Ask a front desk where their week goes and the answer is rarely check-in. It is the two days before check-in: what time does the flight land, do they want the pickup, has the balance been paid, do they surf, do they need a board, are they vegetarian, and where exactly is the house.
Every one of those is a message, and every message is a reply, a follow-up and a note somewhere. For a house with three arrivals a day that is an hour of work that produces nothing except information you already knew the guest would need to give you.
The five things you need before someone arrives
- Arrival time and flight number. Not to be polite: to know whether the room has to be ready at 11 or at 20:00, and whether the driver leaves at 4 a.m.
- Transfer, yes or no. The single most expensive thing to get wrong, because a missed pickup starts the stay with an apology.
- The money. Whether the deposit landed, what is still open, and in which currency they intend to pay the rest.
- Surf level and board. Two lines that decide the coach's day plan and which board leaves the rack. Guests who are asked at reception get sorted on the beach instead, which costs an hour of the first morning.
- The signature. If you require a liability waiver, it belongs on a phone before arrival, not on a clipboard while someone is holding a backpack.
Notice what is not on the list: a passport scan of everyone in the party sent through a chat app, which most houses ask for and almost none need before the guest is standing in front of them.
Why the guest should fill this in, not you
The information is theirs. They know the flight number, you do not. Every time you transcribe it, you introduce a typo, and the typo lands in the driver's plan.
A personal page per booking, sent as a link, flips the work: the guest fills in what they know, in their own time, on their own phone, in their own language, and it lands in the team's inbox as a structured entry rather than as a sentence inside a chat. Ten arrivals a week is ten fewer transcriptions and roughly forty fewer messages.
It also answers their questions before they ask. The same page carries the address, the way in, the check-in time, the wifi, what breakfast is, and where the nearest ATM is. Those five facts are the majority of pre-arrival messages in most houses.
When to send the link, and when to nudge
Sending it at booking is too early. People book in March for August and forget everything. The useful moment is when the deposit lands, because that is when the trip becomes real to them, followed by a short reminder in the week before arrival for anyone who has not filled it in.
Two messages, not five. The house that sends a link, a reminder, an offer, a checklist and a countdown has taught its guests to ignore the next message, and the next message is the one about the driver. Keep the pre-arrival thread short enough to still be read.
What to do with the ones who never answer
Roughly one guest in five will not fill in anything, ever. That is not a failure of the system, it is normal, and it needs a plan rather than another reminder. Assume the default: no transfer, standard check-in, beginner board, balance in cash on arrival. Write those defaults on the arrival list so the team is not guessing on the day.
The exception worth chasing is the transfer. If a pickup was offered and never confirmed, one direct message the day before is worth sending, because that is the one silence that ends with somebody standing at an airport.
The morning list this produces
Done properly, the arrival meeting takes five minutes and looks at one screen: three arrivals today, each with a time, a transfer flag, a payment status and a clean-room status. Anything red is a task with a name on it. Nobody opens a chat history, nobody walks the corridor to check a room, and nobody discovers at 18:00 that the guest who lands at 19:00 wanted picking up.
That is the whole argument for doing this work before the guest arrives. Not that it is polite, though it is, but that it moves the surprises from the day itself, when they cost you an hour and an apology, to two days earlier, when they cost you a message.