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 Guests Who Booked Through Your Personal Website
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 article assumes that you already have your guest's contact information (real email address, phone number, etc.) from the booking, so you can easily reach out to them by email or phone to offer travel insurance for their upcoming trip.
The Send Travel Insurance Form to Guest is already an OwnerRez default email system message, but you can optionally customize this system email message and adapt the language for SMS messages, too.
By setting up an email, or SMS template, and triggers, you'll be able to send out a request to guests who booked through your personal website 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 Email Template Offering Travel Insurance to Guests Who Booked Through Your Personal Website
- Create a Trigger that Applies to Bookings Offering Travel Insurance to Guests Who Booked Through Your Personal Website
Create Booking Email Template Offering Travel Insurance to Guests Who Booked Through Your Personal Website
You have two choices for the type of template you can create - email, 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.
Email Offer
First, we'll customize your Send Travel Insurance Form to Guest system message, by navigating to Settings > System Messages > Send Travel Insurance Form to Guest > click on the right Action dropdown menu > select Change Message. 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:
Offer Travel Insurance to Guest Who Booked Through Your Personal Website Email Template
From Name:
{MYCOFULL}
From Address:
{MYEMAIL}
To Name:
{CFULL}
To Address:
{CEMAIL}
Subject:
Travel insurance Offer for [Booking # {BID}] at {PDISPNAME}
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 clicking on the link below. Travel insurance may be purchased at any time up until 30 days prior to arrival or as part of the booking payment process.
Travel Insurance form for Booking # {BID}
If the above link does not work, please copy and paste the plain text URL below to access the travel insurance purchase options.
{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}
If you're wondering what those field codes do, check out the field codes support article or use the "Preview" button on the bookings 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 property name. The body addresses the guest by name, so it looks like the body was written by hand. It includes your cancellation policy {BCANPOLDAT} field code that includes the specific cancellation dates. 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 "booking" travel insurance. This message assumes that all bookings it is responding to are bookings that have guest contact information, so make sure to customize accordingly.
We are now armed with a solid travel insurance offer for any bookings for guests who booked on our personal website. But what about SMS messages?
SMS Offer
Direct bookings from your personal website that arrive in your account will already include the guest's phone number.
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:
Offer Travel Insurance to Guest Who Booked Through Your Personal Website SMS Template
To Phone Number:
{CPHONE}
Body:
Hi {CFIRST}, protect your {PDISPNAME} vacation by purchasing travel insurance at the following link {BUTRAV}. Thanks, and we'll talk soon! ☕
Once again, smack that Preview button to see how this looks live! SMS templates only include 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 templates in that it is much shorter and doesn't include the cancellation policy {BCANPOLDAT} field code link. Instead, it's a quick sentence to offer the guest travel insurance at the link. If you'd rather say something else - that's totally fine. Or you could send a larger message body, including the cancellation policy {BCANPOLDAT} field code like the email 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 Offering Travel Insurance to Guests Who Booked Through Your Personal Website
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 offers for email and SMS, so we'll need to create two triggers to send each one.
First, we'll create a trigger to send the email message. Go to Settings > Triggers > and click Create to pull up 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 > Email Address on File: Has Real Email Address
- Add Condition > Travel Insurance Status is: Available
- Add Condition > Listing Site is > Only: Your Personal Website
- Action: Email Templates > Offer Travel Insurance to Guest Who Booked Through Your Personal Website Email 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 direct booking from your personal website is received or recorded in your account.
Since we are targeting only "direct bookings" for guests for whom we already have contact information, we want to add a "Condition" to the trigger that will stop it from sending messages for other bookings. Adding the "Has real email address" condition status covers part of that, but we also included the "listing site" condition of your personal website.
Of course, we added the condition of "Travel Insurance is Available," because you don't want to send a duplicate email offer to guests who already purchased travel insurance when they booked on your personal website. You may want to add other conditions, but this is enough to make our trigger send the email message when you receive a booking on your personal website and offer them travel insurance for their upcoming vacation.
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. The trigger sends your email travel insurance offer template 5 days after the direct booking comes in. Now, make sure you go back and create a trigger for your SMS message too by following these steps and selecting your SMS message template in the Action dropdown menu.