The Welcome Sequence: What to Send and When

Guests read three messages at most. The sequence works when each one carries a single decision, and stops working the moment two of them ask for the same thing.

Last updated: October 25, 2026

A welcome sequence is four messages with four different jobs, sent between the moment a booking lands and the morning after arrival. Guests read three of them at most. That's the whole constraint, and it decides everything else. The sequence isn't a place to be thorough. It's a place to be short in the right order.

Key Takeaways

• Four messages, four jobs. Confirmation, the one question, access, and a single check the day after. Nothing else earns a slot.
• One decision per message. Ask for the arrival time and offer a late checkout in the same paragraph, and neither gets answered.
• The question goes out three days before arrival. Earlier and the guest hasn't booked the flight. Later and they're answering from a train.
• The access note is the only message with a deadline. It goes out on schedule whether or not anyone has replied.
• Cutting to three is fine. The day-after check is the first to go, and the sequence still holds.

Four messages, four jobs

Each message answers a different question, and the questions arrive in a fixed order. On booking: what have I booked, and what do I still need to tell the host. Three days out: something only I know. The day before: how do I get in. The day after: has anything gone wrong.

Written that way, the sequence has a shape you can check. If two messages both ask for something, one of them is wasted and the guest has to work out which. If a message asks for nothing at all, it's a notification rather than a step, and it competes for attention with the ones that matter.

The usual failure isn't a missing message. It's a message carrying two decisions. "Let me know your arrival time and whether you'd like an early check-in" tends to produce silence, because the guest now has to make a choice before answering a simple question. Split it, or drop the second half.

There's a cheap way to audit this. Open your last twenty threads and count how many replies came back after the first message, the second and the third. Whichever message sits in front of silence is the one carrying too much. You don't need a theory of guest behaviour for that. You need the last twenty threads.

The day-after message earns its place by being the only one with no ask in it. One line, sent the morning after arrival: everything working, and here's the number if not. It catches the boiler that failed on the first night, while a repair is still a repair rather than a refund.

What belongs in the first one

The confirmation goes out on booking, within the hour if you can, and it does three things. It repeats the dates, the nightly rate and the total the guest has just agreed to. It gives an arrival window wide enough to be true. And it says when the next message will come.

That last line is the one most hosts leave out. "I'll send access details on the 14th" removes a whole category of messages from your inbox — the ones that begin with "just checking". The guest knows the plan, so they stop asking for it.

Keep the house rules out of the confirmation, apart from the two that could end a booking: no parties, and the checkout time. A rule list stapled to a confirmation reads as a warning. The same list, sent the day before arrival, reads as information.

One more thing the first message should carry, and usually doesn't: the name the guest will meet. Not a company, not a management brand. A first name, and a channel where that person answers. After that, it's two people talking instead of an account broadcasting.

The message guests actually reply to

The message that gets answered is the one that asks for something only the guest can supply, and asks once. "What time will you reach the building?" works. "Please confirm your arrival time, the number of guests, whether you need parking and whether you're travelling with a pet" doesn't. Every item on that list is useful, and the whole list still reads as work.

Three days out is the right slot for it. Whatever comes back goes straight onto the arrival note. The guest count decides the linen, the parking answer decides whether you send the bay number, and the arrival time decides whether anyone needs to be awake at midnight.

The practical snag is that the reply lands in a thread while the booking sits somewhere else, and joining the two is how arrival details get lost. localsbnb.com keeps a booking and its messages visible in the same backend, so the time a guest types sits beside the dates it belongs to instead of three screens away in an inbox.

The access note that follows is the one message where format matters more than wording. Four lines is enough: which door, which floor, which key, and the number to call if none of it matches what the guest can see. Written as a paragraph, those four facts hide inside each other. Written as four lines, they survive being read while standing in the rain.

Cutting it to three

Three messages is a legitimate sequence. Drop the day-after note first. It's the one guests are least likely to answer, and the one you can fold into the checkout message with a single line: anything broken, tell me before you leave.

What you can't drop is the access message. If a guest has to ask how to get in, the sequence has failed at the only job that has a deadline. Everything else can be late by a day. That one can't.

Two messages also works, provided the first is thorough about dates and the second is purely operational. What doesn't work is three messages that each contain a bit of everything. The guest then reads all three hunting for the one line they need, and finds it in none of them.

Write the whole thing once, in a notes file, in the order you'll send it. Then read it as a guest would: on a phone, at night, one thumb, no context. Anything that needs a second read to make sense is either too long or doing two jobs. The trimming is easier than the writing, and it's where most of the quality ends up.

Long lead times are the exception worth planning for. A booking made three months out leaves a gap between the confirmation and the question, and a silent gap makes guests nervous. Fill it with nothing, or with one line saying when the next message lands. What you shouldn't do is add a fifth message in the middle to reassure them. Reassurance with no information in it is the message guests learn to skip.

FAQ

How long should the confirmation be?

Short enough to read on a phone without scrolling. Dates, nightly rate, total, arrival window, and the date of the next message. Anything longer belongs in the house rules, which get their own message.

Should every guest get the same sequence?

The same skeleton, yes. Same four slots, same order, same one-decision rule. The content changes: a family arriving at midnight needs a different access note from a couple arriving at noon. Rewriting from scratch each time is how the two-decision message creeps back in.

What if the guest never answers the question?

Send the access note anyway, on schedule, and say which arrival window you'll assume. Silence is an answer you can plan around. A message that waits for a reply is a message that arrives too late to be useful.

A sequence like this takes an afternoon to write and a few minutes per booking to run. localsbnb.com is where the dates and the conversation already sit side by side, which is the part that makes those few minutes reliable rather than hopeful.

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This article is general guidance for hosts and isn't legal, tax or insurance advice. What a platform expects of guest communication, and what local rules require you to collect from a guest before arrival, differ by market and change over time. Confirm the current requirements with the competent authority and the current terms of each platform you use before you rewrite your templates.