Airbnb guidebook: what it covers, and the four things it leaves out

The Airbnb guidebook is a map of your neighborhood, not a manual for your property. It holds restaurants, parks and city advice. It does not hold your Wi-Fi password, your door code, your thermostat or your trash day, and it is attached to your account rather than to your listing. Fill it in anyway, then put the operational half somewhere the guest can actually reach it.

Hosts find this out in a predictable order. They spend an evening pinning twelve coffee shops, feel organized, and get the same Wi-Fi question three days later.

What the Airbnb guidebook actually is

Airbnb's help page on adding a guidebook, read on September 11, 2026, describes it in one line: a place to suggest your favorite restaurants, stores, parks and attractions. Places, neighborhoods and city advice.

That is the whole scope. It is a local recommendation tool with a map attached, built for the part of a stay that happens outside your four walls.

Airbnb does not publish a cap on how many places you can add, or a minimum. It also does not say whether photographs are required. Treat those as unspecified rather than unlimited.

For what happens inside the property, Airbnb points hosts to a different field. Its own guidance separates the guidebook from the manual that explains features of your listing, such as how the TV works.

The four things it leaves out

1. The Wi-Fi password

The single most requested item in short-term rentals, and the guidebook has no place for it. Wi-Fi lives in the arrival guide, alongside the check-in method and the house manual.

Put it on a printable Wi-Fi sign as well. A QR code taped inside a kitchen cabinet ends the question for good.

2. The door code

Access instructions belong to the check-in flow, not to the map. Airbnb keeps detailed check-in instructions hidden from the guest until 48 hours before arrival, which is its own reason to send your own message earlier.

The check-in instructions generator writes that message from the address, the access sequence and the keys.

3. How the place works

Thermostat, dishwasher, trash day, the light switch behind the door. None of it fits in a pin on a map, and all of it is what guests message about.

That material is the house manual, a text field in the arrival guide that Airbnb opens to guests once their reservation is confirmed. Our guide to the welcome book and house manual covers what goes in each.

4. Your co-host

This is the one that catches anyone managing more than one property. The same help page states it plainly: guidebooks are tied to an individual hosting account rather than to a listing, and home co-hosts cannot access new guidebooks.

Read that twice if you run properties for other people. The guidebook you build sits under your account. It does not travel with the listing when the arrangement changes, and the co-host you bring on cannot edit it.

One thing it does that surprises hosts

Host guidebooks are public. Airbnb says so directly: everyone can access them on Airbnb, not only your confirmed guests.

That changes what it is for. A guidebook is closer to a piece of your listing's marketing than to a private document, and anything you would only tell a paying guest does not belong in it. The gate code obviously. The neighbor's name, the spare key location, the fact that the building has no camera: also no.

It also means a good guidebook works before the booking. A traveler comparing two listings in the same neighborhood can read yours.

What to put in the Airbnb guidebook

Since the scope is the neighborhood, write for the guest standing outside your door with two hours and no plan.

Eight to twelve entries is enough. More than that reads as a directory and gets skipped.

• The coffee you would actually walk to, with the time it opens.
• One breakfast, one casual dinner, one place worth a reservation.
• The grocery store, and whether it closes early on Sunday.
• The pharmacy, and the nearest 24-hour one if there is one.
• The park, the beach access, or the walk with the view.
• The nearest transit stop and what it costs.
• One thing a tourist would never find.
• The thing to avoid, said kindly.

Write the last two yourself. Everything above them is on a hundred other guidebooks in your city, and the two that are yours are the reason a guest reads the rest.

An Airbnb guidebook is not a welcome book

Three words get used interchangeably and they name three different objects.

The guidebook is Airbnb's feature. Neighborhood, public, tied to your account.

The house manual is a field on the listing. Operational, visible to confirmed guests, text only as far as Airbnb documents it.

The welcome book is yours. It is not an Airbnb object at all. It holds everything in one place, and you can print it, host it yourself, or hand it to a guest who never opens a link.

Most hosts need all three, which sounds like work until you notice they come from the same eight answers. Fill in the welcome book template once and it produces the printable book and the house manual text as separate files. The recommendations you wrote for it are what goes into Airbnb's guidebook.

Rules are the fourth object and they live somewhere else again, in the listing, where the guest accepts them at booking. Our guide to Airbnb house rules covers what holds up and what does not.

Should you bother filling it in?

Yes, and it should take twenty minutes rather than an evening.

It is free, indexed on Airbnb, and visible to people still deciding. It is also one of the few surfaces where a host with a real opinion beats a management company with a template. What it will not do is reduce your messages, because the messages are about the thermostat.

Hosts running two to twenty units usually split the job. Airbnb's guidebook takes the neighborhood, and a digital guidebook of their own takes everything inside the property, in the guest's language, editable across every listing at once. That division is not a workaround. It follows the shape of what Airbnb built.

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