Types of emails automatically sent to guests
The booking engine sends notification emails to your guests when they place a booking or when their booking gets cancelled or modified.
In addition, you can set up the Booking Engine to automatically send marketing messages to your guests using the Pre and Post-arrival Message emails.
There are five types of emails generated by the booking engine:
Booking Confirmation - the email with reservation details that is sent to the guests after they complete the booking process
Booking Modification - the email that is sent to the guests when a reservation is modified
Booking Cancellation - the email that is sent to the guests if a reservation has been cancelled
Pre-arrival Message - an optional reminder email sent to guests a set amount of days before they are expected to arrive
Post-departure Message - an optional follow-up email that can be used to thank the guests and solicit reviews after they have checked out, it will be sent a set amount of days after the guest has checked out
Confirmation, Modification and Cancellation emails are enabled by default when initially setting up the system.
Pre-arrival and Post-departure emails are disabled by default, which means that they need to be manually enabled and set up before the Booking Engine starts sending them to the guests.
Customise and set up the automatic emails sent to guests
You can add headers and footers to the default email templates and also customise them to make them look more in line with your branding.
To modify the settings of any of the automatic emails sent by the Booking Engine:
Click Setup
Click the Property tile
Click the Emails tab
Click Edit at the right of the type of automatic email you want to customise
From this section, you can edit or view certain parts of the automatic emails sent to guest depending on the tab you click on.
Fields tab
The Fields tab opens by default after you click on Edit. From the Fields tab you can:
Select whether the type of email you are editing should be automatically sent to guests or not.
Customise the Subject of the email to say something of your choice
Set up the Header text : a piece of text that will appear in all emails after the Header image and before the main body of the email (the main body of the email contains all the important information about the reservation)
Set up the Footer text : a piece of text that will appear in all emails after the main body of the email and before the Footer image.
For Pre-arrival emails you can set up how many days before the day of check-in the emails will be sent
For Post-departure emails you can set up how many days after the day of check-out the emails will be sent
Images tab
From the Images tab you can upload the Header image and Footer image.
The Header image appears at the very top of the emails, and the Footer image appears at the very bottom of the emails.
You can add a link to both of them in "image link url" so that guests clicking on the image will be sent to a website page of your choice.
The recommended format is "Width 600 x Height 210" and any picture with a smaller Width or larger Height will be cut at the top and bottom to fit within the email.
Preview Template tab
From the Preview tab you can see how the email will appear to guests.
There needs to be at least one reservation made through the Booking Engine for the preview to be generated.
You can also send a test email to your email address by entering it in the " To:" text box before clicking the Send button.
Advanced customisation of email templates
You can customise the design of guest emails by editing the default templates to your desired look and feel within the code editor. The booking engine uses LIQUID templating language to help you customise the guest emails.
Please note : if you are not familiar with LIQUID template coding, we recommend that you involve a web developer to help you edit the code.
Important: changing the email template is entirely at your own risk. We highly recommend testing any changes in different email clients to ensure that the content is rendered correctly.
To enable the code customisation of an email template:
Click Setup
Click on the Property tile
Click the Emails tab and select the email that you want to customise
In the Fields tab, click Enable Code Editing at the bottom, beside the Save button. This will take you to the Edit Template tab which was not previously available before.
Edit Template tab
From this tab you can modify the code of the email template. Afterwards you can:
Discard Draft Template - discard all the changes you made to the email template draft and will revert the template to its last saved version
Save Draft Template - save the latest version of the email template draft and review it under the Preview tab
Publish Draft Template - publishing the template means that all the changes are applied instantly to the email template and from now on the booking engine will send the emails in the new customised format
Reset to Default - revert to the default template. This option only appears when you publish an edited template
If your extranet default language is set up to any language other than English, you will not be able to see the Edit Template tab in any language other than your extranet language.
To enable the Edit Template tab for all languages, you will need to switch your extranet language to English.