Copy this one, change the three bracketed pieces, submit:
“[Guest name] arrived at the time they gave, asked one question about [the parking gate], and left the kitchen ready for the normal turnover with the key back in [the lockbox]. I would host them again.”
Every template below has the same three parts: what happened, one detail that could only belong to this stay, and whether you would host the guest again. The middle part is the whole job. Drop it and you have written “great guest, welcome back anytime” at greater length, and the next host reading that guest’s profile learns nothing they had not already assumed.
“[Guest name] arrived when they said they would, returned the key to [the lockbox], and left the kitchen clean. I would host them again.”
Swap in: where the key actually went — the lockbox, the entry table, the front-desk envelope. Do not write that the kitchen was clean unless you or your cleaner looked at it.
“I enjoyed hosting [Guest name]. They told me about [the later arrival] in advance, looked after the apartment, and left [the patio furniture] the way they found it. Welcome back any time.”
Swap in: the thing that actually came up in the message thread — a delayed flight, an early bag drop, one extra person. If nothing came up, use the concise version rather than inventing something warm.
“[Guest name] answered messages about [the check-in window] the same day, followed the house rules, and completed checkout by [10:00]. I would recommend them to other hosts.”
Swap in: the real topic and the real time. If the replies took three follow-ups, delete “the same day” instead of keeping the shape of the sentence and hoping nobody checks.
The concise template is 24 words. Assume you type 40 words a minute and that is 36 seconds of typing, and the typing was never the slow part — choosing which fact to name is. So the rest of this page is sorted by the situation you are in rather than by tone: pick the situation and the fact has already been chosen for you.
Whatever you write should agree with the star ratings you submit beside it. A warm paragraph sitting on top of a three-star cleanliness score tells the next host nothing they can use. The mechanics are in how Airbnb reviews work, and the ratings themselves in review scores.
This is most stays, and the facts on hand are always the same four: when they left, what they did with the key, what they asked about, and what the cleaner found. Name one of the four. The templates below differ in register rather than content, so pick the tone and fill the slot.
“[Guest name] left [the kitchen] clean, returned [the key] to [the lockbox], and checked out at [9:00]. I would host them again.”
Swap in: whatever your turnover check actually covered — the kitchen, the patio, the parking pass, a physical key.
“It was a pleasure to host [Guest name]. They used [the grill] and cleaned it, gave me notice about [the late arrival], and locked up properly on the way out. They are welcome back.”
Swap in: the feature they used and the thing they told you in advance. If they used nothing and told you nothing, this is the wrong template and the low-contact one below is the honest one.
“[Guest name] communicated clearly before arrival, followed the checkout instruction about [the patio door], and left the property by [11:00]. I would recommend this guest.”
Swap in: the one instruction that matters at your place — locking a gate, returning a permit, leaving used towels in the tub.
“[Guest name] had a straightforward stay. The only thing they needed was [the wifi password], and they left [the apartment] in order and checked out on time. I would host them again.”
Swap in: the one question they did ask. A guest who said nothing did not have “great communication” — they had nothing to communicate, and writing that down is more useful to the next host than praising silence.
“[Guest name] stayed with [three others] and the place came back tidy — [the bunk room] in order, bins out, nothing broken. I would host this group again.”
Swap in: the guest count you actually agreed to and one room that would have shown wear. Use the booking name only; do not name children or the other adults.
“[Guest name] stayed [nine nights], kept in touch about [the mid-stay linen swap], and left the apartment in the condition it was in on day one. I would take this booking again.”
Swap in: the length and whatever mid-stay contact happened — a clean, a maintenance visit, a parcel. On a long stay that is the detail no other host’s review of this guest will have.
Liesbeth runs three units in Savannah and writes from her turnover log rather than from what she remembers. One checkout last month: the guest gave 9:00, the cleaner arrived at 9:20 and found the key in the lockbox, and the kitchen needed only the standard turnover. Her brief template becomes “The guest checked out at 9:00, left the key in the lockbox, and left the kitchen ready for the normal turnover.” Nothing in that sentence came from her impression of the guest.
“Clean” and “ready for the normal turnover” are two different claims, and the second is the one you can usually defend. Used towels on the bathroom floor are not a mess, they are a turnover. Our Airbnb cleaning checklist is the line I use to tell one from the other, and it is also what makes a cleaner’s report specific enough to quote in a review.
Answering guests at 11pm is the part software should do.
Start free — first 500 messagesOr book a demo callState the event, give the number, stop. No adjective, no warning to future hosts, no theory about why. A host reading “difficult guest, be careful” cannot do anything with it. A host reading “checked out 37 minutes late” can work out whether that breaks their turnover or not.
“Checkout was agreed for [10:00] and [Guest name] left at [10:37]. I messaged them through the app when the unit was still occupied.”
Swap in: both clock times and whether you made contact. In that example the gap is 37 minutes, which is something a cleaner can plan around; “no respect for checkout time” is a mood.
“After checkout, [the dining room] needed [food removed from the floor and the rug spot-cleaned] beyond the usual turnover.”
Swap in: the room and the specific extra task, in the cleaner’s words. If you cannot name the task, you do not have a review yet — you have an impression.
“The listing rule about [parking] was not followed: [a second car used the neighbor’s space]. I messaged [Guest name] on [the second evening] and it was moved.”
Swap in: the written rule, what you observed, and what happened after you asked. “A second vehicle used an unassigned space” is an observation; “they ignored everything I said” is a verdict on a person.
“At checkout, [the glass shower panel] had [a crack across the lower corner]. I reported it with photographs through the app.”
Swap in: the item and the condition, and leave out who you think did it. Keep the money out of the review as well: the policy in the next section prohibits threatening a negative review as a means to obtain unwarranted compensation, and a damage claim runs on its own track whatever your review says.
“I sent [two] messages about [the alarm code] on [the first night] and had no reply before checkout.”
Swap in: how many messages, about what, and when. Count them in the thread before you write the number, because this is the line another host will weigh against their own check-in setup.
The factual version is the useful one because the next host can price it: 37 minutes late is a scheduling problem, an unanswered message is a real risk if their check-in depends on a code being read. It is also the safer one for you, because every word of it sits in the message thread or the cleaner’s log. If the problem is a review left about your place rather than one you are writing, that is responding to a bad Airbnb review, and the case for getting one taken down is in our Airbnb review removal guide.
Two lists: what the policy prohibits, and what it permits but you should still delete. I opened Authentic and trustworthy reviews and Airbnb’s Content Policy on 11 September 2026; the categories below are the ones that policy page sets out, in its order, not a summary from memory.
Nothing screens any of this before it goes live. The help page on reviews for homes, read the same day, says Airbnb does not moderate reviews before they are published. The sentence you paste is the sentence that appears.
Most of the second list is my own preference rather than a rule; the last row is the exception. These are the lines I cut from my own drafts, with what goes in instead:
| Delete | Write instead |
|---|---|
| “Rude, entitled, high-maintenance” | “Sent 14 messages between 22:00 and midnight about the heating.” |
| “The guest was careless” | “The patio door was not locked at checkout.” |
| “Impossible to communicate with” | “I sent two messages about the gate code and had no reply before checkout.” |
| “They clearly wanted to cause trouble” | “The parking rule was not followed on two nights.” |
| “Future hosts are in for a treat” | Either the fact itself, or nothing. |
| Family, health, work, appearance, background | Nothing — and this row is a rule, not a preference: the Content Policy bans content that publicly discloses another person’s private information and content that violates the Nondiscrimination Policy. |
The policy publishes no list of banned adjectives, so I am not going to pretend one exists. My own test is narrower and fits on a line: if I cannot swap the judgment for something a third person standing there could have observed, the judgment comes out and the sentence gets shorter.
Response speed and calendar hygiene, handled for you.
Start free — first 500 messagesOr book a demo callFrom Editing a review, opened 11 September 2026: “If you submit your review first, you may edit it anytime within the 14-day review period, up until the other party submits their review. Once both reviews are submitted or the 14-day review period has ended—whichever comes first—both reviews are automatically published and no more changes can be made.”
For anyone pasting templates that has one practical consequence: your window can close the moment the guest submits theirs, which can be minutes after yours. Replace every bracket before you press submit, not after. A published review that reads “left [specific area] clean” is the failure mode of this entire page.
Four questions before I submit anything:
Taking one down afterwards, disputing one written about you, and posting a public response are three separate processes with three separate rules, and they are all in editing, removing and responding to Airbnb reviews. Missing the 14 days altogether is a different problem again, handled in Airbnb review automation.
A template is a sentence you wrote once and reuse with one slot changed. A generator writes the sentence from what happened during the stay: you hand it the facts, it hands back the paragraph. For an ordinary checkout the template wins, and it wins for a dull reason — you already approved the wording, so there is exactly one decision left and nothing can appear that you did not write. A generator starts paying when a stay has five or six facts that need compressing into three lines, and it costs you a verification step, because a fluent sentence about a stay you actually had is easy to nod at and hard to check. Which generators do what is in our Airbnb review generator guide, and the wider category sits in Airbnb review management tools. I am not re-running that comparison here.
Where we come into it: BnBGenius asks the guest for a review after checkout and publishes the review the host writes, at $10 per unit per month — a unit being one rentable place, so the same home listed on Airbnb and VRBO counts once — with the first 500 messages free and no card. It does not decide the sentence for you. The templates on this page are still yours to choose between, and the slot is still yours to fill.
Liesbeth’s three units in Savannah run at about 70% occupancy — three units across a 30-day month is 90 unit-nights, so about 63 booked nights; at a three-night average that is 21 checkouts in the month, so 21 reviews to write. She keeps 5 saved wordings. Twenty-one checkouts across five wordings is four or five uses each, and that is the part people get backwards: rotation does not make the reviews different. With five wordings, four or five guests get the same sentence, and saving more wordings only makes that group smaller. The slot is what makes them different, and the slot changes 21 times, not five.
| Saved wording | The slot that has to change | Where Liesbeth gets it |
|---|---|---|
| Arrival and messages | What changed before check-in | The message thread |
| Care of the place | Which area was left in order | The cleaner’s photo |
| House rules | Which instruction actually mattered | The rule she had to mention |
| Checkout | The time, or where the key went | The lockbox log |
| Low-contact stay | The only question the guest asked | The message thread |
Checkout 4 and checkout 9 can both use the arrival wording. The first says the guest moved arrival to 22:00 and used the door code without asking; the second says the guest confirmed the car before driving down so the permit was ready. Same shape, different fact, both of them in the thread — which is the argument for keeping guest communication somewhere you can reread it, whether that is a set of check-in and checkout message templates or automated Airbnb messages that leave a record of what was asked and when.
Six questions produce the slot for any of the five wordings, and I answer them before opening the review box:
If five of the six come back blank, the stay was low-contact and the low-contact template is the honest one. That is not a lesser review. “They needed nothing and left on time” is information the next host can act on, and it is more than most reviews of quiet guests contain.
Two cases. The first is the one where the cleaner says something felt off but cannot name an item, a room, a time or a photograph. There is no review in that, only a feeling, and I am not putting a feeling on a guest’s record as though it were a fact. The second is the draft that is still an argument: if what I have written is three paragraphs defending my own cleaning fee, it is not a review of a guest and no amount of editing will turn it into one.
What silence does not buy is the thing hosts expect it to buy. The help page on reviews for homes says both parties have 14 days after checkout to submit, and that reviews are posted once both have submitted or the 14-day period ends, whichever comes first. Skipping yours does not hold theirs back. Theirs publishes when the clock runs out. Skip three of Liesbeth’s 21 checkouts and she has 18 accounts of a stay on the record instead of 21, while the guests’ reviews of her units land either way.
When there is one defensible sentence available, I write it rather than leaving the box empty:
“[Guest name] stayed [three nights] and checked out at [11:00]. Nothing further to report.”
Swap in: the nights and the time, and nothing else. It records that the reservation happened and claims no more than you can support — which, on the stay you are still annoyed about, is exactly the amount you know for certain.