Notify All Current Guests About an Urgent Situation

Triggers give you a powerful way to communicate automatically. You can respond to guests with personalized messages or notify third parties without lifting a finger! To read more about triggers, check out our Trigger overview and Triggers - Setup & Configuration support articles. We've also created a small library of trigger examples to help get you started.

In this example, we're dealing with a booking for the following scenario:

Scenario: Notify All Current Guests About an Urgent Situation

Urgent situations sometimes arise, necessitating the need to notify all current guests. This message could inform guests about unplanned building maintenance, emergency storm notifications, or any changes that could affect multiple guests, even at a specific property. But how do you send a message to all current guests at once rather than individually? 

Although you can never predict when an urgent situation may arise, it's wise to have message templates and disabled triggers ready in the event of that happening. This way, you can quickly edit the messages and enable the trigger to notify all current guests about the issue and then disable the trigger afterward. This support article explains how to set that up. This scenario assumes that all of your guests have already provided their contact information and signed a renter agreement.

By setting up an email, channel, or SMS template and trigger, you can notify all of your current guests about an urgent situation by creating message templates. OwnerRez can do that for you with message triggers.

Here are the steps for how to set up a template and trigger for this scenario:

1. Create a Booking Message Template to Notify All Current Guests About an Urgent Situation
   • Send by Email
   • Send by Channel
   • Send by SMS
2. Create a Trigger That Applies to Bookings to Notify All Current Guests About an Urgent Situation

Create a Booking Message Template to Notify All Current Guests About an Urgent Situation

Go to Settings > Templates to configure the "booking" template type message you want to send to your guest. 

There are three choices for the type of template you can create - email, channel, and SMS.  These are the delivery methods that will be used for your response.  To send these types of templates, the booking must have contact information you can reply to.  For instance, if you want to send an SMS message as your reply, the guest must have provided a phone number with their booking.  Likewise, if you want to send a message on Vrbo, the booking must have come through Vrbo, to begin with, so that our system knows how to deliver your response back to the correct Vrbo thread.

Send by Email

First, we'll create an email template, so go to Settings > Templates > Email tab > click the Create Email Template button > select the "Booking" option.  This will open an email editor with some sample field codes filled in.  For detailed information about how email templates work, check out the email templates overview article and field codes article.

Copy and paste the following values into your new email template.

Name:

Notify All Current Guests About an Urgent Situation Email Template

{MYCOFULL}

{MYEMAIL}

{CFULL}

{CEMAIL}

Subject:

Urgent Situation at {PDISPNAME}

Body:

Hi {CFIRST},

We want to notify you about an urgent situation that is currently occurring at {PDISPNAME}.

Insert specific information regarding urgent situation. 

We apologize for this inconvenience and hope it does not disrupt your stay at {PDISPNAME}.

{MYFIRST}

If you're wondering what those field codes do, check out the field codes support article or use the "Preview" button on the booking to take a live look.

Here's a quick preview of what the above email message looks like:

Notice how clean and personalized the content is. The subject line is dynamic to the booking by including the {CFIRST} guest's first name and the property name {PDISPNAME} field codes. The body addresses the guest by name, so it looks like the body was written by hand. In other words, it looks like a hand-written manual response, even though it wasn't.

After copying and pasting the above subject and body into your template, customize it with information regarding the urgent situation that could affect guests at this specific property. However, remember that we are creating a message that is specific to "bookings."  This message assumes that all bookings as it responds to are bookings with guest contact information, so make sure to customize accordingly. 

We are now armed with an email template to guests about an urgent situation. But what about a channel message?

Send by Channel

Even though we assume that the guest has already provided their contact information and signed a renter agreement in this scenario, some users and guests still prefer to keep all communications on the channel. OwnerRez directly integrates with the native messaging platforms at Vrbo, Airbnb, and Booking.com, so this is easy to set up!

For detailed information about how channel templates work, check out the Channel Templates and field codes support articles.

To create a channel template, go to Settings > Templates > Channel tab > click the Create Channel Template button > select the "Booking" option. This will open a message editor with some sample field codes filled in.

Copy and paste the following values into your new channel template.

Name:

Notify All Current Guests About an Urgent Situation Channel Template

Body:

Hi {CFIRST},

We want to notify you about an urgent situation that is currently occurring at {PDISPNAME}.

Insert specific information regarding urgent situation. 

We apologize for this inconvenience and hope it does not disrupt your stay at {PDISPNAME}.

{MYFIRST}

Channel templates have a Preview button, so as you type, take a quick look at the preview window to get a sense of how the channel message will look.

Here is a quick look at how the above channel template looks in preview mode:

As you can see, this message is plain (no colors, bullets, images, or rich text), but that's good because it will be sent to the guest via the channel messaging platform, and the messaging platforms don't allow anything other than plain text. 

Again, the channel message is dynamic to the booking by including the {CFIRST} guest's first name and the property name {PDISPNAME} field codes. You want a concise message for the guest to read, and this does the trick!

Now we have your channel message template created! But maybe we want to send an SMS message?

Send by SMS

Some bookings that arrive in your account will already include the guest's phone number.  This typically happens when a guest books on your book-direct website, using your Book Now widget, or on a listing channel that passes guest contact information at the time of booking, such as Vrbo.

Using our SMS premium feature, you can reply directly to their cell phone via SMS. For detailed information about how SMS templates work, check out the SMS Templates and field codes support articles.

To create an SMS template, go to Settings > Templates > SMS tab > click the Create SMS Template button > select the "Booking" option.  This will open an SMS message editor with some sample field codes filled in.

Copy and paste the following values into your new SMS template.

Name:

Notify All Current Guests About an Urgent Situation SMS Template

To Phone Number:

{CPHONE}

Body:

Hi {CFIRST}, we want to notify you about an urgent situation that is currently occurring at {PDISPNAME}, insert specific information regarding urgent situation. We apologize for this inconvenience and hope it does not disrupt your stay at {PDISPNAME}.

Once again, smack that Preview button to see how this looks live! SMS templates are similar to channel templates in that they are plain text with no colors or formatting options, but you can still dress them up with personalized field codes and light-hearted emojis.

Here is a quick look at how the above SMS template looks in preview mode:

Not a fan of emojis?  No worries, edit that part out!

You'll notice that this SMS template differs from the email and channel templates in that it is much shorter and doesn't include detailed instructions.  Instead, it's a quick sentence to remind the guest to bring the trash cans to the curb. If you'd rather say something else - that's totally fine. Or you could send a larger message body with more details like the email or channel templates above do.

Now that we have some message templates created, it's time to configure the trigger that will send them.

Create a Trigger That Applies to Bookings to Notify All Current Guests About an Urgent Situation

Since each trigger can only send one message template, you'll need to create triggers for each type of reminder you send.  Above, we crafted replies for email, channel, and SMS, so we'll need to create three triggers to send each type of template.

Here is a list of all the settings this trigger needs to have:

• Type: Scheduled Time
• Event: Before > 1000 days before > Booking departs > at 9:00 AM
• Add Condition: Arrival Date is > On or Before > TODAYS'S DATE
• Add Condition: Departure Date is > On or After > TODAYS'S DATE
• Add Condition > Email Address on File is One of > Has Real Email Address
• Action:  Notify All Current Guests About an Urgent Situation Email Template
• Retry: Every day until departure > Between 9:00 and > 9:00 PM > each day
• Description: Create this trigger in a disabled state - I will activate it later.

Now, let's talk about what the above settings mean!

Additionally, even though the trigger Type is a scheduled type, we've selected today's date to send your email template at 9:00 AM. Just as you'll need to edit your templates to address the specific urgent situation, you'll also need to adjust the time to send the templates. We added a retry but also suggest you select at least one hour past your current time to allow the system to process the trigger correctly.

Since we are targeting "bookings" for guests for whom we already have contact information only, we want to add a "Condition" to the trigger that will stop it from sending out messages for other bookings. Adding the "Has real email address" condition status covers that.

Keep in mind that channels like Airbnb and Booking.com don't provide an email address (or even a phone number) for the guest. See the Ask Channel Booking Guest Without Contact Info, to Provide Contact Info and Sign Renter Agreement support article for more information on that topic.

Finally, the last thing we select is the "Action" for the email template we want to send. Since this trigger is supposed to send an email message, select the email template and be careful not to select a channel or SMS template.

At this point, your trigger should look like this:

Click Save, and Now this trigger is ready to go, but it will remain disabled until there is an urgent situation in which you need to notify all guests.