Crafting the Perfect Check-In Message: Key Details and Tips for a Great First Impression

One of the key steps for a 5 start guest experience.

The check-in message is by far the most important message you need to craft. Hence, the word, craft and not simply create. This message must be concise yet contain everything the guest needs for their check-in. Do include key items such as:

• Wifi information

• Address

• Door code

• Garbage collection

• Your contact info

• etc

Don’t include items such as:

• Restaurant recommendations

• Nearby attractions

• House rules

• TV Channel Guide

• etc

  The above items are for your guidebook.

This message should have bullet points and never ever have long run-on sentences here.

When traveling, we often stay in Airbnb, and we have seen so many convoluted check-in messages or messages with missing key details.

You must use paragraphs and bullet points in your check-in email.

In one of the local real estate meetups, I met a couple with a lakefront duplex in a popular summer destination. Both sides of the duplex were in Airbnb and they were thinking of converting a 3rd place they owned into an Airbnb, but only when the wife retired. As we were talking, they mentioned how, on average, every guest generated 4-5 questions, and almost everyone had questions when they checked in. The questions were always similar.

If you get the same question 2 or 3 times, this means your instructions need to include something else. Fix it. The check-in message should be tweaked until it is close to perfect.

Finally, one of the most overlooked items in your check-in message is how to contact you and that you want your guests to have a 5/5 experience. In your Check-In message, you do want to stress for your guests to contact you if anything is keeping them from giving you a 5/5 rating. We stress to use the app, but for high priority items we give them a phone number to call. This phone number rings our 4 cells at the same time with a distinct ring.

In addition, this check-in message should stress that you are open to any and all feedback.

All hosts know that anything less than a 5 is a failure, but your guests may not know this. The newsgroups are full of hosts who are frustrated with their guests saying everything was awesome, and they rate it 4 out of 5.

Your goal is to have an average higher than 4.9. Sooner or later, you will have someone who will leave less than 5, but as long as most reviews are 5/5, you are ok.

In the hosting world, sooner or later you will have to handle fires such as the cleaning crew forgetting this turnover and guests arriving with a completely uncleaned house, power outage, the dishwasher broke, the washing machine breaking and water pouring down in the living room, HVAC stopped working and thermostat hit 101 degrees, smart lock stopped working, dozens of roaches in the garage, the dreaded double booking, etc. These are all real emergencies that we have had to deal with. If guests can quickly contact you for these emergencies, and they are handled appropriately, you can still recover and have a good review.

Here is our exact welcome message and key pints. We have a single template with tags for all of our properties.