A welcome desk for every home: our guest guides and Local Connections
Before I started Airfreedom in 2017, the business that is now Guesture, I spent eight years in hotel management, including as General Manager of the four-star Manor Hotel in Crickhowell. One habit from those years has never left me: the welcome desk. A good one answers the questions a guest has before they think to ask them, and points them towards the best of the town outside the front door.
A holiday home has no welcome desk. The guest arrives on their own, often after a long journey, at a front door they have never seen. So we build the welcome desk into the home itself, and into the days before the guest arrives.
Every home has its own guest area
Every Guesture home has its own digital guest area, built on our guest platform. Guests open it from their booking, on their phone, before they arrive. It is not a PDF of house rules. It is a set of around fifteen cards, each written for that particular home and each with a photograph of it, so the guest can see exactly what is being described:
Welcome, Getting in and Parking: finding the home and getting through the door.
Wi-Fi, Heating, Kitchen, Bedrooms, Bathroom, and Living and dining: how the home works, room by room.
Garden, where there is one, and Dogs, where they are allowed.
Bins, Safety and Quiet hours: how to look after the home and the neighbours.
Local guide: our own recommendations near the home, alongside a shared city guide.
Before they arrive, each guest also completes a personalised online check-in form. We know who is coming, and they have what they need, before anyone reaches the door.
Why it matters to you as an owner
A guest guide can sound like a small thing. For an owner, I think it matters in four ways.
Fewer repeat questions. When the answer to “where do I park?” or “how does the heating work?” is already on the guest’s phone, with a photograph, they do not need to message at eleven at night to ask. We still answer every message, and quickly, but our time goes into the questions that genuinely need a person.
Guests arrive knowing how the home works. A guest who has read the Getting in card before leaving home is not standing on the pavement trying to work out how to get in. A guest who has read the Heating card knows how to keep the home warm without guesswork. The first few minutes of a stay set the tone for the rest of it.
Care of the property. The cards guests think about least are often the ones owners care about most. Bins, quiet hours, safety and heating are where a stay either respects your home and your neighbours or does not. Plain words and a photograph of which bin goes where are easier to follow than a list on the fridge, and they reach the guest before arrival rather than after.
Reviews that mention the welcome. Guests rarely review a building. They review how a stay felt: whether getting in was easy, whether the home made sense, whether someone had thought about them. A clear guide and a good local tip are the details that find their way into those words, and on every platform reviews shape where your listing appears and what it can charge.
Local Connections: the local tip, done properly
The Local guide card is where Local Connections lives. It is our programme for introducing guests to independent businesses near each home: the bakery, the café, the people who make a neighbourhood worth staying in. There are no fees, no commission and no paid placement. A business earns its place in the guide on merit, not by paying for it.
Our first live partner is Kos Deg, a Scandinavian bakery run by Hayley inside Newport Market. I wrote about my first visit: cardamom buns, cinnamon knots, and the best cinnamon bun I have eaten. Guests staying with us in Newport who show their Guesture guide at the counter get 15% off the bakes. Other local businesses are going through the same process now.
For an owner, Local Connections does two things. It gives your guests the kind of recommendation only a local would give, which is often the line that ends up in a review. And it ties your home into its neighbourhood, so a stay feels like part of a place rather than a bed for the night.
The welcome desk, rebuilt for homes
None of this is complicated. It is the hotel welcome desk, rebuilt for homes that do not have one: the answers in advance, written for that home, with photographs; a check-in completed before arrival; and a short list of local people worth meeting. It sits alongside the pricing, the cleaning and the reporting as part of how we look after every home we manage, personally managed and to hotel-level standards.
If you own a property in Cardiff, Newport or Cwmbran and would like to see what a guest area for your home would look like, I would be glad to show you.
Pedro Reis, Founder, Guesture
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