An Email List for Repeat Guests: What to Send and How Often

Repeat guests are the cheapest bookings you will ever get, and most hosts lose them to a list they never got round to building.

Last updated: September 27, 2026

The guest who stayed last summer is the easiest person to book again, and most hosts never ask. Not because they don't want the booking. Because there's no list to ask. Building one is small, unglamorous work — an address captured at the right moment, a note that isn't an advert, and a rhythm that doesn't wear people out.

Key Takeaways

• Start with guests you hosted. A list begins with people who already stayed, not with a campaign you plan to run someday.
• Consent comes before collection. An address given to confirm a booking isn't permission to market, so ask separately and keep the record.
• A rhythm beats a blast. A few sends a year, timed to real moments, outlast a monthly newsletter nobody opens.
• A list isn't a discount channel. Its value is being remembered rather than being cheapest on a given week.
• Measure replies, not opens. Replies and direct bookings tell you more than an open rate that's increasingly unreliable.

Why a list is worth building even with a small guest base

Thirty past guests sounds like a small number until you try to reach them. They're the people who already know the unit, already know the area and already liked it enough to pay once. An email is the only channel you own where that history still counts for something.

Everything else you use to reach a guest belongs to somebody else. The booking platform controls the message thread, the pricing rules and how prominently you appear when someone searches again. Your list doesn't work that way. Nobody can change the algorithm between you and a person who stayed in your unit last year.

That doesn't make it a channel you can treat casually. A list is also a small liability, because it holds other people's details and it has to be handled under rules you didn't write. The rest of this guide treats those two things together, because a list built without consent is worse than no list at all.

If you've never kept guest details anywhere, start with something small rather than something clever. You don't need software and you don't need automation. You need one place where an address and a date live, and a habit of adding to it while the stay is still fresh.

Consent, storage and what you are allowed to keep

Consent is the part hosts skip, and it's the part that turns a nice list into a problem. An address a guest gave you to confirm a booking is usually enough to service that booking. It isn't automatically permission to send them anything else. Those are two different reasons for holding the same piece of data, and only the first one is implied by the booking.

So ask. The easiest moment is check-out or the message you send the day after. One plain sentence — would you like an occasional note about the place, maybe twice a year? — gets a clear yes or a clear no, and a yes you wrote down is worth more than an assumption you can't prove. Keep the record of when they agreed and what they agreed to, not just the address.

Storage matters as much as consent, and it's where most home-made lists quietly go wrong. Keep the minimum you need to send the note: a name, an address and the date they stayed. Don't keep passport numbers, ID scans or payment details in the same file, and don't move guest data into personal spreadsheets on a personal account. LOCALSBNB already masks guest names, phone numbers and ID numbers, and keeps its credentials stored locally — a reminder that the boring default is usually the safe one.

Two boundaries are worth stating plainly. Data protection rules for marketing email differ by country. What you may send, to whom, and for how long is set by your local law and by the terms of whichever email service you use. Check both rather than copying a habit from somewhere else. And one regulation that does not belong here: EU Regulation (EU) 2024/1028 concerns short-term rental data sharing between platforms, hosts and public authorities. It isn't an email marketing rule, and citing it as one would be wrong.

A sending rhythm that never feels like spam

Most hosts who never email their past guests are worried about one thing: bothering people. The fix isn't to send less often. It's to send at moments that make sense, with something the reader can use, and to ask for nothing in most of them.

A workable year has four moments. The day after check-out, a short thank-you with a tip for the area and no ask at all. Before your own quiet weeks, an opening that names the dates and the reason — the season, a local event, a price that genuinely changed. Once in the middle of the year, a note with nothing to sell, just a photo and a line about what's different this year. And one offer, sent to the people who replied to something earlier.

That last point is the one that separates a list from a mailing. If every note carries a request, readers learn what your name means and stop opening. If three of the four are useful and ask for nothing, the fourth one works.

Keep each note short. One idea, one photo, one link. Write the subject line the way you'd text a friend who stayed with you, not the way a brochure talks. If you want images, the ones already on your listing are the ones to reuse. LOCALSBNB can import listing data from Airbnb, including title, photos, basic capacity and calendar structure, so the raw material for a note already sits in one place. The calendar behind it sits at localsbnb.com.

Measuring whether any of it is working

Open rates used to be the easy number to watch, and they're now close to useless. Mail clients pre-load images to protect privacy, which registers as an open, and image blocking registers as nothing. A high open rate can mean the note was read or that it was never actually seen.

Watch replies instead. A reply means a person read the note and decided to type back, which is a much stronger signal than an image loading. Then watch what follows: a direct enquiry, a repeat booking, a guest who comes back a second time without needing the platform at all.

Keep a simple log while you learn what lands. The month you sent, how many addresses went out, how many replies came back, how many turned into a stay. Three or four cycles is enough to tell you which of your four moments people actually respond to, and which one you can drop.

And check the list itself twice a year. Remove anyone who asked to be removed, add the guests who booked since, and update the notes on who came back. A list that hasn't changed in a year is usually a list nobody's reading.

FAQ

How many past guests do I need before this is worth doing?

There's no threshold. A list of twenty people who stayed and liked the place is a real list, and the first note usually finds someone who was already thinking about coming back. Starting small also means your mistakes stay small.

Should I put every past guest on the list automatically?

No. Ask first, and keep the ones who say yes. Booking a stay isn't the same as agreeing to marketing email, and the distinction differs by country. Keep the address you need to service the booking, and keep the address you have permission to write to in a separate place.

What if I only have a handful of bookings a year?

Then send a couple of notes a year rather than four. The rhythm matters less than the reason. A single note that names next season's dates and sounds like you wrote it will do more than a schedule you can't keep.

Build the list slowly and it stays useful for years. Ask at check-out, keep only what you can justify, send at moments that make sense, and judge it by replies rather than opens. The bookings behind those past guests already sit on one calendar at localsbnb.com, and writing to them costs nothing but the time.

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This article is general guidance for hosts and isn't legal or data protection advice; marketing and privacy rules differ by country, and your local law plus your email provider's current terms prevail.