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: Send Thank you to Your Channel Guest With Contact Information
Good guest communication is essential for a positive guest experience. Clear and timely communication can greatly influence guests' perceptions and impact their reviews. Similar to the Send Morning of Departure Information to Your Channel Guest With Contact Information support article that details how to send departure information on the morning of their departure with a link to review their stay, you can also send a thank you message with a link to review their stay and includes a discount code to book again after a guest's departure.
This scenario assumes that the guest has already provided contact information and signed a renter agreement.
By setting up an email, channel, or SMS template and trigger, you can send your channel guest a thank you message with a link to review their stay along with a discount code for a repeat stay following their departure. 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:
- Create a Booking Message Template to Send a Thank you to Your Channel Guest With Contact Information
- Create a Trigger That Applies to Bookings to Send a Thank you to Your Channel Guest With Contact Information
- Variations
Create a Booking Message Template to Send a Thank you to Your Channel Guest With Contact Information
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.
Note: Why can't you use a platform email or proxy email address like "joe.blow.12345@messages.airbnb.com" or "joe.blow.12345@messages.booking.com?" These platform/proxy email addresses aren't real. If you send messages to them, your message will be collected by the channel, stripped, re-formatted and displayed on the channel's message platform in various ways that typically don't work well for email.
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:
Send Thank you to Your Channel Guest With Contact Information Email Template
From Name:
{MYCOFULL}
From Address:
{MYEMAIL}
To Name:
{CFULL}
To Address:
{CEMAIL}
Subject:
Thank you for choosing {PDISPNAME}!
Body:
Hi {CFIRST},
Thank you for choosing {PDISPNAME} for your {BARR} to {BDEP} stay, and we hope you found it to be relaxing!
Please use the following link to write a review (or send private feedback) for your stay at {PDISPNAME}.
{BUREVIEW}
Reviews provide valuable information to other potential renters about the quality of {PDISPNAME}.
We are always looking for ways to improve the vacation experience for our guests. Please let us know if you have any suggestions for improvements or ideas on how your stay could have been more enjoyable. If you had any concerns or unsatisfactory experiences during your stay, please contact {MYFIRST} at {MYEMAIL} directly so that we may deal with them immediately.
Hopefully, you have our contact information from your visit and can contact us with your future travel dates to book directly. Booking directly with us saves both of us a lot of fees--usually hundreds of dollars. It's not too early to start planning your next stay at {PDISPNAME}!
Here's a 10% discount code, FANCYSTAYAGAIN10, eligible for 10% off your next stay.
Again, thank you {CFIRST} for choosing {PDISPNAME} and we hope to host you again soon!
{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 property name {PDISPNAME} field code. In the email body, we included the booking arrival {BARR} and departure {BDEP} field codes as well as requested a review by including the review link {BUREVIEW} field code and a discount code for the guest to use for future stay. 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, feel free to play with the words and styles to make it your own. 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 a Channel Guest Thank You email template to send to the guest. But what about channel bookings?
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!
Note: Why can't you use a platform email or proxy email address like "joe.blow.12345@messages.airbnb.com" or "joe.blow.12345@messages.booking.com?" These platform/proxy email addresses aren't real. If you send messages to them, your message will be collected by the channel, stripped, re-formatted and displayed on the channel's message platform in various ways that typically don't work well for email.
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:
Send Thank you to Your Channel Guest With Contact Information Channel Template
Body:
Hi {CFIRST},
Thank you for choosing {PDISPNAME} for your {BARR} to {BDEP} stay, and we hope you found it to be relaxing!
Please copy and paste the url below into a new tab to write a review for your stay at {PDISPNAME}.
{BUREVIEW}
Reviews provide valuable information to other potential renters about the quality of {PDISPNAME}.
Please let us know if you have any suggestions for improvements or ideas on how your stay could have been more enjoyable. If you had any concerns or unsatisfactory experiences during your stay, please respond here directly so that we may deal with them immediately.
Hopefully, you have our contact information from your visit and can contact us with your future travel dates to book directly. Booking directly with us saves both of us a lot of fees--usually hundreds of dollars. It's not too early to start planning your next stay at {PDISPNAME}!
Here's a 10% discount code, FANCYSTAYAGAIN10, eligible for 10% off your next stay.
Again, thank you {CFIRST} for choosing {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, 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.
Notice how we include instructions to "copy and paste" the plain text Review URL into a new tab? The channel message template converts the {BUREVIEW} field code link into plain text that can be copied and pasted by your channel booking guest to leave you a review, and we included a discount code for the guest to use for future stays.
Again, the channel message is dynamic to the booking by including the booking arrival {BARR} and departure {BDEP} field codes as well as the property name {PDISPNAME} field code. 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:
Send Thank you to Your Channel Guest With Contact Information SMS Template
To Phone Number:
{CPHONE}
Body:
Thank you again for choosing {PDISPNAME} for your {BARR} to {BDEP} stay, {CFIRST}! Reviews provide valuable information to other potential renters about the quality of {PDISPNAME}. We would really appreciate if you could leave your review by clicking on this link, {BUREVIEW}. Thank you, {CFIRST}! 😁
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 a return discount code. Instead, it's a short message thanking the guest and providing the {BUREVIEW} review field code for the guest to leave a review. If you'd rather say something else - that's totally fine. Or you could send a larger message body, including the discount code, as the channel template above does.
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 Send a Thank you to Your Channel Guest With Contact Information
Since each trigger can only send one message template, you'll need to create a trigger for each type of reply you send. Above, we crafted replies for email, channel, and SMS, so we'll need to create three 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: 7 days > After > Booking has departed > at 9:00 AM
- Add Condition > Email Address on File: Has Real Email Address
- Add Condition > Listing Site is > Only: Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo
- Action > Email Template: Send Thank you to Your Channel Guest With Contact Information Email Template
Now, let's talk about what the above settings mean!
The Type and Event fields will trigger your email template to be sent at a scheduled time seven days after your guests' departure at 9:00 AM.
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. We also added the condition of "Listing Site is > Only: Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo" to target our channel guests.
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.
You may want to add other conditions, but for now, this is enough to make our trigger send the Guest Thank You email message seven days after their departure.
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:
Nice and simple!
Click Save, and now you have a trigger ready to go. These actions do exactly what they say. Seven days after your guest departs at 9:00 AM, the trigger runs and sends your Send Thank you to Your Channel Guest With Contact Information Email Template. That's it!
Variations
You work extremely hard to get reviews. If you're like most users, you ask your guests to post reviews after every booking, but only a small fraction do. It can take a decade to build a good list of reviews, and the more you have them the stronger your reputation (and easier your marketing) gets.
- Staggered Scheduling
- Consider creating a detailed schedule of staggered Guest Thank-you messages that include review requests. Perhaps send an email guest thank-you message with a review request 7 days after your guests depart, then send a channel message 10 days after your guests depart, and follow up with a guest thank-you message with a review request by SMS 14 days after departure.
- Return Discount Code Offers
- Consider offering specific return discount codes by including that code in your email, channel, and SMS guest thank-you messages. You could also offer discount codes of varying amounts or percentages on a specific schedule to tempt your guest to book again.
- Include a Social Media Like or Follow Request
- Consider including a request to like or follow your social media channels (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube) in your templates by including your social media field codes ( {MYFACEBOOK}, {MYINSTAGRAM}, {MYTWITTER}, {MYYOUTUBE}, {MYTIKTOK}).
Or even consider a combination of these ideas!