Your Welcome Guide is one of the most important pieces of collateral that your property has.

A necessary tool for every host, this guide houses all the important information about your property from where to get a hot cup of coffee to how to use the thermostat. Your Welcome Guide is one of the first tangible experiences at your property, which is why it’s so important to impress your guests right off the hop!

Not only is your Welcome Guide packed with all the important info your guests need to know, it’s also your opportunity to showcase your properties’ personality & share your favourite local hidden gems with your guests.

We’ve visited our fair share of Air bnb’s and one thing that always stands out to us is the Welcome Guide. In our experience it typically goes one of two ways. It’s either a random pile of typed up Microsoft word pages printed and crammed willy-nilly into a binder with no sense of design direction.. OR, it’s thoughtful, intentional, and graphically designed.

Don’t be the microsoft word binder property. ;)

We recognized that a lot of properties could use some help in the Welcome Guide department.. and trust us—we get it. Graphic design can be tricky and it can take a long time to create something from scratch. To hire a designer to create a fully custom guide would cost a fortune and doing it yourself would cost your sanity.

We did all the hard work for you and created a super simple-to-use editable CANVA template that is completely customizable to your property. It’s got 17 fully customizable pages with easy-to-swap placeholders and we’ve even gone ahead and added sample header copy to help guide you through what to include. The best part? All of the text, colours, and copy are completely interchangeable so you can customize them to your property.

Here’s an example of how our clients at The Mount Rundle Hideaway in Canmore Alberta customized this guide to their branding. (Psst, we did a full branding and social media package with them.. Click here to find out more about our services).

How to use your welcome guide:

We created this Welcome Guide to be printed and kept at your property. You can print it (we love Staples!) and store it in a nice binder, OR—CANVA actually has an option built right into the platform that allows you to print the guide as a “photobook”. Either way—be sure to consider that this book is going to get a lot of action and needs to stand up to multiple visitors leafing through it every visit. If you’re going the binder route you may want to consider having all the pages in page protectors, or laminating them!

And although the intention for this book is for it to be printed— there is also an option to save the guide as a PDF that you can email to your guests before they arrive. Since you’re not able to add attachments in your Air bnb communications, we recommend putting a link to the PDF download in a Google document and sending that through to guests during check in.

Think about your check-in communication for a second. That’s a pretty exciting experience for a guest. As a traveller, I often receive that message on the drive to the property and excitedly read it out loud to the car I’m driving with. (Anyone else??).. Think of how impressive that message would be with a shiny PDF version of your Welcome Guide included. This is your opportunity to make a remarkable first impression on your guests. It’s also great for your guest to reference from their phone at any point during their stay.

BONUS TIP

Staying at an Air bnb is a fully sensory experience, and that includes music! Our superhost clients The Mount Rundle Hideaway went the extra mile to curate customized playlists for different milestones during the visitors stay.

Wanna peek?

FOR THE DRIVE - A perfectly curated modern mixtape for the drive to the Hideaway.

LET’S SWIM- Poolside jams for the whole family.

LET’S GO EXPLORING- Summertime vibes at the Mount Rundle Hideaway

There’s something powerful about how music can feel so nostalgic. Flipping on a playlist from a specific trip can take you right back. By including playlists in your initial messaging you’re setting the vibe for the entire visit—creating lasting memories that your guests can access again and again anytime they want to take a trip back in their mind.

In our opinion there’s nothing better
than a host-recommended hidden gem.

Side note story: Once while we were staying at an Air bnb in Costa Rica.. the Welcome Guide included detailed walking directions off the beat and track that lead us to a secret waterfall. All the other waterfalls around were FULL of tourists wielding selfie sticks.. And here we were, feeling like full blown explorers—following a hand made map through the jungle to a secret hidden waterfall without a single person anywhere to be seen. We full blown skinny dipped haha! It was one of the best, most magical experiences of my life and I will never forget it.

What is your secret waterfall and how can you share a life changing experience with your guests?

Within the 17 fully customizable pages there’s space for all the important info like what to bring, amenities, things to know.. And we’ve left room for you to showcase the heart of your stay with your host recommended places to eat, drink and explore!