It’s one thing to make sure your property is safe as, well, houses. It’s another thing entirely to make sure that your guests know your property is safe, and they know the ins and outs of your property. You need to keep your guests informed about where they’re staying. This is where a property guide comes in handy, because it allows you to introduce yourself and your property, and give your guests vital safety information.
How to keep your guests informed?
Make sure to group all vital safety information at the top of the guide. Nobody wants to thumb through an index in order to find out how to turn off a smoke alarm, especially when they’ve burnt their toast and the alarm is blaring at top volume. And they certainly don’t want to rifle through a guide if the smoke alarm is blaring and they need to unlock the door as quickly as possible.
It’s not something that you, as an Airbnb host and as a homeowner, probably want to consider, but you need to make sure that you keep your guests informed, and they can access these vital pieces of safety information as quickly and easily as possible. It can be difficult to judge how easy something like this is to read—after all, it’s you writing about your property. The best thing to do is to ask a friend to read over your guide and get them to tell you what might be confusing or unclear. Ask them to imagine they are a guest who is unfamiliar with your home.
How will your guests access this information?
It is also important to bear in mind how your guests will read your safety information. Perhaps you are best to post it online rather than leave paper copies, if your property is in a city with a reliable mobile internet connection—although guests from abroad might not be able to access it due to high roaming costs. Perhaps, though, it’s easier to use a service like YourWelcome to accommodate your guests and give them information.
YourWelcome provides a tablet that you leave out in your home, which comes pre-loaded with area guides and recommendations for your area as well as giving you the chance to upload your own tips and recommendations, as well as to create a welcome video and post guides to your home, making it easy to access vital safety information about your Airbnb property. In addition, YourWelcome has partnered with companies such as Addison Lee and Deliveroo to allow your guests access to services such as takeaways and taxis, laundry and money-saving deals that they might not have had access to otherwise.
