The Five Questions Guests Ask Before a Long Stay

Every long-stay enquiry asks the same five things in roughly the same order. Answer them on the listing page and the enquiry arrives pre-sold.

Last updated: October 30, 2026

Long-stay enquiries are repetitive in a way that's useful. The same five questions arrive, in the same order, whether the guest is a family between houses or a contractor on a six-week job. Answer four of them above the fold and the fifth becomes a short message instead of a thread. Answer none, and you'll spend the week typing the same paragraphs.

Key Takeaways

• Five questions, one order. Duration, work, kitchen, cleaning, arrival. Guests ask them in that sequence for a reason.
• The first answer decides the rest. If the stay length doesn't work, nobody reads about the kitchen.
• Above the fold means the first screen. Not a tab two clicks away, not a paragraph in the house rules.
• A vague answer is a transfer. The guest doesn't stop asking, they just ask someone else.
• Write once, reuse in replies. The same sentences work on the page and in the inbox.

The five questions, in order

The first is duration, and it's usually phrased as a doubt rather than a question. Can I stay three weeks without moving out halfway? Is there a minimum stay that rules me out? Does the rate change if I extend? Everything else waits behind this one, because a stay that isn't possible doesn't need a kitchen described.

The second is work. Not everyone asks it outright, but almost everyone checks it: is there a table, is the connection usable, is there a corner where a call won't wake anyone. A guest on a site job wants it for an hour a night. A guest relocating wants it for eight hours a day.

The third is the kitchen. Long stays eat differently from weekends. The real question is whether the kitchen functions as a kitchen: a proper hob, a fridge with room in it, a shop within walking distance that's open late. A photograph of a kettle answers none of that.

The fourth is cleaning, and it's the one hosts forget because it's the one they've arranged internally. Does someone come in, when, do I have to be out, do I pay for it. A guest staying three weeks is not asking for hotel service. They're asking not to be surprised on day nine.

The fifth is arrival, and it lands last because it feels transactional. Where do I park, how do I get the key, what if my train is late, is there a shop open when I arrive. It's also the question whose answer decides the review, because arrival is the one part of a long stay that happens exactly once.

Answering them above the fold

Above the fold means the first screen of the listing, on a phone, before any scrolling. That's a small amount of space, so it only holds four or five short lines. Put the five answers there in order and the rest of the page becomes optional reading.

Duration first, as a line rather than an adjective: 21 nights minimum, 30 and 90 available, rate fixed for the first month. Work next: desk in the back room, wifi throughout, no shared wall with the bedroom. Kitchen: full hob, oven, fridge-freezer, shop 200 metres away. Cleaning: mid-stay clean on request, linen changed weekly. Arrival: key safe at the door, parking on level two, late arrivals fine with a message.

Notice what those lines have in common. Each one could be wrong, which is what makes it useful. "Great for long stays" can't be wrong and can't be checked, so it doesn't answer anything.

localsbnb.com sits behind the duration answer specifically. Airbnb, Booking.com, Agoda and Trip.com share one calendar, so the three-week block you're advertising is a block you can see as open across the channels that could sell it. The line above the fold then reads as a fact rather than a hope.

A practical note on layout: keep the five answers as text, not as a gallery. Guests on a long-stay search are reading, not browsing, and text survives being screenshotted and sent to a partner who's deciding too.

What a vague answer costs

It costs you one conversation per question, and conversations don't arrive in the order you'd like. A guest who can't find the cleaning policy asks about cleaning first, gets an answer, then asks about parking, then asks about the minimum stay, and by then two days have passed and they've looked at three other flats.

The bigger cost is the signal it sends. A page that doesn't answer the basics reads as a host who hasn't thought about long stays, and a guest on a three-week booking is unusually sensitive to that. They aren't only buying a flat. They're buying a month of not having to chase anyone.

There's a filtering cost too, and it's the one hosts underrate. Specific answers turn some guests away, and those are exactly the guests who would have been unhappy. "No lift" costs you the guest with a heavy case and saves you the review about the stairs. That's a good trade, and it only works if the limit is written where it can be read.

The last cost is the one that shows up months later. Vague pages generate enquiries that end in "we decided to go with something else", and because there's no record of why, the host concludes the market is soft. Usually the market was fine and the page was quiet.

Reusing the answers in messages

The five answers are also the five replies. Once they exist as sentences, keep them in a note you can paste from, and resist rewriting them each time. Consistency between the page and the message is itself a form of trust: the guest reads the same numbers twice and stops checking.

On Airbnb, the in-app inbox connects to Airbnb only, so an enquiry that arrives there gets answered there, in one place, with the listing's answers in front of you. Enquiries from other channels get answered in their own inbox. That's worth knowing before you promise a guest a single thread across everything, because you can't deliver one.

Keep the pasted answers short. A reply that repeats the whole page reads like a template, and a template invites the guest to assume nobody read their message. Two lines that answer the actual question, plus a pointer to the page for the rest, works better than five paragraphs.

When the facts change, change them in both places on the same day. A page that says weekly linen and a message that says fortnightly is worse than either one alone, because now the guest has to decide which of your statements to believe.

FAQ

Do I have to answer all five on the page?

No, but the first two decide whether the other three get read. Duration and work are the ones that rule a stay in or out. If space is tight, put those above the fold and keep the rest one scroll down, clearly headed.

Isn't five answers too much for the first screen?

It's five short lines, roughly the same space as two sentences of marketing copy. Written as facts rather than adjectives, they read faster than the paragraph they replace, and they can be checked, which marketing copy can't.

What if my answer is no?

Say no, in the same place and the same tone as the yeses. A "no lift, two flights" line filters the guests who'd struggle and reassures the ones who won't. The alternative, saying nothing and explaining at check-in, is how a small limit becomes a complaint.

The five questions aren't a marketing framework. They're what people actually type when they're about to commit three weeks of their life to a flat. Answer them where they're asked. localsbnb.com keeps the four channels on one calendar so the duration answer stays true, and its in-app inbox connects to Airbnb, which is where most of these questions arrive first.

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This article is general guidance for hosts and isn't legal, tax or insurance advice. Minimum stays, registration duties and the rules on longer bookings are set by local law and by each platform's terms, and they differ by place. Confirm the current requirements with the competent authority and the current terms of each platform you use before you act.