Bookings from your website: how the email conversation with the guest works
By GuestChat Team ·
When someone books on your own website there is no Airbnb or Booking.com in the middle, so there is no booking site chat to talk in. The natural channel is email. So that it doesn't turn into an email lost in your personal inbox, every website booking has its own thread inside the dashboard.
How it starts
Once the payment goes through, the guest gets their confirmation by email. They can reply to that email: their reply doesn't get lost in an inbox nobody reads, it comes into the dashboard as one more message.
Where you see it
In Conversations, that guest's conversation has the Web booking tab. Everything you have written to each other is there, like a chat. Don't mix it up with Sent emails, which is only the log of the automatic emails the system has sent them.
Who answers
The AI answers on this channel too, with the same property profile and the same rules as on the booking sites. The guest writes from their email and gets the answer in their email.
You can write from the Web booking tab: they get an email with your message and can reply to it. If you write in Spanish and the guest speaks another language, it is sent to them translated into theirs.
Protection against auto-replies
Email has a risk that booking sites don't: auto-responders ("I'm on vacation until Monday"). If the AI answered one, and it answered back, you would get a chain with no end. There are several barriers to prevent it: automatic replies are recognized, echoes of our own messages are detected, and there are caps on messages per hour and per day.
Automated messages by email
Your automated messages also reach these guests, because the website bookings box comes checked by default in every message. They go out on the same thread, so if the guest replies to your arrival instructions, their reply shows up in the conversation.
The same goes for bookings you create by hand with no booking site: they are written to by email, in their own thread, in the messages where you check the manual bookings box.
What they don't get until they pay
While a direct booking is waiting for payment, the guest doesn't get automated messages or see their key. As soon as they pay, everything starts at once.
Tips
- Check the guest's email address. If it is wrong, neither your messages nor the AI's will reach them.
- Review the first threads. Check in Web booking that the answers sound like they do on the booking sites.
- Don't reply from your personal email. If the guest writes to your own address, answer from the dashboard so everything stays in the same thread and the AI has the context.
- Mention in the confirmation that they can reply. Many people don't know there is someone behind that email.