Booking confirmation message
Send this after the reservation is confirmed. It thanks them and repeats the times. It does not add a new rule.
{Guest name}, your stay at {Property name} is confirmed for {Arrival date}.
Check-in is {Check-in time}. Checkout is {Checkout time}. Both times are the ones on the reservation. The house rules on the listing are the ones for this stay.
I will send arrival details closer to {Arrival date}, including how to get in. If your plans change before then, reply in this thread.
When to send
Send the confirmation once the reservation exists and you can see it on the calendar. That is later than an inquiry and later than a pre-approval. {guest_name} has a stay. {arrival_date} is the first night on that stay, and {checkin_time} and {checkout_time} are copied from the reservation, not from memory. If the listing says 16:00 and this booking was accepted with a different time, the reservation wins. Write the reservation’s time into the blanks.
The note has three pieces and then it should end: the stay is real, the times are these, and the rules are the ones they already saw. Door codes, Wi-Fi passwords, and a tour of the kitchen are a different day. Hosts who paste the entire arrival manual here end up correcting it twice, because a code set at booking is often replaced, and a parking spot sometimes changes with a street-cleaning day you do not know yet.
{property_name} matters when you host more than one place. A guest with two trips on one account should be able to tell which home this thread is about from the first line.
Timing tip
Send it the day the booking is confirmed, or the next morning if the confirmation arrived while you were asleep. Do not wait until the week of arrival. By then the guest has been wondering whether the host exists, and you have lost the chance to catch a date mismatch while changing a booking is still easy.
Do not send it a second time as a reminder. The three-day note is the reminder, and it should add arrival information rather than repeat this text with a new greeting. If you scheduled an automatic message, read it once against a real reservation before you turn the schedule on. A blank {checkout_time} that shows as unavailable is worse than leaving the sentence out.
Same-day bookings are the exception to “wait for the morning.” If they arrive today, send this note only if the check-in message is not ready in the same hour. Otherwise skip ahead to the door instructions. Two messages an hour apart that both say welcome are noise.
Common mistakes
Adding a fee, a form, or a rule that was not in the price or on the listing is the mistake that starts arguments. A damage deposit mentioned for the first time here, a request for a copy of an identity document the platform did not ask for, or a new quiet hour is a term they did not accept. Keep those out. If the platform already collected what it requires, you do not need to collect it again in the thread.
The second mistake is the door code. A code in a message sent days or weeks early gets screenshotted, forwarded, and sometimes revoked. Say that arrival details come closer to {arrival_date}. Fill {checkin_time} so they can plan a train, and stop.
The third is a novel. This confirmation is a few lines on a phone. A paragraph about the neighborhood, a list of restaurants, and your life story belong in a guidebook page they can open when they want it, not in the message that is supposed to tell them the stay is real.
What to check against the reservation
Read {arrival_date}, {checkin_time}, and {checkout_time} off the reservation screen while you fill the blanks. Then read the message once as if you were the guest. If any sentence introduces a task, delete it or move it to the checkout reminder, where tasks that are already on the listing can be repeated.
If a co-host also messages guests, decide which of you sends this one. Two confirmations with two different times is a support problem you will answer on arrival day.