The seven messages every guest should get — and when to send each one

Hosting communication has a strange property: guests only notice it when it's missing. Nobody praises the check-in instructions that arrived exactly when they were needed — but everyone remembers standing in a driveway at 4 p.m. texting "hi, what's the door code?" A well-run stay is really a small sequence of messages, each doing one job at one moment. Get the sequence right and the stay feels effortless from both sides; wing it, and you're answering the same questions by thumb, at midnight, forever.

The timeline: seven messages, each with a moment

1. Booking confirmation — within a few hours of booking. Warm, brief, sets expectations: thanks, key dates, and when they'll hear from you next. Its real job is signaling "a responsive human runs this place."
2. Pre-arrival — about a week out. The planning message: arrival logistics, parking, what to bring, house quirks worth knowing before packing. A week out is the sweet spot — real enough to read, early enough to act on.
3. Check-in details — the day before arrival. Address, door code, Wi-Fi, step-by-step entry. Sent the day before — not at booking — so it's at the top of their inbox when they're standing at the door, and the code isn't circulating for weeks beforehand.
4. Check-in-day hello — that evening. One line: "Everything as expected? Anything you need?" It catches small problems while they're still small — the burned-out bulb mentioned tonight instead of appearing in Saturday's review.
5. Mid-stay check-in — for longer stays. Skip it on one-nighters; on a week-long booking, one light touch mid-stay reads as care, not surveillance.
6. Checkout instructions — the night before departure. Time, the two or three tasks you actually need, where things go. Sent the night before, it removes the morning scramble — and protects your turnover schedule, because the cleaner's window starts on time.
7. Post-stay thank-you + review request — within a day of checkout. The money message, and the one most hosts fumble. More on it below.

Why templates beat typing

None of these messages is hard to write once. All of them are tedious to write every time — which is why winging it decays into copy-pasting last month's message with the wrong name in it. A template library fixes three things at once: consistency (every guest gets the same complete information, so the "what's the Wi-Fi?" questions stop), time (a stay's worth of messaging drops to a few minutes of personalization), and tone (you wrote them calm, so they read calm — even the ones you send at 11 p.m. after a noise complaint). Whether you send them by hand, via saved replies, or through a scheduling tool doesn't change the content; the library is the asset, the sending method is a preference.

Asking for the review — the honest way

Reviews compound: they're the single biggest lever on future bookings that messaging can touch. The rules of doing it right are strict and simple:

• Ask every guest. Deciding who "deserves" the ask based on how the stay went — review gating — is against platform policy, and it also quietly biases your listing's history.
• Ask plainly, for an honest review. Not "a 5-star review if you enjoyed your stay" — an honest one. Guests can smell the difference, and platforms prohibit incentivized or conditioned reviews.
• Never offer anything for it. No discounts, no refunds, no perks. One sentence of thanks, one ask, done.
• Invite direct feedback alongside — never instead. "If anything wasn't right, I'd genuinely like to hear it" belongs in the same message. It surfaces fixable problems, and it isn't a review-dodge as long as the review ask stands on its own.

Messages, book, turnover: one system

Messaging is one leg of the stay's tripod. The welcome book answers the in-house questions so your messages don't have to; the turnover checklist makes sure the place the messages promised is the place the guest walks into; and the messages carry the guest between those two. Hosts who wire all three stop being their property's full-time receptionist — which was the point of buying the place, presumably.

This is general operational guidance for short-term-rental hosts, not legal advice. Platform messaging and review policies change — check the current rules for the platforms you list on. Quire Paper is independent and not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Airbnb or VRBO; those names are the trademarks of their respective owners.