane. A guest who gets it the day before can screenshot it, and a screenshot survives bad signal in a stairwell.

Put the one critical thing first, always

If there's a single detail that causes the most confusion, a gate code, an unmarked driveway, a building entrance that isn't the front door, that goes in the first sentence. Not paragraph three. The first sentence.

You already know which detail this is. It's whatever you find yourself explaining again in almost every stay. That repetition is data. Promote it.

Send a photo of the entrance

This is the highest-value line in most check-in messages and almost nobody includes it.

If your entrance is ambiguous in any way, a side door, a basement flat, a green door among four identical ones, a photo does more than a paragraph ever will. Guests match images to reality faster than they parse directions, especially in the dark, especially in a place they've never been.

One daylight photo, taken from the direction guests actually approach from, attached once, reused forever.

Skip the personality in the middle

Warmth matters, but not between two steps of "how do I get into this apartment."

A line like "We're so excited to host you on your adventure!" dropped between the gate code and the lift instructions is exactly where guests lose the thread. Save the personality for the opening line and the closing line. Keep the middle purely instructional and slightly boring. Boring is a feature here.

A structure that works

1. One warm opening line.
2. The single most important logistical detail, alone, first.
3. Everything else needed before arrival, in short numbered steps.
4. One line about what to do if something goes wrong.
5. A warm closing line.

That's the whole message. Anything not needed before they physically get inside can wait.

On point four: give a phone number, not a sentiment. "Let me know if you need anything" is warmth pretending to be instruction. "If the code doesn't work, call or text me on 555-0142, I usually answer within a few minutes" is a guest who knows exactly what to do at the one moment things go wrong.

Format it for a phone, not a page

Nobody reads your check-in message on a laptop.

Keep paragraphs to two lines. Put codes on their own line so they're easy to spot and easy to copy. Avoid dense blocks of prose in the middle of instructions. If a step has a number in it, that number should be scannable without reading the sentence around it.

What to leave out entirely

House rules do not belong here. Neither does the history of the building, the story of the renovation, or a list of everything you've thoughtfully provided.

None of it is bad content. It's just competing for attention with the door code, and the door code wins or the guest is standing outside. Rules belong in the listing and on a printed card inside. The story belongs in the welcome book, which the guest will read at leisure with a drink, not on a doorstep in the rain.

The test

Read your check-in message as if you're standing outside the building with a suitcase and a phone at 40% battery.

If you'd have to reread it twice to find the door code, it needs to be shorter, not longer. Better still, send it to someone who has never been to your place and ask them to tell you, in one go, how they'd get in. Whatever they hesitate on is the line to rewrite.

Once it works, stop rewriting it. Save it as a template and reuse it, editing only the details that genuinely change between stays. A check-in instructions template gives you a working starting point, and what to actually print and post at check-in covers the half of this that belongs on paper rather than in a message.