Airbnb House Manual: What to Include With Examples

Every property has a secret language — the thermostat's moods, the shower's one good setting, the hob that needs the child lock explained. You stopped noticing yours years ago. Your guests meet it cold, usually at the exact moment they wanted hot water, dinner or heat, and every untranslated quirk becomes a message: "sorry to bother you, but how does the…?"

The house manual is the translation layer. It's the how-things-work core of your welcome book — less glamorous than the local guide, and responsible for preventing more mid-stay messages than every other section combined. Here's what to include, how to write entries guests actually follow, and worked examples for the systems that generate the most confusion.

What belongs in a house manual

The test for inclusion is simple: has anyone ever asked, or plausibly could? Walk the property as a first-time guest and list every interaction with a learnable step:

• Climate: heating and thermostat, hot water (and how long it takes), air conditioning, fans, the fireplace or log burner.
• Kitchen: hob (induction hobs alone justify house manuals), oven and its true temperatures, dishwasher, coffee machine, kettle quirks, bin and recycling system.
• Utility: washing machine and dryer settings that actually work, drying rack location, iron, vacuum for the self-sufficient.
• Entertainment: TV inputs and remotes, streaming sign-in etiquette, speakers, games console if offered.
• Bathroom: the shower's knack (every shower has one), extractor fan, hot water sharing across simultaneous showers.
• Access and security: spare key, alarm if any, window locks, "which doors lock behind you".
• Safety: smoke and CO alarm locations, fire extinguisher and blanket, first-aid kit, torch, stopcock, fuse box — each with a photo, because these entries are read in a hurry.
• The quirks: the sticky door, the switch that controls the odd socket, the tap that runs cold for ten seconds. Naming quirks is the manual's highest-value work — it converts "broken" into "characterful" and a complaint into a knowing smile.

What doesn't belong: verbatim appliance manuals (photograph the one relevant page instead), instructions for things with no learnable step, and anything you can't keep accurate.

The anatomy of an entry that works

Manual entries fail by being written from the host's knowledge instead of the guest's ignorance. The pattern that works, every time:

Name it by the guest's goal, locate it, instruct in doing-order, name the quirk, grant permission.

Worked example — the entry hosts most often get wrong:

Hot water (yes, there's plenty) The boiler lives in the airing cupboard, already set — you shouldn't need to touch it. Showers are hot on demand; the bath takes about 10 minutes of running to fill properly. Quirk: the kitchen tap runs cold for ~15 seconds, then commits. If anything ever runs cold for more than a minute, message us — that's not a quirk, that's a fault, and we'll sort it same-day.

Notice the moves: the title answers the anxiety ("yes, there's plenty"), the guest learns they don't need to act (the most reassuring instruction there is), the quirk gets named with its normal behaviour, and the fault-versus-quirk line tells guests exactly when messaging is right — which paradoxically reduces messages, because uncertainty is what generates them.

Two more compressed examples:

The induction hob — pans must be flat-bottomed (the ones in the cupboard all work). Touch the power symbol, then + to your heat; it beeps if a pan's too small or off-centre — nudge it central. The "L" on the display is the child lock: hold the key symbol for three seconds to release. It boils faster than you expect; treat 7 like a gas flame's "high".

TV and streaming — one remote (the black one; the silver one belongs to a soundbar we no longer own and keep forgetting to retire). Press Home, and Netflix, iPlayer and Prime are signed out ready for your accounts — log in freely and we clear sessions between stays. If the screen says "no signal", someone's on HDMI 2; press Input, choose HDMI 1, order restored.

Photos and video: the force multipliers

Every entry improves with one photo — the thermostat's actual dial, the lockbox in situ, the stopcock behind its cupboard — because photos remove the describe-and-hope gap entirely. The photo session is one fifteen-minute walk with your phone.

For the two or three genuinely fiddly systems (the log burner, the tricky entrance, the hot tub cover), a 30-second video beats everything: film your own hands doing it, no production values needed. In a digital welcome book videos embed directly in the entry; guests watch the burner lit properly instead of decoding paragraphs. This is where digital formats pull decisively ahead — a binder can describe; a guide can show.

Organising the manual within your book

Keep the manual as one section of the larger welcome book, organised by room or by system (either works; pick one and stay consistent), with entries ordered by likelihood of need — climate and kitchen first, the iron last. In a digital guide, search flattens the organisation problem entirely: a guest typing "oven" lands on the entry regardless of where it lives, which is the strongest practical argument for going digital with manual-heavy properties.

Keeping it true

House manuals age in a specific way: appliances get replaced, and the manual keeps describing the old one — a fresh source of confusion wearing helpful clothes. The habit that prevents it: any time anything in the property changes (new washing machine, rewired switch, moved key safe), the manual entry updates the same day, before the next guest meets the mismatch. Digitally this is a two-minute edit that reaches every future guest instantly; the update routine makes it near-automatic. And the reverse habit fills the gaps: every "how does the X work?" message is the manual telling you which entry it's missing — write it that evening, retire the question forever.

The ten entries that earn their keep first

If you're building gradually, write in order of message-prevention value. Across thousands of stays, the how-does-this-work questions cluster reliably: 1) the shower's knack, 2) the thermostat, 3) the TV's input maze, 4) the induction hob, 5) hot water expectations, 6) the washing machine's one good setting, 7) the coffee machine ritual, 8) bins and recycling, 9) the Wi-Fi router's location (for the reboot moment), 10) whichever quirk your property is secretly famous for. Ten entries, ten photos, roughly forty minutes — and the majority of your mid-stay message volume addressed before you've written the long tail.

The bottom line

The house manual is the unglamorous section that buys the quietest inbox: one entry per system, written to the guest's goal, quirks named, photos throughout, videos for the fiddly two. Build it in an hour's walk, keep it true with same-day edits, and let it retire the "how does the…" genre permanently — start yours free.

Your future evenings thank you in advance.