Open any host’s message thread and the questions repeat. Different guests, different properties, same handful of things — because a stranger arriving somewhere new always needs the same information, just in a different order depending on where they are in the stay.
Here is that order, and what to actually put in each answer.
Before arrival: “will I get in?”
This is the question underneath every other pre-arrival message, even when it is phrased as something else. “What time is check-in?” and “Is there parking?” are both really “will this part go smoothly,” because a guest who has never seen your building has no idea how it works.
Answer with specifics, not policy. Not “check-in is flexible” but the exact process: which door, what the lockbox looks like, what to do if the code does not work on the first try, where to park and what it costs. A guest reading this on a phone outside your building at 9pm should be able to follow it without messaging you first.
On arrival: Wi-Fi, always Wi-Fi
The single most-asked question in hosting, and the easiest to get wrong by being almost right. Spell the password so it cannot be misread — call out a capital I versus a lowercase l, a zero versus the letter O — and put it somewhere a guest finds in ten seconds, not buried in paragraph four of a welcome message.
Early in the stay: “how does this work?”
Every appliance a guest has not used before generates a question the first time they touch it: the shower that needs a knob turned a specific way, the heating that is controlled from an app, the coffee machine with no obvious power button. None of these are complicated once someone shows you once. The guest just was not there for the “once.”
The fix is the same for the whole category: describe it the way you would say it out loud to a friend standing in the room, not the way the manufacturer’s manual describes it.
Mid-stay: local questions with a short answer
Where to eat, what to see, which supermarket is closest — guests ask these expecting a short, opinionated answer, not a list. Three restaurants you would actually send a friend to beat fifteen you found by searching. The question is really “what would a local do,” and a long neutral list answers a different question than the one being asked.
Near the end: “what do you want checkout to look like?”
Guests generally want to leave a place in reasonable shape and just do not know what you consider reasonable. Strip the beds or not? Dishes in the machine or in the sink? Keys on the counter or back in the lockbox? Say it plainly and most guests will follow it exactly.
The pattern underneath all of it
None of these questions are unusual, unreasonable, or specific to a difficult guest. They are what anyone would ask, arriving somewhere new, with no one there to show them around. The questions do not stop being asked because a host gets more experienced — they stop being asked twice, once the answer exists somewhere the guest can find it before they have to type the message.
That is the entire idea behind a welcome book: write the answer down once, in the order guests actually need it, and the same question does not cost you a reply for every guest who has it.
It is also why we built Askello the way we did: instead of a document guests have to search through at 11pm, they scan a QR code and ask the question directly, in their own language, and the guide answers from what you actually wrote — nothing invented, and if it is not covered, the question is saved so you only ever answer it once. You can see what that looks like on the sample guide, and the FAQ covers how the rest of it works.