There can be a few reasons why an automated message either failed to send to your guest or wasn’t scheduled for their reservation in the first place. Let’s explore these!

If an answer to a question that the guest asked wasn’t sent out automatically, or the question wasn’t detected, then please see this article.

Let’s start with the basics:

Make sure the messaging rule is scoped to the platform and property, as well as the host for the booking channel which the guest booked through.

You can read more about scoping here.

Different platforms have different sets of criteria of what content they will filter and block, at what stage of the reservation, and what they will block.

If your message breaches the platform’s policies, it may be rejected wholly.

See more about permissible message content here.

After scoping and message content have been checked and confirmed to be okay, there are some different criteria and caveats to Event messages and Scheduled messages, which influence if and how these are scheduled.

We will go through these in order of those two rule categories.

By default, Hospitable does not send the “New reservation” event message to returning guests from Airbnb. However, you can enable a setting that then starts sending the message to returning guests.

You can read more about that here.

Event messages should be sent at their scheduled time (immediately or with a delay) after a new event happens.

If you have a delay on your message, and you manually replied to the guest before the scheduled send time of the message, then we will not send it. This is to avoid repetition.

See more on messages for last-minute bookings here.

It’s important to remember that this messaging rule is not an event message! It is a scheduled message, which has a very specific caveat: it will never be scheduled or sent past the check-in time of the reservation.

See more on this messaging rule here.

If you had reservations from your booking platforms which were booked/inquired about/requested either before you connected that booking platform to Hospitable, or before you created or enabled the relevant event messaging rule, then we will not send that event message out.

Event messages are never sent out retroactively.

This messaging rule will never be scheduled or sent to a guest if your “New inquiry” messaging rule is set to “Automatically pre-approve” the guest.

This is because a new inquiry would trigger two messages to fire at the same time. Instead, we recommend hosts include any important information from the “New pre-approval” message in the “New inquiry” message already.

If your guest booked a last-minute stay, close to the check-in and -out times, and a scheduled message wasn’t sent to them, please check to see if any of the last-minute booking caveats apply, here.

Scheduled messages can be configured to only be sent for reservations that are a certain number of nights or more.

That is the “Specify a reservation duration” setting.

If this setting is enabled, then the reservation stay must meet the requirement in order for us to schedule the message.

You can read more about settings here.

This messaging rule has a specific caveat, which means it will not be sent if the send time falls after the check-in time on the reservation.

See more here.

This setting only applies to Airbnb reservations. But if enabled, and your guest has already left a review for you on Airbnb, then we will not send this message out.

You can read more about this here.