What is the criteria OR uses to label a guest as Repeat?

What is the criteria OR uses to label a guest as a Repeat? I've not been able to figure out the pattern on my own. For example, below is a screenshot of a guest who booked direct for her 1st stay, and now has 2 future stays booked but doesn't have the repeat label on her info.

Also with Channel Bridge, will the system label as repeat guests those who booked via an OTA for their first stay and then book direct for subsequent stays?

I send a different email template to repeat guests than I do for first-time direct bookings, so it would help to know this when they request a quote/booking. I'm probably going to add a custom field definition asking if the person has stayed with us before. But since the repeat guest label already exists I thought I should find out how it works.

https://ibb.co/jRmf2Fk

Hi Janice,

We currently do not automatically flag guests as repeat based on email, phone or other things. Booking and quote records are only linked to the same guest record if they happen to be linked by you in the interface. It's a big hole in our guest system and we have an update coming to plug it. The update will make it so that - by default - existing guest records are re-used if the email or phone is the same. We will probably do a similarity check on address as well.

You can already merge guest records yourself in the Guests menu by selecting multiple records and clicking the merge button. You can also go the other way and split bookings out to different guests by opening a booking > guest record > associate with different guest.

The repeat label shows if the current guest record (ie. that you are looking at) is associated with another booking in the system.

Thank you, Paul. I'm now using that merge feature you mentioned - very helpful!
Will the future update be able to recognize a guest who booked through VRBO as a repeat? (imported from Channel Bridge)

Yes, for sure. That's a big hole right now and one we plan to fix soon. Whether the booking is imported, direct or API, the guest list needs to identify probably-matches for repeats. Email and phone are no-brainers.

Thank you, Paul. That sounds great!

Hi there,
You mentioned in this post that some sort of alert for repeat guests was coming soon. Does this exist yet? If not, is it on the horizon?

Has this been updated yet?  I just had a repeat guest book for 2023.  It shows as "Repeat" to the 2022 booking but not to the 2021 booking.  I have several multi repeat guests that it only shows some of their stays. Do I need to merge them all manually?

Thank you

Lucinda

We added guest auto-merge back in October of 2021. You can read about that in the blog post.

Auto-merging handles incoming bookings, not existing guests, so guests that were created before should be manually merged. You can do that on the CRM > Contacts list.