How do your guests know of local restaurants and attractions?

1

Our semi-remote Airbnb is between two small mountain towns (4 and 8 miles away), and there are many surrounding tourist attractions. Our guests greatly appreciate the free lists of nearby restaurants and local fun stuff, which I design and print on my home computer for guests to take.

I find these take-away lists are sometimes better than a binder of local restaurant menus.

Also, we provide free brochures of area tourist sites and a framed wall-map that helps guests plan their day’s adventures. Our local tourism office gives us these brochures for free.

Here are the weblinks to my printed pages of our local restaurants and tourist sites. I suggest you mention which restaurants require a reservation with phone number, and which ones are your personal favorites:

http://www.meadowslair.com/fun_stuff.html?r=20190430114031

Here is our tourist information center in our guest lounge:

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Some great ideas Don. Guests really appreciate some guidance on where to go and what to do (especially if they don’t know the area).

Do you partner with any local restaurants / companies to offer discounts and entice guests? We try to stay on top of the best ways to keep guests happy and they appreciate hosts that go the extra mile (which you obviously do)!

Keep up the great work and happy hosting!

3

No, we don’t partner or arrange restaurant discounts.

But thank you for the kind compliment, as we always try to give our guests 5-star hospitality.

4

Doesn’t Airbnb let you put most of that stuff in your listing so the guest has it at their fingertips all the time?

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5

Airbnb lists a few local restaurants and attractions.

But a complete printed list is more convenient for our guests to choose where they wish to go.

We have guests (mostly seniors) who don’t depend on their Smart Phones to look up local information.

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6

Yes you can and you can print it for guests if you want to. You can also have the information on your own website so that guests can access it easily on their phone or tablet during their stay. (We have a print version that’s also online so the guests have it online and in the apartments).

I’ve found that it’s important to only recommend restaurants that you truly know about and genuinely like. Anyone can look at a dining guide of your area but you can have special knowledge about your favourite dishes, the best place to park, happy hour times, what’s good for vegetarians, where to go for breakfasts, where to get deli foods for a picnic etc. etc. and plenty of info that would take them ages to find out from dining guides.

It’s a good idea to add details to your recommendation (whether online, in print or verbal) exactly why you like the place. One of the reasons your guests are staying with you is because they want, in Airbnb PR talk, to ‘live like a local’ o they rely on you for insider info not stuff they can get anywhere.

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7

I use Houfy to make my guides and it’s free. This is one I wrote last night. Once I write about enough bakeries I will create a bakery guide for my guests. They get all my Houfy guides after they book from any site.

8

Prior to check in i send my guests a guide book including area emergency medical providers (I’m a nurse), close by grocers, activities and restaurants I enjoy. This is a huge vacation area so an abundance of information is available on the internet.

A printed copy is also in my guest book.

Guests have commented and liked the dining recommendations.

I have the same on Airbnb. No one looks at it.

9

Yes, they do, but guests never read it. I keep loads of info in the guest dining room, in an old letter rack. English Heritage brochures etc, business cards for restaurants. Being on hand, I can recommend our favourite restaurants nearby and where not to go too. We once gave up our own reservation for Sunday lunch overlooking a beach, but it was worth it, as they mentioned our doing so in their review.

10

I have it in the ABB guidebook as well as at the house. I also direct guest to our personal page and/or FB page “for information only” and ABB has yet to call me on it. VRBO did, but I’m not actively trying to book direct, so I haven’t gotten nailed to the wall … Yet.

11

I put a lot in the online Airbnb guide, but I don’t find that many people reference that. I have hard copy menus, but note that changes in offerings and price changes are beyond our control. (I actually had someone complain that a pizza cost a buck more that it did in the menu that I had on hand). In small towns it is particularly important to tell people that restaurants close much earlier than in the city. If I see that guests are coming from urban areas, I often warn them in my confirmation that if they plan to arrive late they should eat before they get into town.

12

Yes, it’s very important that the information we offer our guests is completely up to date. In this area (it might be the same in a lot of places) restaurants often change hands, change their menus, change the entire staff - to mention just a few. It’s not good to rave to guests about a certain dish that a local restaurant has only to discover that they’ve stopped doing it :slight_smile: