A guest guide isn’t a document you write once and forget. The restaurants you recommended last year might have closed. The café that was “open daily” now has winter hours. The transport route you described was rerouted. The local market only runs September through April.
An outdated guest guide creates friction and disappointment. A guest who follows your recommendation to a closed café, or who shows up at a market that finished two months ago, is a guest who feels misled — even though you had the best intentions when you wrote the guide.
The solution is simple: a quarterly review habit.
What changes most often
- Restaurant and café recommendations — closures, ownership changes, and quality shifts are the biggest culprit. Check each one every 6 months at minimum.
- Opening hours — many local businesses operate differently in summer vs winter. “Open daily” is often only true in peak season.
- Transport and parking — routes change, fees increase, permit zones expand. Council websites are the most reliable source.
- Local events and markets — seasonal markets, festivals, and community events have fixed seasons. Update them at the start of each relevant season.
- Emergency contacts — check that your emergency numbers, neighbouring contacts, and property manager details are still current.
Building the review habit
Set a recurring calendar reminder for the first week of each season — late February, late May, late August, late November. Block 30 minutes. Read through your entire guide as if you were a guest arriving for the first time. Ask yourself: is everything here still accurate? Is anything missing?
You don’t need to rewrite the guide every quarter. Most of the time, you’ll make two or three small updates. The value is in catching the one or two things that have changed before a guest encounters the problem.
Ask your recent guests
After a stay, consider adding one question to your follow-up message: “Was everything in the guide accurate and useful?” You’ll occasionally get a response that flags something outdated you’d missed. This costs you nothing and keeps the guide calibrated to real guest experience.
Document what you change and why
If you remove a restaurant recommendation because the quality dropped, make a note somewhere (even just a comment in the edit history). This prevents you from adding it back in the next update cycle without remembering why you removed it.
A guest guide that’s kept current is a living document. It compounds in value over time — each update making the guide slightly more useful and slightly more reflective of what guests will actually experience when they arrive.