Offer Travel Insurance to Channel Guest Without Contact Information

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.

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:

1. Create booking channel template offering Travel Insurance to channel guests without contact information
2. 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!

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. 

Before you make any decisions, make sure to review your choices carefully. I encourage you to check out a variety of companies that offer Travel Insurance, many of which are available online. Some groups you may wish to consider are Allianz Global Assistance, Travelex, Travel Guard, Seven Corners, and Generali Global Assistance. There are also web sites like InsureMyTrip.com that offer comparisons of different coverage.

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 > Messaging > Triggers > and click + Create Trigger 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 > 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.

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.

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!