How to cut check-in day questions to almost zero

Track your inbox for a month and the same five questions will account for nearly all of it: where do I park, what is the code, where is the Wi-Fi password, how does the heating work, and what time can I actually arrive.

Parking

Vague parking instructions cause more arrival stress than anything else. Name the street, the bay number or the side of the building, and say what happens if the space is taken. If parking is on-street and unpredictable, say so honestly in the listing — a surprise on arrival is much worse than a known constraint.

Entry

Describe the door from the guest's point of view, not yours: "the blue door to the left of the bakery", not "the side entrance". If you use a lockbox, state exactly where it is and which way the dial turns. Add one photo of the entrance to the welcome guide.

Wi-Fi

Put the network name and password in the pre-arrival message, in the welcome guide, and on a card near the router. Write it in a way that survives being read aloud — avoid ambiguous characters, or note them explicitly ("lowercase L, not the number one").

Heating, hot water and appliances

One line per appliance, written as an instruction rather than a description. "Hot water: already on, no action needed." "Heating: dial in the hallway, set to 20 and leave it." Anything with a quirk gets its own line.

Arrival timing

State the earliest possible arrival time, not the ideal one, and give a clear answer for early arrivals: bag drop, self check-in from a set hour, or a flat no. Guests accept a no far better than silence.

If a guest has to ask, the answer was missing from somewhere it should have been.

Put it in one document

A welcome guide covering entry, Wi-Fi, appliances, rules, emergencies and local recommendations answers all five questions in one place, and gives your cleaner and co-host the same source of truth.