Airbnb welcome book: free template to download

A welcome book is the printed document you leave on the counter. A house manual is the operational half Airbnb asks you to paste into a field on your listing. You need both, and you can generate both for free in about eight minutes. Fill in eight sections in the Airbnb welcome book template and download two PDFs: the full welcome book, and the house manual on its own.

WonderGuest, the European company that built this template, also makes a digital guidebook for hosts and property managers. It's free for one property.

Most templates you find are a Canva file with a photo of a beach and three lines about the Wi-Fi, or that same file sold on Etsy for around nine dollars, which the Etsy section below goes through. What guests actually message about is narrower and more boring than that: trash day, the thermostat, where on earth to park the rental car. Both documents get their own section below, with the US details that keep the phone quiet.

Download the free Airbnb welcome book template

The generator asks for eight sections, in this order:

1. The property: its name, the address and the welcome line guests read first.
2. You: your name, phone and email, so guests know who to contact.
3. Access: the check-in time, the access type and the steps to get through the door.
4. Wi-Fi: the network name and password, on a page of their own.
5. House rules: what's allowed, from pets to parties, and when quiet hours start.
6. Local picks: the restaurants and activities you'd send a friend to.
7. Practical info: trash day, heating and AC, and how to get around.
8. Check-out: the time, where the keys go and how much cleaning you expect.

Empty sections are skipped, so a half-filled form still produces a clean document.

Two PDFs come out of the same form.

The welcome book is the guest-facing document: a short welcome, your contact details, how to get in, the Wi-Fi page, house rules, your restaurant and activity picks, trash day, heating, parking, check-out. Print it, put it in a binder or a clear stand, leave it on the counter. The binder section below prices the sleeves and the tabs.

The house manual drops the welcome letter and the neighborhood picks and keeps the operating instructions. That is the version to paste into the Airbnb house manual field, and the version to text a guest who is standing at the wrong door.

There is a Word export too, if you want to restyle it. No sign-up, no watermark, no email wall.

Welcome book, house manual, or guidebook: what Airbnb actually asks for

Three words, three different things, and the confusion costs hosts real time.

The welcome book is the only one of the three that isn't an Airbnb feature. The guidebook is about the neighborhood, not the property, so filling it does nothing for the guest who can't work out your thermostat. Our guide to what the Airbnb guidebook leaves out goes through it in detail. Airbnb's Help Center describes the house manual and the guidebook on separate pages, both read on October 7, 2026.

Put the operational text in Airbnb's house manual field, keep the printed welcome book on the counter, and use Airbnb's guidebook feature for the map. That combination covers every place a guest looks.

What to include in an Airbnb welcome book

Start from the messages you already get. Nearly all of them fall into five buckets, and four of the five are specific to how American rentals actually run.

Wi-Fi, in large type

The single most requested item, and the one hosts most often hide in a paragraph. Give the network name and password their own page, in type big enough to read from across the room. A printable WiFi sign with the QR code on it, taped inside a kitchen cabinet, removes the question entirely.

Two details worth adding: what the network is called if you have a guest network and a private one, and whether the router lives somewhere the guest can reach it.

Trash day and recycling

This is the number one late-night message in single-family rentals, and it is entirely avoidable. Say which bin, which day, and where the bins live between pickups. If your city fines for a bin left at the curb past collection day, say that too, because the guest has no way of knowing.

Write the actual day. "Trash goes out Tuesday night, recycling every other Thursday" beats "please take out the trash."

Heating and AC

Second most common message, and the one that costs you money. Say where the thermostat is, what range you want it kept in, and whether windows and AC can run together. Most thermostat arguments come from a guest who set it to 65 in August and a host who saw the bill in September.

If you have a smart thermostat with limits, say so up front. A guest who discovers a locked setting on their own reads it as being watched.

Emergency numbers and 911

Put 911 at the top, then poison control at 1-800-222-1222, then the nearest urgent care with its hours, then a 24-hour pharmacy. International guests do not always know that 911 covers police, fire and medical in one number. Fewer still know that urgent care exists, sitting somewhere between a doctor's office and an emergency room.

Add your own number and say what it is for. "Text me for anything about the house, call 911 for anything about a person" is a sentence that ages well.

Occupancy tax notice

Short, and it prevents an awkward conversation at the door. In most US markets Airbnb collects and remits occupancy or lodging tax on your behalf, so the guest owes nothing on arrival. In a few counties it does not, and the host collects. Either way, one line in the welcome book saying which applies stops the guest from wondering whether they are being asked for cash.

House rules guests actually read

Guests follow rules they can see the point of. Keep the list short and give each rule one sentence a guest can act on. Five cover most homes:

• No smoking indoors, and say whether the porch counts.
• Quiet hours, with the time they start.
• The occupancy cap, children included.
• Pets, allowed or not, and any fee.
• Parties and events.

A reason helps more than a capital letter. "Quiet hours start at 10 PM because the neighbors live here year-round" gets more cooperation than "NO NOISE AFTER 10." The house rules generator turns your list into a printable page you can point to if something goes wrong.

Local recommendations: what to list and where it belongs

Guests want a short list they can trust, not a directory. Three picks per category is plenty: places to eat, places for coffee and groceries, things to do when it rains.

Add one line on why you'd send a friend there. That line is what makes a guest go.

Those picks belong in the printed welcome book and in Airbnb's guidebook feature, which puts them on a public map. They don't belong in the house manual, which should stay operational. Our guide to the Airbnb guidebook explains what the feature shows guests and what it leaves out.

Add a QR code so guests open it in one scan

A QR code by the door or on the fridge saves guests from typing anything.

Two codes cover most homes. One joins the Wi-Fi network directly, and the Wi-Fi QR code generator prints it as a sign. The other opens the digital guidebook in the phone's browser, with no app to install.

The Airbnb house manual: where it lives, and what goes in it

The house manual is a text field on your listing. Airbnb opens it to the guest once the booking is confirmed, which makes it the one document you can count on them actually having.

Where the house manual field lives

Open the listing editor and go to the arrival guide. The house manual sits there, next to the check-in method, the directions and the Wi-Fi password. Airbnb's help page on adding a house manual spells out the path: Listings, your listing, arrival guide, house manual, save.

One sentence on that help page should decide how you write yours: only guests with a confirmed reservation can access the manual. Nobody is choosing whether to book from it. You can be as flat and as specific as the property requires, and Airbnb publishes no character limit for the field.

What to put in the house manual

Six blocks, in this order.

1. Getting in: check-in time, access type, the code or lockbox location, step by step.
2. Wi-Fi: network name, password, nothing else.
3. How the place works: thermostat, appliances that need explaining, anything with a trick to it.
4. House rules in plain language: quiet hours, occupancy cap, pets, smoking, parties.
5. Trash day and recycling.
6. Check-out: the time, what to do with keys, what to leave and what not to bother with.

Block one does double duty. The same text is what you send the evening before arrival, so write it once in the check-in instructions generator and paste it into both places.

Airbnb's own guidance names much the same list. Its resource center article on writing a house manual went up in November 2020 and was updated in November 2021. It asks for the Wi-Fi password, parking, the thermostat, the dishwasher, trash disposal, water and power, and step-by-step instructions for the TV. It also asks hosts to keep it short.

Most hosts read that last part and ignore it.

What to leave out

No neighborhood tips, no photographs, no welcome message. Those belong in the welcome book and in Airbnb's guidebook feature, which is a separate thing again.

The test is position. A guest reads the manual standing at an unfamiliar door at 11 PM, on a phone, with one hand on a suitcase. Every line above the door code is a line they scroll past.

Download the house manual as its own PDF

The same form produces it. Fill in the Airbnb house manual template. The house manual comes out as its own file, with the welcome letter and the local picks stripped out.

Two files, two jobs. Print the welcome book for the counter. The house manual text goes into the Airbnb field, where the guest who booked will find it.

Print it, go digital, or run both: what each costs

The printed welcome book has one real advantage: it works with no phone, no signal and no login. Guests read what is physically in front of them. It has one real weakness too, and every host discovers it the same way. The Wi-Fi password changes, and eight printed copies are now wrong.

Printing costs less than most hosts expect. A twelve-page binder with sleeves and tab dividers came to $27.94 at Staples list prices on September 21, 2026, as the binder section below details. On that date, Staples copy centers charged $0.82 per color page for hosts who'd rather not print at home.

A digital guidebook fixes the reprinting problem and adds what paper cannot do. It reads in the guest's own language, and the Wi-Fi QR code is tappable. The map is live. One edit reaches every property at once. WonderGuest builds one from the same information you just typed. The button sits next to the download.

Most hosts we talk to end up running both. Paper on the counter for the guest who never opens links. The digital one in the pre-arrival message, for the guest who reads everything on their phone before they land. Neither costs anything to start.

Once your welcome book is done, the natural next step is the house rules generator, which produces the formal version you can point to when something goes wrong.

Printable binder version

A welcome binder is a three-ring binder that sits in the property, with the printed pages slid into clear sleeves and sorted behind tabs. Hosts on Airbnb's Community Center describe it in those exact terms, and the format has one rule worth copying from them: sleeves, not lamination. A laminated page goes in the trash the day the Wi-Fi code changes. A sleeved page gets a new sheet for $0.82.

Robin129, a Level 10 host, prints single pages and loads two back to back in each protector. Twelve pages ride in six sleeves, so a wrong one comes out on its own without disturbing the eleven around it. Tabs matter for the same reason. Without them, as Joan2709 put it on May 21, 2024, guests find the binder overwhelming and do not use it.

At Staples list prices on September 21, 2026, one binder for one property came to $27.94.

In-store lamination runs $1.99 per letter page at the same counter, twelve times the price of a sleeve, and it is permanent. FedEx Office publishes no per-page rate at all. A saddle-stitched copy of the same twelve pages is $10.99 at Vistaprint in letter size, plus shipping. It cannot be corrected page by page.

Page order follows the one Sally456 posted on May 14, 2024. The welcome note and phone numbers come first. Then a single page carries the house rules with the Wi-Fi password at the bottom, so the rules get read on the way down. Then come the emergency numbers with the nearest hospital, the floor plan with exits and the appliances. Check-out closes the binder. The restaurant pages stay out of the rings. Susan151 clips hers by neighborhood so guests throw them in a backpack in the morning, because those are the pages that leave the property.

The binder stops paying at two thresholds. Past four changes a year on one property, or past two properties at any change rate, every wrong line means a trip to the store. The same twelve pages on a link are corrected once for every guest. Keep the neighborhood pages on paper, since they change least and get carried the most.

Buying a template on Etsy vs. a free one

An Airbnb welcome book on Etsy costs $4 to $19, with a median of $9.00 across the twelve listings opened on September 20 and 21, 2026. Every one of the twelve delivered a PDF. Not one shipped an editable design file. The PDF is a wrapper holding a link that clones a Canva template into your account. The purchase is a redirect: you pay Etsy, you land in Canva, you type.

What the price never covers is the writing. The access sequence, the exact network name, the appliance that is not obvious, bin night as a night, two local picks nobody else has. Those lines are yours whatever file you start from, and they are the lines guests message about.

Four more lines deserve a read before you pay. The "Digital file type(s)" field tells you what arrives. The page count exists only when a seller types it, and three of the six who did gave a floor rather than a figure. The terms of use sit in free text at the foot of the description. At least four of the twelve bar commercial use in writing, and renting a property is commercial use. Digital listings accept no returns, so the reading happens first.

Three free routes cover the same job. TheGooDocs publishes 10-page Airbnb welcome books for Google Docs and Word. No account is required, only a credit line in the footer. Canva's own library has the rental templates one page at a time, as our guide to Canva welcome book templates lists. The welcome book template on this site writes the document from your answers, with no layout to buy and no credit line.

A bought file stops at the second property, where reusing it is what four of the twelve licenses forbid. It stops again at the fourth change a year, where the export and the drive to the printer become a chore you skip. Past either one, a digital guidebook repairs itself in every copy and answers in the guest's language, which Canva only does on its paid tier at $18 a month.

Frequently asked questions