The Guest Fact Sheet: Write Your Hotel's Answers Down Once

If you run a small hotel, a guest can ask whether the pool is heated in January and get three different answers before they've even booked. The website FAQ says it's heated all year. The booking site listing says it's seasonal. The night porter, who has worked two winters there, says no.

Nobody in that story is lying. Each answer was true when someone wrote it down, and nobody went back to check.

That used to cost you one confused guest. It costs more now, because the answer doesn't stay where you wrote it. Search engines now write AI answers from websites, hotel sites included, and link to the pages they used. So the old FAQ line about the heated pool can turn up in an answer you'll never see, months after the boiler was switched off.

The fix is boring. Write the answers down once, in one place, and make everything else copy from that.

What goes on the sheet

Start with the questions guests really send you. Your inbox and your message history already hold them. Read the last fifty or so and note every question that comes up twice.

Most of them fall into a few groups. Arrival questions are about check-in times and where to leave bags. Getting there is mostly airport transfers and how long a taxi really takes at night. After that come the rooms, the house rules and anything about money.

Add the answers you'd rather not give. If the kitchen closes at nine, or you can't take dogs over ten kilos, say so plainly. Guests forgive a clear no far more easily than a yes that turns out to be wrong at the front door.

How to write each answer

Write each one the way you'd say it on the phone to a guest you like. Give one plain answer, then the exception if there is one.

"Check-in is subject to availability" tells a guest almost nothing. This version tells them what to plan around. "Check-in is from 3 p.m. If your room is ready earlier, we'll message you, and you can leave your bags with us from 8 a.m."

Next to every answer, add two small things. One is the name of the person who owns it, usually whoever would hear first when it changes. The other is the date someone last checked it. (A date from 2023 next to the pool hours tells you exactly where to start.)

Where the sheet goes

The sheet itself can live anywhere your team can open it, and a shared document is fine. What matters is that every place a guest reads copies from it. That means your website FAQ, your booking site listings, your map listing, the welcome message and any automatic replies.

Put the website version on a plain page, as text. A scanned PDF of house rules or a photo of the breakfast board is hard to read on a phone. Google's own guidance for its AI search features also asks site owners to keep important content in text form.

If you use automatic replies of any kind, from a simple out-of-hours message to a full chat assistant, point them at this sheet and nothing else. A tool that answers from an old brochure will be confidently wrong, and the guest won't care whose fault that was.

Keeping it true

The sheet only works if every change hits it first. When the pool closes for repairs or checkout moves to eleven, update the sheet, then every place that copies it, on the same day. Give one person that job, or it'll belong to nobody.

Once a quarter, sit down with the front desk team for half an hour and read the sheet out loud. They'll catch the answers that have drifted, because they're the ones who hear about it when a guest arrives expecting something else.

What to do this week

Pull your last fifty guest messages and list every question that came up more than once. Write a plain answer to each, with an owner and a date. Then look up your own hotel on two booking sites and your map listing, and fix anything that disagrees with the sheet. Last, search your website for old PDFs and image-only menus, and turn the important ones into text.

It's a dull afternoon's work. Do it before the next guest asks about the pool.