The Guesty Inbox is a messaging platform that centralizes your guest communication and its history.
Our suggested best practices will help you manage communication and suggest effective ways for you to enhance guest experience and maintain productivity. See the information below.
Structure the Inbox to fit your team
Use saved views to segment your Inbox and enable team members to focus on their specific responsibilities based on how they work.
Property-oriented teams
Use the "Listings" or "Listing tags" filters to make sure team members handle communication only for the properties they are responsible for.
Location-oriented teams
Use the "Listing cities" or "Listing tags" filters to make sure team members handle communication only for properties in the locations they are responsible for.
Reservation-oriented teams
Use the "Reservation status" filter to make sure team members handle communication only for reservations that are currently in the reservation life-cycle status they are responsible for.
For example:
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Sales-oriented teams: Create a Saved View with the "Reservation status" filters: Inquiry, Reserved, Declined, and Closed to focus on communicating with guests who have not yet confirmed their reservation and increase conversion.
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Operations-oriented teams: Create a Saved View with the "Reservation status" filters: Awaiting payment, Confirmed, and Canceled to focus on communicating with guests that have confirmed their reservation and increase responsiveness to provide a good guest experience.
Prioritize guest communication
Use saved views to make sure time-sensitive messages are handled before others.
Answer inquiries before confirmed reservations to increase conversion
Use the "Reservation status" filter to create a Saved View for non-confirmed reservations to prioritize pre-confirmation communication and answer potential guests first.
Add a layer of timing to your prioritization
Combine the "Check in" or "Check out" filters with other filters to create a tailor-made priority strategy for your business.
For example:
- Within pre-confirmation communication: Combine "Reservation status" Inquiry and "Check in" Is in the next 2 weeks to prioritize responding to inquiries with a closer check-in date before inquiries with a later check-in date.
- Within post-confirmation communication: Combine "Reservation status" Confirmed with the following filters to prioritize responding to guests, starting with the most urgent:
- Add "Check in" Is in the next 1 days for guests checking-in in the next day.
- Add "Check out" Is in the future and "Check in" Is in the past for guests currently staying at one of your properties.
- Add "Check in" Is after the next 1 days for guests before check-in.
- Add "Check out" Is in the past for guests that have already checked-out.
Support work productivity
Keep a clean Inbox
Archive conversations when you finish handling them and no further action is required on your end to focus on tasks that still require handling.
The archived conversation will move back to the general conversation feed, under "All conversations", if the guest responds or sends a new message.
Follow up in a timely manner
Snooze conversations to be reminded to follow up on inquiries and uncompleted tasks:
- For inquiries: Be reminded to check in with potential guests to increase bookings.
- For uncompleted tasks: Be reminded to complete a task or check what still needs to be done, and update the guest.
Instruct your team to leave an internal note when snoozing a conversation to maintain transparency and make sure everyone knows the current status of the follow-up: They should include information that is not present in the conversation and provide the next action item for when the conversation is scheduled to come back.
The snoozed conversation will move back to the general conversation feed, under "All conversations", if the guest responds or sends a new message.
Facilitate quick and professional response
Use Saved Replies to maintain a consistent tone of voice in your communication with guests and reduce your response time.
Optimize the use of Saved Replies by:
- Creating an inventory of replies for as many types of common situations: Refrain from creating replies to support edge cases.
- Giving each reply a short and intuitive name.
Utilize the Inbox Widgets
Employees can access information about the reservation from the Inbox widget and update many details on-the-go, without having to leave the Inbox and access other parts of the Guesty dashboard. For example, view and edit a guest's name or update the number of guests for a reservation.
You can use Custom Fields to add even more reservation details to the Inbox Widgets.
Maintain a good guest experience
Turn off Automated Messages when necessary
Automated Messages may become a problem in certain situations:
- If a guest is unhappy, you may want to turn off Automated Messages for that guest and move to manual communication to better attend to their concerns.
- For example, if there are changes to the check-in instructions, to avoid confusion, you may want to stop the Automated Message that provides these instructions from being sent.