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 support article. We've 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 Cleaning Staff About an Early Check-in and/or to Document the State of the Property
It's imperative to keep your cleaning staff in the loop about early check-ins or to remember to document the state of your property prior to the check-in of that booking! Similar to the Tell Cleaning Staff About Special Preparations Needed for an Upcoming Booking, you can use message triggers in OwnerRez to identify bookings with early check-in requests by applying tags to those individual bookings.
Here are the steps for how to set up a template and trigger for this scenario:
- Create a Booking Template to Notify Cleaning Staff About an Early Check-in and/or to Document the State of the Property
- Create a Trigger that Applies to a Booking to Notify Your Cleaning Staff About an Early Check-in and/or to Document the State of the Property
Create a Booking Template to Notify Cleaning Staff About an Early Check-in and/or to Document the State of the Property
Go to Settings > Templates to configure the message you want to send. Since this template will be used for bookings, create a "Booking" type of template.
There are two choices for the type of template you can create - email, and SMS. These are the delivery methods that will be used for your response. To send these types of templates, you'll need your cleaners' contact information to send the message to. For instance, if you want to send an SMS message, you'll need your cleaners' cell phone number.
Notifying 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 and field codes work, check out the email templates overview article and field codes articles.
Copy and paste the following values into your new email template.
Name:
Notify Cleaning Staff About an Early Check-in and/or to Document the State of the Property Email Template
From Name:
{MYCOFULL}
From Address:
{MYEMAIL}
To Name:
Cleaner Name
To Address:
Cleaner email address
Subject:
Reminder about early check-in for {BARR}-{BDEP} at {PDISPNAME}
Body:
Hi Cleaner name,
Just a reminder about an early check-in for the following booking:
{BARR} to {BDEP} at {PDISPNAME} for {BNGUEST} guests.
Also, please be sure to do a quick video to document the state of {PDISPNAME} prior to guest check-in. Thanks!
{MYFIRST}
If you're wondering what those field codes do, check out the field codes support article or use the "Preview" button on the template 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 property, and dates booked, so it will match the guest booking. It includes the property, booking dates, and number of guests. 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, feel free to play with the words and styles to make it your own. However, remember that we are creating a message specific to notify your cleaning staff about an early check-in and/or to document the state of the property prior to check-in. If this template is used for a guest, the message body would be confusing to your guest. Similarly, if you do not include the {BARR} arrival date and {BDEP} departure date field codes in either the Subject field or body of the email template, the cleaner will not see booking dates displayed.
Optionally, if your property has an entry door that uses a manual door code, that your cleaner changes before each booking, you could include the {BDOORCODE} door code field code in this email message too. And if you use the {BCLEANDATE} cleaning date field code that is manually set in individual OwnerRez bookings, you could include that as well.
We are now armed with a solid email notification for cleaners about special preparations. But what about sending an SMS message to notify cleaners of an early check-in and/or to document the state of the property prior to check-in?
Notifying by SMS
If you have your cleaners' cell phone number, let's put it to good use by notifying them about special preparations.
Using our SMS premium feature, you can notify them directly via SMS to their cell phone. 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 Cleaning Staff About an Early Check-in and/or to Document the State of the Property SMS Template
To Phone Number:
Cleaner cell phone number
Body:
Cleaner first name, just a quick reminder about today's early check-in for the {BNGUEST} guests, {BARR} to {BDEP} booking at {PDISPNAME}. Also, please be sure to do a quick video to document the state of {PDISPNAME} prior to guest check-in. Thanks! 🎥
Once again, smack that Preview button to see how this looks live! SMS templates 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 template in that it is much shorter. Instead, it's a quick sentence to notify your cleaner about the early check-in and/or to document the state of the property prior to check-in. If you'd rather say something else - that's totally fine.
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 a New Booking to Notify Your Cleaning Staff About an Early Check-in and/or to Document the State of the Property
Since each trigger can only send one message template, you'll need to create a trigger for each type of message you send. Above, we crafted messages for email and SMS, so we'll need to create two triggers to send each one.
First, we'll create a trigger to send the email message. Navigate to Settings > Messaging > Triggers > and click + Create Trigger to pull up the new trigger screen.
Here is a list of all the settings the trigger needs to have:
- Type: Scheduled Time
- Event: 1 day Before Booking has arrived at 8:00 AM
- Conditions > Tag is > Any of > Early Check-in
- Action: Email Templates > Notify Cleaning Staff About an Early Check-in and/or to Document the State of the Property Email Template
Now, let's talk about what the above settings mean!
The Type and Event fields will make the trigger run 1 day before the guests arrive at 8:00 AM.
This trigger has the Condition of "Tags contain any of." I'll bet you were wondering how we were going to pull this trigger together with an early check-in! By applying an Early Check-in tag to a booking, we can notify our cleaners about early check-ins and remind them to also document the state of the property.
Need your team to set up a crib and high chair for guests? Consider using other tags along with a trigger to send your message template to remind your team to set up a crib and high chair.
You may want to add other conditions, but for now, this is enough to make our trigger send the email message to notify cleaners before the arrival of bookings that need special preparation. Check out our Tags Overview support article for other tag ideas!
But what if you have more than one property, and each property has a different cleaning staff? Clearly, you'd have to add the Condition of "Property is Only" and select those specific properties to ensure that the correct cleaning staff is notified for the properties that they maintain only.
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 the SMS template.
At this point, your trigger should look like this:
Nice and simple!
These actions do exactly what they say.
That's it! Click Save, and now you have a trigger ready to go.
But we're not done. You created a template for an SMS message, so now you need to create a trigger to send that.
Using the instructions above, create one more trigger with the same type, event, and conditions, but select the SMS template as your "Action" instead of email.
There is no "Phone Number on File" condition, but that's okay because the trigger won't send an SMS message if there's no phone number to send it to. And we manually entered our cleaner's cell phone number in the Phone Number Field. The trigger will silently skip sending a message if there is no way to send it.
All done! You now have active triggers in place that will automatically notify your cleaning staff about early check-ins and remind them to also document the state of the property!