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 With 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 article assumes that you already have your guest's contact information (real email address, phone number, etc.) from the channel booking, so you can easily reach out to them by email, channel, or phone 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, but you can optionally customize this system email message and adapt the language for channel and SMS messages, too.
By setting up an email, channel, or SMS 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 email template offering Travel Insurance to channel guests with contact information
- Create a trigger that applies to bookings offering Travel Insurance to channel guests with contact information
Create booking email template offering Travel Insurance to channel guests with contact information
There are three choices for the type of template you can create - email, channel, 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. Likewise, if you want to send a message 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.
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 Channel Booking Guest With Contact Information 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 channel bookings that have guest contact information. But what about channel messages?
Channel Offer
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 as well. 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 With 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! But maybe we want to send an SMS message?
SMS Offer
Some bookings that arrive in your account will already include the guest's phone number or you have already Asked Your Channel Booking Guest Without Contact Info, to Provide Contact Info and Sign Renter Agreement.
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 Channel Booking Guest With Contact Information 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 are similar to channel templates in that they are 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 and channel 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 channel 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 channel guests with 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 replies for email, channel, and SMS, so we'll need to create three 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 Vrbo
- Action: Email Templates > Offer Travel Insurance to Channel Booking Guest With Contact Information 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 channel booking is received or recorded in your account.
Since we are targeting "channel bookings" for guests for whom we already 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 "Has real email address" condition status covers that. We added the "listing site" condition of Only Vrbo, but you could add any of your listing sites to the list.
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 email 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 email 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 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 channel booking comes in. That's it!