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 the guest experience and crucial to the success of your vacation rental business, no matter which 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 communication with travelers so you don’t have to write the same message to each guest. And what about Booking.com? What tools are available to hosts to help them communicate with guests via Booking.com messages?
Let’s take a closer look at the messaging tools Booking.com offers hosts to help them save time on operational tasks and ensure guests receive timely replies.
Booking.com Messages: Tools for Communicating with Guests
You can use the Booking.com Extranet or the Pulse app to communicate with your guests, making them feel welcome and providing them with useful information to help them 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.
Monitor your reply score, which shows how quickly you reply to guests. Your reply score is updated daily and reflects the percentage of messages responded to within 24 hours.
Booking.com messages are a helpful feature that can streamline your communication with guests and reduce your workload, giving you more time to focus on other daily tasks. But as you can see, the platform's messaging tools 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 short-term 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 a native API connection to Booking.com and can help you automate communication with your Booking.com guests, just as with 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, but that’s not enough to get more great reviews and bookings. You must be proactive in your communication throughout the customer journey. This way, you can show your guests that you’re a responsible host who cares about providing them with 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 provide travelers with all the important information they need for a pleasant stay, in 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 can either create message templates to cover the stages of the message flow, or use our preloaded message templates and apply shortcodes to personalize them for each guest. You can choose from 50+ shortcodes 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, including:
Then, you can create scheduled message rules to send messages at specific times, such as when a new reservation is made, at check-in and checkout, or on specific days of the week. For example, you can schedule messages to share check-in and check-out instructions, directions to your property, access codes, Wi-Fi details, local attractions, and review reminders.
Hospitable also lets you add attachments to your Booking.com messages, such as images. There are no restrictions on the types of files you can send, but there is a 2 MB size limit.
Replies to events
Hospitable users can also create messaging rules to send messages in response to certain events automatically. 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 inquiries, pre-approval requests, or requests to book, we can only automate replies to 2 events that the platform supports. These events are booking confirmation and booking cancellation.
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)
AI-powered features
With Hospitable, you can easily set automatic answers to guest questions. You can use AI tools available in your Inbox when you message guests manually. Choose Suggest with AI to draft detailed, personalized responses for tricky guest questions in a single click, or use Improve with AI to polish what you’ve drafted for clarity and tone.
You can help the AI write better messages by uploading your guidebooks to the Knowledge Hub. The AI will use this information to generate more accurate answers to specific guest questions. You can also opt for a fully automated AI Inbox—just set rules for your Inbox AI to let it create and automatically send replies to your guests while you sleep or even 24/7.
As you can see, Hospitable’s AI-powered messaging system is more advanced than the messaging tools available to hosts on Booking.com. And the best thing is that you can use Hospitable to ensure fast, clear communication with guests across other connected booking channels, including your Direct booking website, and manage all your messages in one centralized inbox.
You may want to check out our blog article to find out why Hospitable stands out as the best solution for automating guest communication in vacation rentals.
Moreover, our STR super app offers a powerful set of features to help hosts and property managers streamline their operations and ensure an excellent guest experience. Hospitable is a Booking.com Premier Partner, which means we maintain a high-quality connection and offer the most advanced systems and the broadest range of products and services.
Booking.com recommends Hospitable as a channel manager and property management software. If you’re looking for ways to make your STR business more efficient, Hospitable can help you automate almost all your daily tasks and run everything on autopilot.
Note: If you have an existing Airbnb listing connected to Hospitable, you can automatically create and publish a new Booking.com listing directly on Hospitable from your Airbnb listing details. You can read more about it in our help article.
Final Thought
Booking.com offers hosts free messaging tools to help them manage and respond to guest messages, answer questions, and provide guests with helpful information. Although Booking.com's message functionality allows you to use message templates to send pre-written messages at specific times and set up automatic replies for frequently asked questions, it has some limitations.
On the other hand, Hospitable allows you to fully automate your conversations with Booking.com guests and guests across other channels using AI, ensuring perfect communication at every stage of their journey. You can manage all conversations with your guests from Hospitable’s Unified Inbox and take advantage of AI tools.
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Table of contents
Booking.com Messages: Tools for Communicating with Guests
How to Automate Booking.com Messages with Hospitable
Scheduled messages
Replies to events
AI-powered features