Free welcome book: when it really is enough
The three ways to make a welcome book without paying, what each one costs you the day a piece of information changes, and the exact signal that it is time to move to a paid tool.
The essentials. A free welcome book is enough as long as you have a single property, few weeks booked and French-speaking guests: a Word document, a Canva design or Airbnb's house manual will do the job. Free costs time: a PDF or a Canva design has to be redone every time the wifi code changes, and it doesn't translate itself. What you pay for with a digital welcome book is updating once and the languages. The tipping point is when you answer the same text message twice.
When free really is enough
People look for free because they are starting out, with one or two properties. That is a good reason, and in a fair number of cases the honest answer is: stay free.
Three conditions, and you need all three.
- A single property, whose codes you know by heart.
- Few weeks booked: a handful of bookings a year, not a calendar full from May to September.
- Guests who read French, or stays where you are there in person to greet them.
On the language question, a PDF doesn't cheat: it isn't interactive. The day you want to translate it, you redo it, page by page, and you print it again. As long as your bookings fit on one hand, that's bearable. Beyond that, it's a lot of paper.
Many hesitate to leave paper behind, telling themselves that their older guests will prefer it. Generally, it goes very well: they like finding the welcome book in advance and searching as little as possible. And nothing stops you from keeping a paper version linked to the digital welcome book.
As for free digital versions: either they are limited, or there's something fishy going on. You can't give everything away and keep a quality product. What you are looking for is a welcome book that suits you, an interface that suits you, and a support team that answers.
For a property let three weeks a year, free is enough. You print two pages, you put them on the table, you correct them with a pen the day the gate code changes. Nobody needs a subscription for that, and selling you one in that situation would do you no favours.
What tips the balance is almost never the number of pages in the welcome book. It's the number of times you change it, and the number of languages it ought to be readable in.
The three free options, and what they can do
There are three ways to make a welcome book without paying. They are not equivalent, and none of them is bad: they simply fall down on different things.
A Word document, exported as a PDF
The simplest, and the most durable. You write the seven sections in the order of the stay, you export, you send the file by message before check-in. Content matters more than layout: we have written the complete template, section by section, with a worked example, and it can be copied into any word processor.
Its limit is mechanical. The file the guest downloaded on Tuesday will never change again, even if you correct yours on Wednesday.
Canva
The result is often attractive, and the free plan is more than enough for six well-managed pages. Translation, though, quickly runs into the format: Canva's translation tool works on one language at a time, with a limit of 2,000 characters, and produces a copy of the design. Four languages means four files to correct the day the wifi password changes. We have set out elsewhere what really changes when you move from a Canva PDF to a welcome book you can read online.
Airbnb's house manual and guidebooks
This is the most under-used free option, and the one with the best effort-to-result ratio if you only let on Airbnb. Two separate fields: the house manual, for how the property works, and the guidebooks, for your local recommendations.
Two details to know before betting everything on it. Only guests with a confirmed booking can access the house manual, according to the Airbnb help centre: a guest who came via Booking, Abritel or your own site will never see it. And guidebooks are attached to an individual host account rather than to a listing, which shuts your co-hosts out of editing them. Sources consulted on 13 September 2026.
In other words: excellent as long as Airbnb is your only channel. The day you let elsewhere, you have two welcome books to maintain, and only one of them is up to date.
What each option costs you the day a piece of information changes
Here is the same incident, the one that happens to everybody, handled by all four options. The last column isn't there for decoration: it's the only one where you do the job once.
| The situation | Word or PDF | Canva | Airbnb house manual | Digital welcome book |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The wifi password changes in August | You correct it, export it again and resend the file to guests currently booked | Same, and once per language | Corrected in the listing, visible straight away | Corrected once, everybody sees the current version |
| An Italian guest arrives at 11pm | They photograph it and translate it themselves | You need one file per language, created in advance | Restricted to guests who booked on Airbnb | Shown in the phone's language, with nothing to prepare |
| You open a second listing on Booking | One more file, almost identical | One more design to duplicate | Unusable outside Airbnb | The same link, or one welcome book per property |
| You want to know what guests are looking for | No idea | No idea | No idea | You can see which sections are opened |
| There's no network coverage in the hamlet | Paper wins | Paper wins | Inaccessible | A connection is needed to open it the first time |
That last row is a genuine limit on our side, and it deserves to be said: if your property is in a notspot, leave a sheet with the codes on the table, whatever tool you use. A QR code with no network is a pretty mosaic.
The tipping point: the same text message twice
The tipping point is when you answer the same text message twice. Not at your tenth property, not when you turn professional: the second time you tap out the gate code on your phone keyboard, for two different guests, because the welcome book didn't say it clearly enough.
Those messages rarely arrive at 3pm. They arrive at 11.40pm, and they all look alike: the code, the bins, the wifi. A well-filled welcome book doesn't protect you from a call, nothing does. It removes the recurring questions, the ones you already answered the week before, word for word, to somebody else.
The rest is a matter of boundaries. A guest who has the information to hand and still writes to you at an unreasonable hour is an isolated case, not your daily life. That's where the difference lies: you answer because you choose to, not because your welcome book forces you to. That's mainly what you gain, and it shows up in no return-on-investment calculation.
A question asked twice is worth more than a return-on-investment calculation. It tells you two things: your welcome book has a gap, and it needs filling somewhere the correction also benefits the next guest. In a file, that isn't the case. The next guest will receive the same version you haven't reopened yet.
What you pay for, exactly
A digital welcome book is a private web page, specific to one property, that the guest opens by scanning a QR code or clicking a link, and that the host updates at any time without reprinting anything. That's all. You write the content yourself: it's the same as in your Word document.
What you pay for with a digital welcome book is updating once and the languages. The rest is comfort. At StyQR, a correction reaches every guest currently staying, and the welcome book appears in the language of the guest's phone, across 14 languages. Of the 35,000 welcome books created since 2019, 40% of views are in a language other than French, and 91% on mobile. That's the argument that most often decides it, well ahead of design.
The price: 49 € excl. VAT per year per welcome book for a rental, a gîte or a bed and breakfast, a little over 4 € a month, with a 14-day trial and no card details. For properties open a few weeks a year, a seasonal plan starts at 9.90 € excl. VAT, and the details are on the rental pricing table. If you want the reasoning costed line by line, it's in our article on what you really pay for when you pay for a welcome book.
One thing we won't promise you: a paid welcome book doesn't make thin content interesting. A well-written Word document beats a half-filled digital welcome book, every day of the week.
The free template, with no form to fill in
We don't ask for an email in exchange for a template. It's written online, readable from start to finish, and you can copy it into whatever format you like. If you let on the platform, the Airbnb welcome book example covers the expectations specific to Airbnb, self check-in included.
And if you'd rather see before you write, several demo welcome books are open: gîte, flat, campsite. Look at them above all for the order of the sections, that's what copies best and costs nothing.
One last marker, to decide without a table: if you're still hesitating, free is holding up. The day it no longer does, you won't be asking the question, you'll be retyping a code on your phone.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a free welcome book template to download? Yes, and plenty of them ask for an email in exchange. Ours is written directly in the article devoted to the welcome book template, section by section, with a worked example. You copy it into Word, into Canva or into a digital welcome book: it's the same content.
Is Airbnb's house manual enough? It's enough if Airbnb is your only booking channel. The Airbnb help centre states that only guests with a confirmed booking can access it. A guest who arrived via Booking, via Abritel or directly will therefore never have access to it, and they will call you.
Can you make a free welcome book on Canva? Yes, and the result is often a success. The difficulty comes with languages: the translation tool works on one language at a time, with a limit of 2,000 characters, and creates a copy of the design. Each language therefore becomes one more file to correct.
Is a welcome book compulsory? The document itself isn't. Several pieces of information it contains, however, such as the property's registration number or the safety instructions, must be made known to the guest. The welcome book is simply the most convenient place to bring them together.
How many properties before you should move to a paid tool? There's no threshold, there's a symptom: the same question asked twice by two different guests. Some hosts with five properties get on perfectly well with files, others switch with a single flat let all year round.
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