House rules for your holiday rental: what do others put in them?

How many hosts write house rules, and how long they run

A hundred and thirty-nine of our two hundred and twenty-two properties online have house rules filled in. Eighty-three have none, which is almost four in ten. In that last group a guest falls back on what sits in the description and in the ticked boxes, and those are rarely the same thing. If nothing there covers noise or visitors, there is no agreement about it afterwards either.

Those who do fill them in keep it short. The median property uses 102 characters, so about two sentences. The shortest runs to thirteen characters and the longest to nearly four thousand. That difference of a factor of three hundred says there is no customary length, only a customary habit of keeping it brief. The length clearly follows what has happened to a host, rather than a template.

That brevity is not a shortcoming. A rule a guest remembers is worth more than ten they skip. Nobody reads four thousand characters after a three hour drive, and the chance they go back to it during a disagreement is small.

What does count is that the rules are written down somewhere. In a disagreement afterwards, a written rule is the only difference between an agreement and an opinion, and eighty-three properties do not have that difference today. Two sentences are enough to have it.

What house rules most often cover

Parties, noise and quiet hours come top, at thirty-seven of the hundred and thirty-nine properties with rules. Smoking follows at thirty-three and pets at thirty. Those three together roughly cover whatever has happened to a host most often.

After that it turns practical: fire, barbecue or stove at fifteen properties, parking at thirteen, and pool or wellness at twelve. Those are the things a guest can get wrong without meaning any harm, and that is exactly why they are written down. They are also the things where a repair turns out most expensive.

Further down come damage and deposit at nine, tidying up on departure at eight, waste sorting at six, extra people or visitors at five, internet at five and shoes indoors at three. Those are not small matters, but they clearly come up less often.

Conspicuously absent is the arrival time. A field for it exists with us and it sits empty at two hundred and twenty of the two hundred and twenty-two properties. Anyone who wants to pin down their hours is best off putting them in the house rules today, because that is where a guest actually reads them.

Smoking and pets: the two boxes that differ most

A hundred and seventy-nine of the two hundred and twenty-two properties ban smoking indoors. That is four in five, which makes it the least ambiguous rule across our whole offering. A guest expects it by now, so the ban surprises nobody.

Pets split the group almost evenly: a hundred and two properties allow them and a hundred and twenty do not. It is the only major rule where the two camps are almost the same size, and it is also the rule guests actively filter on. Allowing pets therefore puts you in a list where half the offering is missing.

Those two boxes carry different weight from the rest of your house rules, because they steer the search results. A guest searching with a dog only sees the properties where the box is set correctly, and they read your text only after that.

So line your boxes up with what your rules say. If your text says a dog is possible by arrangement while the box says not allowed, you do not appear in that filter and nobody ever reads that sentence.

Changeover days and the day in between

Ninety-six of our two hundred and twenty-two properties limit the departure day to a fixed set. That is slightly fewer than the hundred and eight that do so for the arrival day, and the two belong together: a fixed arrival day without a matching departure day produces stays you do not actually want.

Twenty-nine properties keep a buffer day before arrival and twenty-seven after departure. That is a day that cannot be booked, leaving time for cleaning or the key handover. So roughly one in eight makes use of it.

A buffer day costs you nights, and precisely as many as your property has changeovers. Count your own changeovers from last year and you know how many days you are closing, because it is one per changeover. That is a price to pay deliberately rather than by accident.

What a buffer day does solve is the back to back booking where one guest leaves at eleven and the next arrives at two. If that happens to you rarely, you are better off opening that day and blocking the exception by hand when it comes up. You then pay only for the changeovers that are genuinely tight.

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