Check-in and check-out times for your B&B: what hours, and what do you charge?

There is a category of question every host answers again every single week. "Could we arrive at 1pm?" "Can we leave a bit later on Sunday, our train is only at four?" "We'll get in around 10pm, is that a problem?"

There is nothing wrong with any of that. But if you answer those questions five times a week, it stops being hospitality and starts being a symptom. Usually of check-in and check-out times that live somewhere in an old confirmation email, once, in small print.

Why those hours decide more than you think

Your check-out time and your check-in time together form your cleaning window. Check-out at 11 and check-in from 4pm gives you five hours. Move check-out to noon and check-in to 3pm and you are down to three — and on a busy Saturday with three departures and three arrivals, those two hours are exactly the difference between working calmly and running behind all day. How to use that window in practice is covered in cleaning scheduling between check-out and check-in.

The check-in time also decides what your evening looks like. An open ending ("come whenever suits you") sounds hospitable, but in practice it means being home and available from four in the afternoon until eleven at night. You can sustain that for one season, not for five.

Picking realistic hours

For a small-scale B&B, this tends to work:

• Check-out between 10 and 11. Earlier than 10 feels rushed for guests having breakfast; later than 11 squeezes your cleaning window shut.
• Check-in between 3 and 5pm, with an end time. For example: 4pm to 8pm. That end time is the important half of the sentence. Without one there is no such thing as a late arrival, only an arrival you are waiting up for.
• A separate arrangement for late arrivals. Not "can be arranged", but concrete: after 8pm it runs through the key safe, with a code the guest receives on the day.

Two things feed into this: how many rooms you have to turn over on a single day, and whether you live on site. Someone living above the business can carry wider hours than someone twenty minutes away.

Say it three times, not once

The classic mistake is not that the times are wrong — it is that they sit somewhere the guest never reads. A guest who booked through a platform three months ago has not had that confirmation email open since.

So put your times in three places:

1. At booking. In your house rules and in the confirmation email, as a plain sentence, not buried in a block of terms.
2. A few days before arrival. In your pre-arrival message — the one guests do read, because it holds the practical information. That is also the natural moment to ask for their arrival time.
3. At departure. One line in the message the day before: "Check-out tomorrow before 11 please; you can leave the keys on the table."

Once those three messages go out automatically, the vast majority of your questions disappear on their own. See automating guest communication for how to build such a series without it turning impersonal.

Early check-in and late check-out: favour or product?

This is where the money is, and where most of the vagueness is too. Three workable positions:

Free, when it happens to be possible. You say nothing in advance and offer it spontaneously when the room is ready and nobody has left. Costs you nothing, often earns you a sentence in a review. Downside: guests who got it once expect it next time.

Paid, as a fixed extra. Late check-out until 2pm for €20, early check-in from 1pm for €20. That is not gouging — you are selling half a day in which that room cannot be sold again. Charge it as an option on the booking rather than as cash at the door, so it lands properly on the invoice. Same logic as the other paid extras on a booking.

Not at all, in high season. On days when every room turns over, there is no slack. You are allowed to simply say so: "in July and August a late check-out isn't possible."

What you do not do in any of the three cases: promise it at the moment of booking. Whether it works depends on the booking after this one — and that one often does not exist yet. "Do ask us the day before" is an honest and workable answer.

Four practical rules

Half a day has a price, including a free one. If you structurally let people in at 1pm, then your check-in time is effectively 1pm. Adjust it, or charge for it — but do not leave it hovering in between.

Luggage storage is the cheapest solution. A guest checking out at noon whose train leaves at six usually does not want a room, they want somewhere to put a suitcase. A lockable corner in the hallway solves nine out of ten of those questions, for free.

Have the guest tell you their arrival time. One required field at booking or one question in the pre-arrival message saves entire evenings. Store the answer with the booking, not in your head.

Make sure it works without you. A key safe or code lock is not coldness, it is the reason you can go to a birthday party on a Saturday. More on that in self check-in and smart locks.

How to set this up in BedFlow PMS

In BedFlow PMS you set the default check-in and check-out times per property, so they travel automatically into your confirmation and pre-arrival emails in the guest's own language. Early check-in and late check-out you configure as paid extras added to a booking; they end up on the invoice and in your revenue figures instead of in a notebook. The arrival time the guest supplies stays attached to the booking, so whoever opens the door that day does not have to dig through a mailbox. The documentation shows exactly where those settings live.

In short

Pick hours that respect your cleaning window and give you your evenings back, put an end time on your check-in, and communicate those times three times instead of once. Treat early check-in and late check-out as something with a value: free when it happens to be easy, paid when it costs you half a day, and off the table in your busiest weeks. And say that up front, not in the moment.

Want to manage check-in times, paid extras and automatic pre-arrival messages in one place? Try BedFlow PMS free for 30 days — no credit card required. The pricing is right there on the site.