My £3.80 Airbnb welcome pack — the full parts list and where I buy each bit

For three years I paid Waitrose £9.50 a box for pre-made welcome hampers. They were lovely. A small Tiptree marmalade, some Dorset Cereals, a packet of Duchy shortbread, tied up with a raffia bow. Guests mentioned them in reviews about one stay in six. My accountant once asked me how much I was spending on them annually across five properties and I realised, sat in her office in the Seven Dials in Brighton, that the answer was over two and a half grand.

Then I started making my own. And last year I finally wrote down the exact parts list, with suppliers and SKUs, because Magda kept asking "which tea bags, which shortbread, where do we get it again?" — and I kept telling her from memory and getting it wrong.

This is the list. Eleven items, £3.80 all-in per pack at current prices, thirteen minutes to assemble twenty packs once everything is in the cupboard. If you want to copy it line-by-line, you can.

The full parts list

Every welcome pack I assemble contains exactly these items. Per-pack cost in brackets. Source and rough pack size after.

1. Two Walkers shortbread fingers in a twin-pack (23p). Costco, 48 packs per box. They're the pre-wrapped catering twin-packs you get in hotel breakfast buffets. Keep forever, everyone recognises them.
2. Two Nespresso-compatible coffee pods, Caffeluxe Intenso (34p). Amazon Business, 100 per case. Not actual Nespresso — the compatibles are about a third of the price and the crema is indistinguishable in a blind cup. I wrote a whole post on the pod comparisons last year, short version: the Caffeluxe Intenso is the one I buy for everything now.
3. Two Yorkshire Tea bags (5p). Amazon Business, 1,040-bag catering pack. I put these in a small glassine bag I buy in packs of 250.
4. Two Twinings English Breakfast Decaf bags (9p). Amazon Business, 100-box catering pack. The decaf matters. About one in eight guests asks for decaf and providing it unprompted gets mentioned in reviews at a rate I've come to trust.
5. One small bottle (500ml) Highland Spring still water (28p). Costco, 24-bottle pack. The bottle itself is part of the signalling — the crumpled plastic Tesco own-label 500ml looked cheap next to the rest of the pack. Highland Spring looks the part and the cost differential is 12p a bottle. Fine.
6. One 25g Cadbury Dairy Milk bar (22p). Costco, 48-bar box. Anything more expensive and half your guests leave it behind. Dairy Milk has universal recognition and nobody treats it as disposable.
7. Two hand-written note cards (free, amortised). I buy plain white postcards in packs of 100 from Ryman, about £12 the pack, and I write a three-line welcome note before each check-in. Guest name, one local recommendation, a sentence about the property. Takes about ninety seconds per note. Guests screenshot them. I know because they tag me on Instagram.
8. One welcome card with wifi and house info (5p). Printed on my laser printer onto Ryman 160gsm card stock, guillotined to A6. I refresh the template quarterly when anything changes (wifi password, bin day, local taxi number).
9. One small sachet of Kallo Organic Oatcakes (11p). Costco, 100 sachets per box. The Scottish guests at Edinburgh love these. Southern guests treat them as a curiosity.
10. One fridge magnet with property wifi code (18p, amortised over four uses per magnet). Bought bulk from a custom print shop, around 70p each, I reuse them until they look tired. About four check-ins per magnet on average.
11. One small sprig of something seasonal from the garden (free). Rosemary in winter, mint in summer, a bit of dried lavender in between. This is the one item I've never put a cost on. It's the bit guests remember.

Eleven items. £3.80 per pack before packaging.

Packaging — the line I kept getting wrong

For the first year of doing this myself I was using small wicker baskets from The Range, about £4 each, reused between guests. Problem: wicker catches crumbs, collects dust, and the handle snaps after about fifteen turnovers. I was replacing them constantly and they always looked slightly tired.

I switched to kraft paper gift boxes with a slide-off lid. Amazon Business, 50-pack, works out at 62p per box. They're single-use, which I initially resisted for environmental reasons, but they're also fully recyclable and the aesthetic is better. Reviews on the packaging went up, not down, after the switch.

Total packed cost: £3.80 + £0.62 = £4.42 per welcome pack. Compared to the £9.50 Waitrose box I used to buy, and accounting for my thirteen-minutes-per-twenty assembly time at an imputed £15/hour, the all-in cost lands at about £4.58 per pack. A touch over half of what I was paying.

Where each supplier actually fits

I get the assembly question asked a lot: is it Amazon Business for everything, or Costco for everything, or a mix? For me it's a mix, for specific reasons.

Costco for the food items I buy in bulk boxes — the shortbread, the chocolate bars, the Highland Spring, the oatcakes. Costco's pack sizes suit this stuff. Fifty shortbread twin-packs at a time is a manageable box. I drive to the Lakeside store in Thurrock once every two months on a loop that takes in the Brighton wholesaler too, and fill the car.

Amazon Business for the coffee pods, the tea bags, the kraft boxes, and anything I need to reorder in smaller quantities without a car trip. The business account gets me VAT-invoiced delivery, prices that run about ten percent below consumer, and Amazon Prime on every order. The saved hassle is worth more to me than the saved pence.

Ryman for stationery. Postcards, card stock, the guillotined welcome cards. Local branch, walkable from one of the Brighton flats, no delivery delay, no minimum order.

A local florist at the Lake District for the occasional fresh sprig if I'm not getting anything from the garden. About £1 a time, negligible.

Why this beats bought-in — and where it doesn't

The cost gap is obvious. £4.58 versus £9.50. Across 264 turnovers a year, that's a £1,300 saving, which is real money even after you tax-adjust it.

Where bought-in wins: occupancy spikes. The week between Christmas and New Year, the Edinburgh flat does seven turnovers back-to-back with about forty minutes between guests. I cannot assemble welcome packs between those turnovers. So for that week, and occasionally peak weekends in Brighton, I do revert to a small pre-made box — a Piccadilly Pantry one, £7.20 trade, which I keep a stash of in the airing cupboard.

The rest of the year, bulk assembly runs weekly. Every Sunday evening, an hour at the kitchen table with Radio 4, twenty packs made, divided between the properties. It's not glamorous. It's also a useful anchor point in the week.

The guest feedback that made me keep doing it

I reread two years of reviews before sitting down to write this. Welcome pack mentions across the five flats, by content:

• Positive mentions of the hand-written note: 41
• Positive mentions of the shortbread: 22
• Positive mentions of the coffee pods: 17 (all of them framing it as "you'd included real coffee")
• Positive mentions of the chocolate bar: 11
• Positive mentions of the overall presentation: 29
• Negative mentions, any component: 2 — one guest didn't drink coffee and was annoyed we assumed, one guest thought the oatcakes were stale (they weren't, they were oatcakes)

The hand-written note is the single highest-signal item in the pack. If you copy nothing else from this list, copy that.

What I tried and abandoned

A short list of things that didn't make the final cut:

• Local artisan biscuits. Expensive, inconsistent supply, and half the guests didn't know what to do with a rosemary-and-pink-peppercorn shortbread.
• Mini wine bottles. Airbnb doesn't like them in welcome packs, and half the guests were under-30 pre-wedding groups who'd arrived with their own.
• Individually wrapped Tunnocks Teacakes. Melted in transit from Costco in July, stuck to the box, irretrievable. Do not repeat this error.
• A USB drive with a map of local recommendations. This was my 2023 experiment. Nobody plugged it in. I got three messages asking what the USB was for.

How I track it now

The eleven items above are each set up as an SKU in my inventory tracker. Hoststock knows the reorder threshold for each (ten packs below minimum triggers an alert) and I can tell at a glance which flat is going to run out of shortbread first. Before I set it up like this, I was running out of something about once a month and doing the panicky chemist run.

The panic run used to cost me. A Costco twin-pack of Walkers shortbread is 23p. An M&S Simply Shortbread single from the Brighton station WH Smith was £1.85. Four panic runs a year across five flats was about £120 I was burning on price differentials alone.

The minimalist version

If you want to copy a subset: the three items that do nearly all the work of the pack, in order of signal, are:

1. The hand-written note
2. Two wrapped biscuits and two tea bags
3. A Dairy Milk

That's a £1.05 welcome pack with about sixty percent of the review-mention impact of my full setup. It's what I leave at the Hove studio for the short business stays where the guest is going to be in the flat for eight hours and asleep the whole time. It still gets mentioned.

The point is: bought-in welcome packs are priced for people who have never assembled one. Once you have, the maths points firmly in one direction. Go bulk, keep the parts list boring, write the note.

The honest caveat

All of this works because I'm in the south of England, two hours from both a Costco and an Amazon distribution centre. If you're in Shetland, or the Outer Hebrides, or even a long way from a wholesaler, the calculation changes. The per-pack savings I'm reporting assume you can buy boxes of fifty shortbread twin-packs and not end up eating them yourself when they pass their sell-by. For smaller operators — one or two flats, six-a-year turnovers — a bought-in box from a decent hamper company is probably still the right call.

Four or more properties, though, the numbers are clear. Eleven items, four suppliers, thirteen minutes a batch. £3.80 a pack. Copy the list.