Timing rules between Event messages and Scheduled messages are slightly different.
Event messages; timing
Event messages can be timed, or scheduled to send in three ways:
Send at time of event This setting will trigger the message to be sent as soon as Hospitable receives the event from the booking channel.
Delay This setting will delay the message for a set time after the event is received from the booking channel. If you don’t want the ‘New reservation’ message to go out immediately after a guest books, you can set a few minutes delay to make it seem more natural. Note: if you manually reply to the guest before an event message is scheduled to be sent, the message will be cancelled!
Prepare (but never send automatically) This setting will prepare the event message for you, but not send it. You can then review the event and any messages from the guest and determine whether or not the message is still applicable. If it is, then you can hit Send now on the message from the conversation thread’s Activity Log. Alternatively, you can edit the message before sending it, or cancel it.
Scheduled messages; timing
Before the day of the check-in, and after the day of check-out, we will use the timezone of the property. We also ensure that the message is not sent outside 9 AM - 9 PM in the timezone of the city your guests say they come from if you have that setting enabled. See more on that here.
Unlike Event messages, Scheduled messages have no ‘event’ to trigger them. When a reservation is booked, all scheduled messages scoped to the property, booking platform, and host are created in the Activity Log. They will then be sent to the guest in line with your set timing.
Scheduled messages can be broken down into three categories, which all have different timing options.
1. Before/After Check-In/Out
These are messages that get sent out to your guests before or after their check-in or -out. These can be timed in two different ways:
Immediately This will send the message out at exactly the time of check-in or -out.
Delay This will send the message out a certain time before or after check-in or -out, depending on the type of message you have selected. The delay can be set in minutes, hours, and days. The maximum delay Hospitable allows is 270 days.
Please keep in mind that even though Hospitable allows you to schedule a message to be sent up to 270 days after the guest’s check-out, some booking platforms have limits on how long after check-out a host can message the guest. For example, on Booking.com, this limit is 7 days at the time of writing.
2. After a new reservation
This message can only be sent with a scheduled delay. The delay can be set in minutes, hours, and days.
Please keep in mind that this message will never be sent after the check-out time of the booked reservation has passed! See more about this messaging rule and its caveats, here.
3. On a given day of the week
As the name indicates, this type of rule is sent out to guests on set days of the week.
Frequency: Choose how often the message should be sent to a guest during one reservation. You can choose "every" (so your guest would receive it on every occurrence of the given day within their stay) or "the first" (your guest would receive it only on the first occurrence of that day within their stay).
Day and Time: You can directly enter the day of the week, and the time, when the message should be sent.
Including or excluding check-ins: If the guest is checking-in on the day of the week that you have chosen, should the guest still receive this message? "Excluding" means that your guest will not receive the message if they check-in on that day.
Last minute bookings
Please see restrictions and caveats to automated messages for last minute bookings here.