Structuring check-in and check-out information

Almost every message a host receives at an inconvenient hour is about one of two things: getting in, or getting out. The middle of a stay is quiet because the middle of a stay is not under time pressure.

That is the useful observation. Check-in and check-out are not two more sections of a guide — they are the two moments where a guest is reading badly, in a hurry, often in the dark or with a taxi waiting. Information that is adequate everywhere else is not adequate here.

What makes arrival different

A guest arriving has three things working against them: they are tired, they are outside, and they have never been here before.

Being outside matters more than hosts remember. They may be standing in the rain, with a bag, with a phone at 8% battery, in the dark, with one hand free. Anything that requires scrolling, tapping through levels or reading a paragraph has a real chance of failing.

Being new matters differently. Everything you know about the property is invisible to them: which of the three doors is yours, that the gate is unmarked, that the entrance is round the side, that the light switch is behind the door.

What check-in information needs

A numbered sequence, in order. Not prose. Arrival is a procedure, and a procedure is a list:

1. Park in the marked bay to the left of the building.
2. The entrance is the blue door on the side facing the water, not the front.
3. The key safe is on the wall to the right of the door, below the light.
4. The code is 4821. Turn the dial to clear it afterwards.
5. The hall light switch is behind the door on the left.

That last line is the kind that is never written and always needed.

The failure branch. What happens when the code does not work, the door sticks, the key is not there. One line: “If the safe will not open, call me on +46 70 123 45 67 — I answer this number at any hour on arrival day.” A guest who knows there is a fallback waits thirty seconds longer before panicking.

Landmarks, not just addresses. Satellite navigation gets many rural properties approximately right. “The last house before the road turns to gravel” is worth more than a postcode.

The arrival window, stated plainly. If check-in is from 15:00, say from 15:00. If you can be flexible, say what to do about it rather than leaving a guest to ask.

Nothing else. The temptation is to greet, to explain the heating, to list the restaurants. All of it can wait an hour. Arrival information that has been padded with welcome is arrival information a guest has to search.

What makes departure different

Check-out has the opposite shape. The guest now knows the property, but they are working against a clock and against a cleaner who arrives after them.

Departure failures are quieter than arrival failures — the guest does not call you, they simply leave the heating on, or take the key with them, or leave at 11:40 when the cleaner was booked for 11:15. You find out later.

What check-out information needs

The time, alone, first. Not inside a paragraph. Check-out is the single most looked-up fact of the last morning.

A short list of actions, with a reason where it is not obvious. Five items is plenty:

• Strip the beds and leave the linen in the basket by the door.
• Load and start the dishwasher.
• Take rubbish to the bins by the gate — recycling is the blue lid.
• Turn the heating down to 15°C, not off.
• Leave the keys in the safe and scramble the code.

The “not off” matters, and it is exactly the sort of instruction that is obvious to a host and invisible to a guest.

What you do not want. Be explicit. Some hosts want beds stripped; some would rather guests did not. Some want the dishwasher run; some empty it themselves. A guest cannot guess, and the considerate ones guess wrong as often as the careless ones.

What happens if they need to leave earlier or later. Even if the answer is no, saying it saves a message.

Where to leave the key — with the same specificity as arrival. “Back in the safe” is fine if the safe was where they got it. “In the drawer” is not a location.

The mistake of writing them as one section

Many guides have a single “check-in / check-out” entry containing both. It is tidy and it is wrong, for three reasons.

It is read at opposite ends of a stay, so half of it is always noise.

It mixes two time pressures. The guest looking for the door code at 22:00 does not need to scroll past the linen instructions.

And it fails on a phone. A combined section is long, and a long section on a small screen means the fact a guest needs is below the fold at the moment they are least able to look for it.

Keep them separate. In QRiousStay they are separate services — a guest opens one or the other — and the arrival sign by the door and the general sign in the kitchen can lead to the guide with the relevant one to hand.

Two details that quietly cause trouble

Times without a format. “11” is ambiguous to a guest from a country that writes times differently, and “11am” is unfamiliar in most of Europe. Use 24-hour time — 11:00 — which is unambiguous everywhere and survives translation without being touched.

Relative dates. “The day after tomorrow”, “Sunday morning” and “your last day” all depend on the guest having calculated something correctly. Where it matters, give the time and let the guest map it to their own booking.

If you offer other languages

These are the two sections where translation quality has a real cost. A misunderstood restaurant recommendation is a mediocre dinner; a misunderstood check-out time is a cleaning schedule missed and sometimes a charge argued over.

Write them in short, literal sentences with numbers as digits, and if you are going to have one native speaker check anything, check these two. Building a guest guide in your guests’ languages covers how to write source text that survives.

Test both, properly

For arrival, the test is specific: hand the instructions to someone who has never been to the property and watch them get in. A partner who already knows where the gate is cannot perform this test. Every unwritten step becomes visible in about ninety seconds.

For departure, read the list on the last morning of your own next stay somewhere, in that frame of mind. You will find at least one instruction that assumes knowledge of your house.

Where this fits

Arrival and departure are two of the sixteen subjects a full guide covers — what to include in a guest guide covers the rest. And if guests are still messaging you about either one after you have written them, the questions themselves are the diagnostic: how to stop answering the same guest questions.