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: Offer Travel Insurance to Channel Guests Without Contact Information
Offering travel insurance to your guests can protect both you as the host and your guests from unexpected emergencies and provide peace of mind for guests to ensure they can enjoy their trip to the fullest. Learn more by reading our Travel Insurance Overview support article.
This scenario assumes the guest booked through a listing channel (such as Airbnb and Booking.com) but has not yet provided contact information or signed a renter agreement. See the Ask Channel Booking Guest Without Contact Info, to Provide Contact Info and Sign Renter Agreement for instructions on requesting guest contact information.
Since we don't have the guest's contact information, our only option is to set up a channel message template and trigger that you can send a message to guests to offer travel insurance for their upcoming trip.
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.
The Send Travel Insurance Form to Guest is already an OwnerRez default email system message that is only sent if you have your guest's email address, but you can adapt the language for your channel message.
By setting up a channel template, and trigger, you'll be able to send out a request to guests who booked through a channel, to offer travel insurance a couple of days following their initial booking. 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 booking channel template offering Travel Insurance to channel guests without contact information
- Create a trigger that applies to bookings offering Travel Insurance to channel guests without contact information
Create booking channel template offering Travel Insurance to channel guests without contact information
Your only template option is the channel template. This is the delivery method that will be used for your response. If you want to send a message on Booking.com, the booking must have come through Booking.com to begin with, so that our system knows how to deliver your response back to the correct Booking.com thread.
Channels like Airbnb and Booking.com don't provide an email address for the guest, so you need to be able to reply on channel messaging platforms. 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.
Since there are no system channel messages for offering travel insurance, you will need to create your own channel template to offer travel insurance to your guests.
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:
Offer Travel Insurance to Channel Booking Guest Without Contact Information Channel Template
Body:
Hi {CFIRST},
Thanks for booking {PDISPNAME}!
Just a reminder about our cancellation policy, which is:
{BCANPOLDAT}
We recommend that you protect your vacation by purchasing travel insurance for your upcoming {BARR} to {BDEP} vacation at {PDISPNAME}.
You can protect your vacation today by copying and pasting the plain text URL below into a new browser tab. Travel insurance may be purchased at any time up until 30 days prior to arrival or as part of the booking payment process.
{BUTRAV}
This will open a form explaining the details and allow you to purchase a travel insurance policy.
Talk to you soon and thanks 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 URL into a new tab? The channel message template converts the travel insurance {BUTRAV} field code link into plain text that can be copied and pasted by your channel booking guest to purchase travel insurance. You want a concise message for the guest to read, and this does the trick!
Now we have your channel message template created, it's time to configure the trigger that will send them.
Create a trigger that applies to bookings offering Travel Insurance to channel guests 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 a channel message reply, so we'll need to create just one trigger to send it.
To create your trigger to send the channel message, navigate to Settings > Triggers > and click Create to open the new trigger screen.
Here is a list of all the settings the trigger needs to have:
- Type: Scheduled Time
- Event: 5 days After Booking is created at 9:00 AM
- Add Condition > Travel Insurance Status is: Available
- Add Condition > Listing Site is: Only Airbnb or Booking.com
- Action: Channel Templates > Offer Travel Insurance to Channel Booking Guest Without Contact Information Channel Template
Now, let's talk about what the above settings mean!
The Type and Event fields will make the trigger run 5 days after any channel booking is received or recorded in your account.
Since we are targeting "channel bookings" for guests for whom we do not have contact information, we want to add a "Condition" to the trigger that will stop it from sending messages for other bookings, so we added the "listing site" condition of Only Airbnb or Booking.com, but you could add any of your other listing sites to the list.
Why didn't we include Vrbo in this trigger? You certainly could, but if you are Vrbo API-connected, Vrbo includes all guest contact information at the time of booking, so it's not really necessary to include Vrbo in this trigger. All Vrbo bookings will be sent a Travel Insurance offer system message automatically, but you could optionally choose to customize your Offer Travel Insurance to Channel Guest With Contact Information.
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.
Of course, we added the condition of "Travel Insurance is Available," because you don't want to send a duplicate offer to guests who already purchased travel insurance when they completed your renter agreement and provided contact information. You may want to add other conditions, but this is enough to make our trigger send the message when you receive a channel booking and offer them travel insurance for their vacation.
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, but avoid selecting 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. The trigger sends your channel travel insurance offer template 5 days after the channel booking comes in. That's it!