Booking.com Messages: How to Manage Your Communication with Guests with Ease
Let's take a closer look at the messaging tools that Booking.com offers to hosts to help them save time on operational tasks and ensure that guests can have timely replies.
Effective communication is an essential component of guest experience that is crucial to the success of your vacation rental business, no matter what OTA platform you use to list your property. If you get it right, it can lead to positive reviews and repeat bookings. But at the same time, this aspect of hosting is very time-consuming, especially if you manage several properties.
Airbnb offers limited functionality to streamline your communication with travelers so you don’t have to write the same message to each guest repeatedly. And what about Booking.com? What tools are there for hosts to help them communicate with guests using Booking.com messages?
Let’s take a closer look at the messaging tools that Booking.com offers to hosts to help them save time on operational tasks and ensure that guests can have timely replies.
Booking.com Messages: Tools for Communicating with Guests
You can use the Booking.com Extranet or Pulse app to communicate with your guests to make them feel welcome and provide them with useful information to feel confident about their booking.
You can contact your guests before, during, and after their stay and respond thoughtfully to their messages. But keep in mind that you can only use Booking.com messages to contact your guests after they have booked your property. Here is what you can do using Booking.com messaging tools:
Create message templates and use them to send personalized messages to guests
Personalize your templates by adding placeholders for your guest’s name, check-in date and time, property name, and more
Add image attachments to help clarify location and other important details
Schedule messages to be sent automatically when guests make a booking or at specific points before arrival or departure
Use templates to automatically respond to frequently asked questions on check-in, check-out, parking, and bed types.
Booking.com messages are a useful feature that can help streamline your communication with guests and reduce your workload so you can have more time to focus on other daily tasks. But as you see, messaging tools provided by the platform have their limitations.
And if you also list your home or apartment on other vacation rental booking sites, for example, Vrbo, you’ll need to use additional messaging services. So, what can you do to ensure fast, clear, and personalized communication with all your guests?
You can easily solve this problem using vacation rental management software like Hospitable. Our tool has advanced Guest Experience functionality and can automate your Booking.com messages and conversations with guests on other channels, including your direct booking website.
How to Automate Booking.com Messages with Hospitable
Hospitable has Booking.com integration that can help you automate your communication with your guests similarly to other OTA platforms we support. You can configure all messaging rules under Guest Experience and then manage all conversations with your guests from our Unified Inbox. This way, you’ll feel confident that all your guests will always receive the necessary information when they need it.
Scheduled messages
Booking.com guests appreciate quick replies to their messages with requests and questions, but it’s not enough to get more great reviews and bookings. You must be proactive in your communication during all customer journey stages. This way, you can show your guests that you’re a responsible host who cares about providing them a memorable experience.
That means you need to create a personalized message flow for every guest who booked your STR property. It should include several essential messages that give travelers all the important information they need for a pleasant stay in small, digestible chunks. And Hospitable can help automate this process, saving you hours each week. All automatic messages to Booking.com guests will be sent via email.
You just need to create message templates to cover the stages of the message flow or use our preloaded message templates and apply short-codes to personalize them for each guest. You can choose from 50+ short-codes to make your messages more relatable to your guests and ensure you don’t sound like a robot.
Pro tip: You can use our templates and detailed instructions to master specific types of messages:
Then, you can create scheduled message rules to plan messages and send them based on timing, such as when a new reservation is made, check-in and check-out time, or a day of the week. For example, you can schedule messages to share information about check-in and check-out instructions, directions to your property and access codes, Wi-Fi details, local attractions, and review reminders.
Replies to events
Hospitable users can also create messaging rules to send automatic messages to quickly respond to certain events. You can create rules to send such messages immediately or delay them for up to 60 minutes.
Since Booking.com doesn't support events before booking, such as new inquiry, pre-approval, and request to book, we can only automate replies to 2 events that the platform supports. These events are booking confirmation and booking cancellation.
Hospitable also allows you to add attachments to your Booking.com messages, for example, images. There are no restrictions about the specific types of files you can send, but there is a size limit of 10 MB.
You will always know if your Booking.com guest received and read an automatic message because we will display the status of each message in your Inbox. There are four possible statuses available, such as
Seen
Not seen yet
Failed (bounced or marked as spam)
Clicked (if the message includes links)
