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 Without 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 Without 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.
By setting up a channel 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 Without Contact Information
- Create a Trigger That Applies to Bookings to Send a Thank you to Your Channel Guest Without Contact Information
Create a Booking Message Template to Send a Thank you to Your Channel Guest Without Contact Information
Go to Settings > Templates to configure the "booking" template type message you want to send to your guest.
There is only one type of template you can create—a channel template. This is the delivery method that will be used for your response. To send a channel template 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.
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.
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 Without 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 direct booking 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 a future direct booking stay.
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 that you have your channel message template created, it's time to configure the trigger that will send it.
Create a Trigger That Applies to Bookings to Send a Thank you to Your Channel Guest Without 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 our channel template message, so we'll need to create the trigger to send it.
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 > Listing Site is > Only: Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo
- Action > Channel Template: Send Thank you to Your Channel Guest Without Contact Information Channel Template
Now, let's talk about what the above settings mean!
The Type and Event fields will trigger your channel 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 do not 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 condition of "Listing Site is > Only: Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo" to target our channel guests does 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.
You may want to add other conditions, but for now, this is enough to make our trigger send the Guest Thank You channel message seven days after their departure.
Finally, the last thing we select is the "Action" for the channel template we want to send. Since this trigger is supposed to send a channel message, select the channel template and be careful not to select an email 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 Without Contact Information Channel Template. That's it!