The digital version of your welcome book does half the job: it travels ahead of the guest, with the booking confirmation. But the copy that actually gets picked up at 11 p.m. by someone hunting for the Wi-Fi password is the printed one on the kitchen counter. And a printed book is where good design goes to die if the export, paper or size is wrong. I've printed welcome books for twelve villas in Portugal, for apartments and villas in Qatar during the World Cup, and for the apartments I manage in Casablanca today, so I've made every mistake in this guide at least once, usually at the worst possible moment, thirty minutes before a check-in.

Here is the whole path from a finished Canva design to a book on the table, step by step: the size to pick, the export settings that matter, the paper that survives real guests, and when a print shop beats your home printer.

Step 1: Pick your size before you design, not after

The single most expensive mistake is designing first and thinking about paper last, because resizing a finished book shuffles every layout. Decide the page size on day one:

  • A4 (21 × 29.7 cm) if you host in Europe, the UK, or almost anywhere outside North America. It prints everywhere without surprises and fits every folder and display stand sold locally.
  • US Letter (8.5 × 11 in) if you host in the US or Canada. Same logic, opposite market: feeding A4 to an American office printer is how you get mystery margins.
  • A5 only if you specifically want a small bound booklet. It's charming, but it halves your text size or doubles your page count, and home printing an A5 booklet means wrestling with duplex settings. Not for your first book.

The practical rule: use the paper size your local supermarket sells. If your template comes in A4 and you need US Letter, Canva can resize the design, but do it before you start editing the content, then check each page, because elements shift.

Step 2: Respect the margins (and forget bleed, mostly)

Printers can't print to the edge of the page; home printers especially claim a border of about 5 mm all round. So keep every piece of text at least 10 to 12 mm from the page edge, and don't put anything critical, like the Wi-Fi password, in a corner.

You only need to think about bleed (design extending past the page edge, trimmed after printing) if your pages have full-bleed photos or coloured backgrounds AND you're using a professional printer. In that case, tick "crop marks and bleed" in Canva's export dialog and the printer takes care of the rest. For a home-printed book, skip bleed entirely and design with a clean white margin; it looks deliberate and every printer on earth can produce it.

Step 3: Export the right PDF from Canva

Canva hides two different PDFs behind the download button, and picking the right one matters:

1. Open your design and go to Share → Download. 2. Choose PDF Print, not PDF Standard. Print is the high-resolution version (300 dpi) meant for paper; Standard is compressed for screens and looks soft on paper, especially photos. 3. If your design uses bleed for a professional printer, tick Crop marks and bleed. Otherwise leave it off. 4. If you'll print at a shop that asks for CMYK, that option lives behind Canva Pro; the free account exports RGB, and honestly, for a welcome book, every online printer I've used accepts RGB PDFs and converts them without drama. Don't buy Pro just for this.

Keep the PDF Standard export too, because that's the lighter file you send guests before arrival. Two exports, two jobs. This step assumes your book is already built; if it isn't, my Canva welcome book tutorial walks through the design side click by click, and this guide takes over at the moment the design is done.

Step 4: Choose paper that survives guests

Paper weight is measured in gsm, and the number changes how your book feels in the hand:

  • 80 gsm is standard office paper. It works, but it's floppy, shows the next page through, and looks like a handout.
  • 120 to 160 gsm is the sweet spot for inside pages: firm, opaque, still cheap. A book on 160 gsm paper feels intentional the moment a guest picks it up.
  • 200 to 250 gsm for the cover only. A heavier cover is the difference between a document and a book.

Finish: choose matte or silk over glossy. Glossy pages glare under kitchen lights and hold fingerprints; matte reads calmly and photographs well. Save glossy for nothing, honestly.

One battlefield lesson: whatever paper you choose, the pages near the coffee machine will meet coffee. In my busiest properties I slide each page into a plastic sleeve in a slim ring binder. It sounds unglamorous, but it wipes clean, single pages can be reprinted and swapped in two minutes when the Wi-Fi password changes, and after two years the book still looks like week one. For a more polished object, print and bind, but accept that you'll reprint the whole book when something changes.

Step 5: Home printer, online printer, or copy shop?

All three work; they suit different moments.

Print at home when the book changes often or you need it today. A basic inkjet on 160 gsm paper produces a perfectly respectable book, and the real advantage is iteration: reprint one page the moment something changes. This is how I run most of my apartments, because in a living document the ability to reprint page 4 tonight beats perfect colour reproduction.

Order from an online printer when you want the book to feel like a product: bound, heavy cover, colours richer than an inkjet manages. Upload the PDF Print file, pick A4, 135 to 170 gsm silk pages, wire or perfect binding, and a 250 gsm cover. It costs a few euros per copy and takes a few days. Worth it for a flagship property, or when you're printing one book per room. If you run a guesthouse or small hotel, this is your lane: order the guest-guide pages that never change (welcome, breakfast hours, safety) as a bound book per room, and keep the changeable pages in sleeves. I go deeper on what belongs in those pages in my guide to the hotel and B&B welcome book.

The local copy shop is the in-between: same-day, decent paper, spiral binding while you wait. It's my answer in a new city, before I've found an online printer I trust.

Step 6: The print-day checklist

Before you print twenty pages or order fifty copies, run this two-minute check. Every item on it is a mistake I've personally made:

  • Proof one copy first, on the actual paper. Colours that glow on a screen can print muddy.
  • Read the Wi-Fi password on paper. Is it findable in ten seconds, and is an O visibly different from a 0? Fix ambiguous characters with a clearer font or by spacing the password out.
  • Check nothing sits closer than 10 mm to an edge.
  • Check page order and duplex settings if printing double-sided; nothing says amateur like an upside-down page 7.
  • Update before you print, not after. The moment a book is printed, its mistakes become permanent. The closed café you forgot to remove will now mislead guests on paper.

Print it, but don't stop there

A printed book and a digital book cover each other's blind spots, so do both: the PDF travels before arrival, the paper copy works mid-stay. Then add the bridge between them, a small QR code on the welcome page that opens the digital version. Guests photograph it once and carry your recommendations around the city, and if the printed book ever walks off, the QR code on your house poster still points to the current version. Everything about what goes on those pages, rather than how they're printed, lives in my complete welcome book guide.

If you're starting from zero, don't design and print in one heroic weekend. Start from a welcome book template with print-ready A4 pages, spend your energy on your content, export PDF Print, and run the checklist above. And if you're setting up the whole property, the complete host toolkit prints from the same playbook: checklists in sleeves where the cleaning happens, posters on decent paper where the reminders belong, and a welcome book on the counter that looks like it was made for the house. Because from the guest's side of the table, it was.