I booked an Airbnb last week. A converted water tower in the English countryside, the kind of listing with a wow factor that makes you want the trip just to experience the stay. Three days before arrival, my host sent me a message.
It was 1,200 words.
I scrolled to the bottom to see how long it went on, closed the app, and told myself I’d read it properly the night before the trip. I did read it the night before. By morning I’d forgotten most of it, and when I finally stood at the front door with my bags, I was scrolling through the whole thing again, hunting for one four-digit code.
By that time, I’d already built software for exactly this problem. The irony was hard to miss.
What was inside
Directions from three different routes. Instructions for the key safe: open the cover, press the central button downwards, enter the code, turn the knob half a turn clockwise, then reverse the whole ritual to close it. A note about the burglar alarm, which wasn’t even activated. A section on the bathroom mirrors, which have proximity sensors and apparently respond to different hand gestures on different floors.
And somewhere in the middle of all that, the WiFi password.
The message was first written in 2019 and updated in 2022. If you printed it out, it would have been four pages.
James is a brilliant host
I want to be clear that this isn’t a complaint about James.
He cares, obviously. He has thought through every scenario a guest could face and written each one down. Two years after the first draft he came back and added the electric car charger and a note on the underfloor heating. That message is what thoroughness looks like when a chat thread is the only tool you have.
The message is the problem. And most of us hosts are sending one just like it.
What I actually needed
I arrived with one thing on my mind: the key safe code.
Not that the rest was useless. I did need to find the place, but for that I wanted a map pin Google could drive me to, not three routes’ worth of written directions. The hob instructions and the note about the horses in the next field could wait until they mattered. Standing at the door, the code was the one thing I couldn’t improvise, and it was buried in the middle of everything else.
Guests skip your instructions for a boring reason: everything arrives at once, in a format nobody can skim, and by the time they actually need it they’re tired and standing outside. What a guest needs at any given moment is one specific thing, and they need to find it without re-reading the rest.
Why a guide works where a message doesn’t
A message is linear. To find anything you scroll past everything, and the longer it gets, the more a guest quietly concludes it isn’t worth reading at all.
A guide has shape. WiFi sits where you’d expect WiFi to sit, and it’s tappable: the password copies to your phone with one touch, ready to paste, instead of being squinted at on a laminated card and typed character by character. Checkout has its own section. House rules don’t compete with driving directions. You can jump straight to the thing you came for, which is how people use their phones anyway: scan a heading, read a short block, move on.
When I set up WelcomeDeck for my own place, that was the test I kept applying: could a tired guest standing at the door find the one thing they need in under ten seconds? Design mattered more than I expected, too. A wall of text feels like admin. A page that looks considered tells the guest someone thought about their stay in advance, and that impression starts working before they’ve reached the property.
Guests also stop texting you, mostly because they’ve already found the answer.
The part I didn’t expect
Once the guide was live I added a few paid options guests could request: late checkout, early check-in, somewhere to leave luggage.
The reasoning was simple. Almost every booking has the same rough edges. The flight in lands at 10am but check-in is at 3. The flight home leaves at 8pm but checkout is at 11. Guests would happily pay a little to smooth that out, but asking feels like requesting a favour, so most either don’t ask or ask apologetically, already braced for the no.
A button removes all of that. Nothing to compose, no reply to wait on, no reading the host’s tone afterwards. The guest sees the option, decides, done.
People on holiday also spend differently than they do at home. They’ve committed real money to be there, so a modest fee that rescues a morning or matches a late flight doesn’t register as an expense. It registers as the trip working properly. The price was rarely the obstacle; the asking was.
What I’ll take from James’s message
The property was beautiful. James was warm, the place was spotless, and I left five stars without hesitating.
What stuck with me is standing at that front door, scrolling. Partly because I’ve sent guests versions of the same four-page message myself. Most hosts have.
The information deserves a better container than a novel in a chat thread.