Industries
Hotel guest communication: what to send and when
A practical guide to guest messaging for small hotels: what to send before arrival, during the stay and after — and why most properties send too much.
Most guest communication problems at small hotels are timing problems, not tone problems. Guests phone because something they needed to know arrived too early, too late, or not at all. Send the practical information the day before arrival, keep the in-stay messages to things that require a response, and the phone gets noticeably quieter.
Ask a small hotel where its front-desk time goes and you get a version of the same list: check-in time, parking, wifi, breakfast, how to get in after midnight. The same handful of questions, several times a day, every day.
That is not a communication style problem. It is a sequencing problem. The information exists — it is in the confirmation email nobody re-reads, or on a page of the website nobody found. The job is putting it in front of the guest at the moment they need it, which is almost never the moment you sent it.
The three moments that matter
Before arrival
The confirmation email at booking does not count. It arrives weeks early, gets filed, and is opened again only by the unusually organised.
The message that does the work goes out the day before arrival, and it should contain exactly the things guests otherwise phone about:
- The address, and what the building looks like from the street. Small properties are missed constantly.
- Parking: where, how much, what to do if it is full.
- Check-in time, and what to do if they arrive early with bags.
- How to get in after hours, including the specific door and any code.
- Wifi, breakfast hours, and whether they need to book a table.
If you keep a tally of what the desk is asked for a fortnight, the top five items belong in this message. That is the whole method.
The single highest-value line in a pre-arrival message is late-arrival instructions. A guest arriving at 1am to a locked door will phone, and if nobody answers they will stand in the street composing a review. It costs one sentence to prevent.
During the stay
The instinct is to check in on guests. Resist most of it. In-stay messages should be limited to things that need a response or genuinely help:
- A single "anything you need?" message, early, with a real reply path.
- Practical notices that affect them: hot water off between nine and eleven, restaurant closed Monday.
- A response to something they asked for.
What does not belong: daily promotions, spa upsells to a guest who booked for one night, and anything that reads as automated at 8am. Guests forgive silence more readily than noise.
After checkout
One message, and be honest about what it is for. If you want a review, ask for a review — routing unhappy guests to a private feedback form while nudging happy ones to a public listing is a well-known pattern, increasingly against platform rules, and it reads as manipulative when noticed.
The channel question
Email for anything the guest may need to find again: confirmation, directions, invoice. It survives, it is searchable, it holds detail.
SMS for anything time-sensitive on the day of arrival or during the stay. It gets read within minutes, which is precisely why it should be rationed.
The phone, still, for anything that has gone wrong. Guests who are lost, locked out, or unhappy do not want to type — and the fact that they phone at exactly these moments is why the line matters more than any messaging tool.
Sending everything through every channel is the most common mistake and the most damaging one, because it teaches guests that your messages are noise. Then the one message that mattered gets ignored too.
Turning calls into content
The practical loop is small and worth running properly:
- 1
Log what the desk is asked, for two weeks
Tally marks on a sheet by the phone is enough. You are looking for the repeat offenders, not a dataset.
- 2
Move the top five into pre-arrival
Whatever comes up most goes into the day-before message. Then check whether the calls actually drop — they usually do, within a couple of weeks.
- 3
Put the same answers where the phone can reach them
Whoever or whatever answers your line — a night manager, an answering service, an AI receptionist — needs the same information. A guest who gets a different answer by phone than by email trusts neither.
- 4
Re-run it once a season
The questions change. New parking restrictions, a changed breakfast time, roadworks outside. The tally sheet is cheap; the calls it prevents are not.
Where the phone fits
Good messaging reduces calls. It does not remove them, and the ones that remain are disproportionately the ones that matter: the guest who is lost, the code that did not work, the booking that looks wrong.
That makes the line the safety net under everything else — which is an argument for it being answered every time rather than most of the time. We set out the options in hotel answering services, and the full picture in hotel phone systems.
Dial Milo works from the same house information you put in your pre-arrival messages, so the answer a guest gets by phone matches the one they were sent — which, more than any individual message, is what makes a property feel organised.
For your business
One person on nights. Forty rooms. The phone doesn't care.
Milo picks up while your night manager is walking a guest to their room. She answers the practical questions from your own house information, passes guest requests to the right department, and puts anything involving money or a booking change straight through to the desk.
Get Milo answering your property lineFrequently asked questions
- How many messages should I send a guest before arrival?
- Usually two: the booking confirmation, and one arrival message the day before with directions, parking, check-in time and how to get in late. A third promotional message is where most properties tip from helpful into irritating, and it is the one that gets muted.
- What should be in a pre-arrival message?
- The things guests otherwise phone about: exact address and what it looks like from the street, parking, check-in and check-out times, wifi, breakfast hours, and late-arrival instructions. If your calls are dominated by one question, that question belongs in this message.
- Should hotels use SMS or email for guest messaging?
- Email for anything the guest may need to find again — confirmation, directions, invoice. SMS for anything time-sensitive on the day, because it gets read within minutes. Sending everything by both is how you train guests to ignore you.
- How do I reduce the number of calls to the front desk?
- Answer the top five reasons people call before they call. Look at what your desk is actually asked, put those answers in the pre-arrival message and the in-room card, and the volume drops noticeably within a few weeks. The calls that remain are the ones that genuinely need a person.
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