Leaving Hostaway because of their booking fee?

Alert for unread email(s)

Status: Requested 2 Votes
Rich S
Feb 15, 2020 7:46 PM
Joined Dec, 2018 301 posts

Would be nice for owners to have a way to discover when a guest has not read certain emails.

Options would be
- report/list sent to owners daily
- add as a trigger that owners could use to email themselves
- make visible from the Ribbon (my favorite!) along with other alerts such as "unsigned rental agreements" and "not fully paid".

Maybe add a checkbox to email templates so that only certain emails can be flagged as *must read*.

I just checked my email history report filtered down to my most important "thanks for booking" and "arrival day info" emails and in both cases about 10-20% have never been read. Probably these are my problem guests who show up unprepared !

Chris Hynes
Feb 17, 2020 8:44 AM
OR Team Member Joined Oct, 2012 1401 posts

Yep, a dashboard for unreads would be cool. However also keep in mind that the read flags are not an 100% guarantee -- if a user has images disabled or privacy cranked up, their email client won't send the read flag either.

Rich S
Feb 26, 2021 11:17 PM
Joined Dec, 2018 301 posts

Bumping this, I just got another guest who never read any emails and is literally 20 mins from my unit.

Out of curiosity I searched email history for my welcome email and it shows 8 out of 25 never opened. I imagine in some cases that is someone with privacy cranked up, but I'd still love to know. My reaching out with a message of "just checking to be sure you got the email" will generally be viewed as my being conscientious/helpful and *sometimes* will avoid a terrible guest experience of showing up and me being unavailable.

Could a trigger be added for unread status?

Ken T
Feb 27, 2021 3:56 PM
OR Team Member Joined Aug, 2019 1706 posts

That's very unlikely, because the "Read" indicator is highly unreliable. Many people have their email clients configured in such a way that we don't know they read it. And, often the "Read" indicator is actually triggered by someone's spam filter, and no human being ever saw the email.

Susie T
Jan 19, 2022 12:15 PM
Joined Oct, 2017 7 posts

I was advised last year that the reason my emails were not being read was due to being @gmail.com. Changed everything up, bought new domain, and the problem is still bad. 20-30% guests contact a few days out saying I never sent them details.  Even if we could catch a proportion of those, it would increase the guest experience.

 

Rich S
Jan 19, 2022 1:01 PM
Joined Dec, 2018 301 posts

I was advised last year that the reason my emails were not being read was due to being @gmail.com. Changed everything up, bought new domain, and the problem is still bad. 20-30% guests contact a few days out saying I never sent them details.  Even if we could catch a proportion of those, it would increase the guest experience.

 

by Susie T – Jan 19, 2022 5:15 PM (UTC)

I share the concern, that's why I wish there could be a positive confirmation button in emails. I'll have to do some searching to see if there's any way, but I suspect it would require development by the or team