Writing house rules guests actually follow

There is a version of this subject that is about enforcement — deposits, cameras, strongly worded paragraphs. This is not that. It is about the far more common case, and the more fixable one: a guest who would happily have complied, and did not, because the rule never really reached them.

Hosts tend to assume the opposite. A broken rule feels like defiance, because you wrote it down and they did it anyway. But sit with the specific failures and most of them turn out to be ordinary: the rule was in a paragraph nobody finished, or it arrived three days before it mattered, or it was written in a register that translated into something almost-but-not-quite right. Nobody decided to ignore you. The sentence did not work.

That distinction matters because the two problems have different fixes, and only one of them is about being firmer.

Separate the rules that matter from the rules you prefer

The first thing to do is not a wording exercise. It is a sort.

Safety and legal rules exist because somebody could be hurt or you could be liable. The sauna, the wood burner, the balcony railing, the maximum occupancy your insurance is written against, the fire exit that must not be blocked. These are not negotiable and should not be phrased as though they might be.

Property rules protect the building or the next guest. No smoking indoors, no shoes upstairs, shut the gate, do not put the cast iron in the dishwasher. Real consequences, but recoverable ones.

Preferences are the rest. Where you like the cushions. Which bin you find tidier. Whether the curtains are open or closed when you arrive to clean.

Most guides present all three in one list, in one tone, and the effect is not that the preferences get taken more seriously. It is that the safety rules get taken less seriously, because a guest reading a list that includes “please return the cushions to the armchair” has already concluded that this list is somebody’s fussiness rather than somebody’s insurance.

Cut the preferences. Genuinely cut them — not “move them to the end”. A list of six rules that all matter is obeyed more reliably than a list of eighteen where the guest has to guess which six you meant.

Write the rule and the reason in the same breath

A rule without a reason reads as arbitrary, and arbitrary rules are the ones that get quietly tested.

No shoes upstairs.

versus

No shoes upstairs — the floors are untreated pine and mark permanently.

The second is not longer in any way that costs a reader anything, and it does something the first cannot: it tells the guest what the rule is protecting, so they can apply it to a situation you did not anticipate. A guest who knows the floor is soft pine will also not drag the suitcase across it. A guest who knows only “no shoes” has learned one instruction about one object.

One clause is enough. Two sentences of justification undoes the effect and puts you back in the fussiness column.

Say what to do, not what not to do

Prohibitions leave a gap where the alternative should be, and guests fill the gap with whatever seems reasonable — which is exactly the thing you were trying to prevent.

Do not put anything down the toilet.

A guest reads that, agrees entirely, and then has to decide what to do with the thing in their hand. Almost every problem this rule exists to prevent happens in that moment.

Only toilet paper down the toilet — there is a bin beside it for everything else.

Same rule. Now there is somewhere for the hand to go.

The same rewrite works nearly everywhere. “No loud music after ten” becomes “Music inside after ten, please — the neighbours’ bedroom shares the wall.” “Don’t leave the heating on when you go out” becomes “Turn the heating dial to 2 when you go out; it holds the house warm without running all day.”

Put each rule where it is needed, not where rules live

This is the failure hosts almost never suspect, because from the host’s side the rule is plainly there.

A rule in a list, read on arrival, has to survive in a guest’s memory until the moment it applies — which might be four days later, at eleven at night, while they are doing something else. Most rules do not survive that trip. That is not a character flaw; it is how anyone reads anything on the day they arrive somewhere new.

So place rules by when they bite:

• Rules about arriving belong in the arrival section, and in the message before arrival. Parking, the gate, where not to leave a car.
• Rules about a specific thing belong with that thing. The sauna rule belongs in the sauna section, not in a rules list three screens away. If somebody is reading how to switch the sauna on, that is the only moment the sauna rule is genuinely interesting to them.
• Rules about leaving belong in check-out, where a guest is already standing with a list in their hand.
• The genuinely general ones — smoking, occupancy, noise — belong in the rules section, which is now short enough to read.

A digital guide is useful here for an unglamorous reason: it lets you put the same rule in two places without printing it twice, and lets you move a rule when you discover it was in the wrong one. Structuring check-in and check-out information covers the two moments where placement matters most, because both are read under pressure.

The rule that was read and not understood

Everything above assumes the guest and the rule share a language. Often they do not, and this is where broken rules are most likely to be honest ones.

A guest reading house rules in their fourth-best language is doing real work. They will get the gist, and the gist is where rules fail — because a rule is precisely the kind of sentence where the difference between “should not” and “must not”, or between “the bin outside” and “the bin outside the gate”, is the whole content.

Some practical consequences for how you write the source text:

Avoid idiom entirely. “Keep an eye on the fire” is not about eyes, and machine translation does not always know that. “Do not leave the fire burning when you leave the room” survives.

Avoid politeness that carries the instruction. English buries obligations inside courtesy: “you might want to close the gate”, “we’d appreciate it if”. Translated literally, those become genuinely optional, and a guest who reads them as optional has read them correctly. If it is a rule, say it is a rule, and be polite in a separate sentence.

Keep one instruction per sentence. Long conditional sentences are where translation quality degrades fastest, and rules are unusually prone to them.

Do not translate the things that are not words. A door code, a network name, a bin colour that is a proper noun locally. These should survive unchanged.

Building a guest guide in your guests’ languages goes through this in detail, including how to check a language you do not read. And what a language barrier actually costs is the argument for why this is worth the effort at all: the cost of a misunderstood rule lands on you, quietly, and almost never appears in a review.

What a guide can and cannot do about this

Worth being exact, because this is easy to overclaim.

A digital guest guide lets you put a rule where it applies, fix its wording in a minute when you discover it was ambiguous, and offer it in the language the guest reads. Those three things remove most of the ordinary failures described above, which is a genuinely large share of them.

What it cannot do is prove a guest read a rule, or understood it, or agreed to it. QRiousStay records that a code was scanned and which accommodation it belongs to — not who scanned it and not what they read. Anyone selling you proof-of-reading from a guest guide is selling you something the technology does not support, and what scan data shows is the long version of why.

So the rules that carry legal or financial weight still belong where they always belonged: in the booking terms the guest agreed to. The guide is where you make them followable, not where you make them enforceable.

Six mistakes worth checking for tonight

Rules written for the worst guest you ever had. Every host has a paragraph that exists because of one person in 2023. It now greets everybody, and it sets a tone the other ninety-nine did not earn.

A rule with no owner. “Please be respectful of the property” cannot be followed, because it does not name an action. Either it becomes something specific or it goes.

Quantities without units. “Don’t overfill the hot tub” — with what reference? “Fill to the line marked inside the rim.”

Rules that contradict the listing. If the listing says “great for families” and the rules say “no children under twelve”, the rules will lose, in a review.

Times without time zones or context. “Quiet after 10” is fine. “Check-out by 10” without saying whether the cleaner arrives at 10 or the next guest does is where a guest decides that 10:20 is probably fine.

A wall of them. If your rules section needs scrolling, it is not being read. That is the one failure that makes all the others invisible.

A house rules template you can copy

These are examples, not a standard. They are written in the shape the rest of this guide argues for — the rule and the reason together, and the action rather than the prohibition — and every one of them needs adapting before it describes your property.

Nothing below is required by any booking platform. Platforms have their own policies and change them; this is a starting list for a document you write.

• Check-out is at 10:00. The cleaner arrives at 10:15 and cannot start until the house is empty. If you need longer, message us the day before and we will say yes if we can.
• Please leave used towels in the bath. Anything on the rail we assume is clean, and we would rather not wash what nobody used.
• Put the bins out on Tuesday evening if you are staying past Wednesday. The collection is early and they are not emptied otherwise.
• Keep noise down between 22:00 and 07:00. The neighbours are close and the walls are thinner than they look.
• The house is non-smoking, including the conservatory. There is an ashtray by the back door and that is the place for it.
• Please do not move the furniture. If something is in your way, message us and we will sort it.
• Shoes off past the hallway. The floors are original and mark easily.
• Pets are welcome downstairs. Please keep them off the beds and the sofas.
• Use the extractor fan when you cook or shower. The building holds damp and the fan is what stops it.
• Turn the heating down rather than opening windows. The thermostat is in the hall; the system takes about twenty minutes to respond.
• Maximum six guests overnight. This is what the insurance covers.
• Lock the back door when you go out, including for a short walk. It looks latched when it is not.

Adapt the numbers, remove what does not apply, and cut anything you would not actually mind about. A list of twelve rules where four matter teaches a guest that none of them do, which is the failure the earlier sections of this guide are about.

Two things worth avoiding as you edit. Do not write conditions about who may stay based on anything other than the number of people and the practical limits of the property. And be careful with charges: a penalty written into a house rules document is not the same as a term a guest agreed to when they booked, and the place to handle money is your booking terms rather than a card on the fridge.

Start with the ones that got broken

You do not need to rewrite everything. Take the rules that have actually been broken in the last year — there will not be many — and ask, for each one, whether the guest could plausibly have believed they were complying. If yes, it is a wording or placement problem and you can fix it this evening. If no, it is a different problem and no amount of rewriting will help.

Then check the rest against one question: would somebody standing in the hallway with a bag in one hand find this, understand it, and be able to do it?

House rules are one of sixteen subjects a guide needs, and the others are in what to include in a guest guide. If most of your rules are currently being delivered by message, one at a time, how to stop answering the same guest questions is the method for working out which ones to move and where.