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Automations to notify vendors or people other than guest

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23 comments

  • Official comment
    Yanni Pasmatzis

    Hello, this is Yanni from the product team here at Hostaway. Thank you all for your feedback, we really appreciate it.

    I'll be contacting you all by email to schedule a call to learn more about your needs and use cases from this functionality.

  • Phil

    Hey Tommy, 

    Thank you for your idea submission! I've passed this along to our Product team for further review and will post any updates here as they become available!

    0
  • Tommy

    Thanks, Phil! Looking forward to it.

    1
  • Piper Horton

    +1! Would like to also communicate to owners for blocks, be able to communicate to guests that isn't a trigger ie. communicating to all winter guests or summer guests about certain activities. 

    2
  • Ross

    I agree completely. We manage a lot of owners 100+ and the ability to manage and automate messages to owners would save a huge amount of time. These messages are often bespoke and not able to be addressed by just sending them the standard notifications as a property assigned user.

    2
  • Hillary

    I completely agree. I just posted about something similar not realizing someone had already mentioned this. 

    A SMS communication would be amazing. As well as automated notifications that are not tasks and can be sent as SMS. 

     

     

    2
  • Tommy

    Awesome, Hillary! Would you upvote it? You do that by clicking the tiny up arrow to the right of my post, under the follow/unfollow button at the top. Hostaway uses these upvotes to decide whether to implement the feature or not

    1
  • Todd Byers

    +1!

    I completely agree and have several use cases, but will just add one here.

    I manage 30 properties in one building and this property uses a front desk where all of my guests are begrudgingly required to check-in. With that being said I have tried several ways to resolve this and the closest I've come up with is to email the Front Desk the night before with all of the reservations scheduled to Check-In the next day.

    Hostaway allows me to setup an automation to do this which is great, but it also sends the message to the Guest which is a little confusing to the guest. I don't think it would be difficult to update the existing code with an option for us to chose the primary recipient or at least to Not send it to the Guest

    Having the option to send messages to the guest, owner, property manager, cleaner, email address or SMS ph # would be a great upgrade

    3
  • Matt

    This would be super helpful to notify an owner that his/her statement is ready.

    3
  • Meredith

    Yes, we also need this done. We need the ability to send a notification, either a HA Notification or HA Automation, to a few different groups of people, 7 days prior to arrival. We need to be able to customize that text to include the guest name, number of people in the group and occasionally other details. Tasks don't work because we can't use Custom Fields in the Task text.  If we could create our own notification with a trigger of 7 days prior to arrival, that would work. It would also work if we could creat an Automation to send to either a property manager or a hot tub company, 7 days prior to arrival. My request is very similar to Todd Byers

    3
  • Steve

    Has this been addressed yet? Several use cases here. We have a third party that drops off linens, Building managers, HOA staff, and contractors that need to be notified of specific units being booked or a reminder of an arrival for parking passes, etc. 

    2
  • Serena with Hostvisors

    Just saw an update to this comment.  We have done this for sending out messages for rolling out garbage cans on trash day.  This is specific to the property and the day of week, thus not linked to any pre-set triggers that come with the system.  If Hostaway is not addressing this fast enough feel free to reach out to me at Hostvisors.  We are listed on the Hostaway marketplace and can implement these types of automations for you.

    0
  • Todd Byers

    @Phil Hodges
    Any updates?
    I provided a use case above and now have another that I cannot send to guests as this would be non-professional.

    At this same resort, mentioned above we now need to send the front desk a message each morning with the days check-outs so they can make keys for our cleaners. Over the summer most check-outs were turnovers so keys were created for the guests that the cleaners and inspectors could use until check-in.

    Now things are slowing down and we have many check-out onlys and no keys are made for our cleaners so they have to wait for keys to be made which is frustrating for them as well as the staff making the keys who now can't do their other duties for several minutes while doing this work.

    I have not found an option to run a report that I could mail to the front desk the night before and don't want to send an automation to the guest, CCing the front desk that the guest is checking out with no turnover and please make keys for the cleaners.

    Being from an IT background this should be a simple ask and helpful to many.

    Why is the only option to use Automations to include the Guest? There are many use cases to use automations in this business outside of guest communications and use reservation triggers that are not tied to tasks.

    Having to subscribe to other partner services with additional fees seems silly for simple little things that.

    When I transitioned to Hostaway one of the reasons was because they seemed to care about the host, were moving quickly to compete with other more developed enterprise solutions. From working in IT for 20+ years as a desktop engineer I know some things are harder than others to implement and some take more time than others, but I don't think it would really take more than an hour or so to update the automations to have the guest as the default, click a checkbox to overwrite the default if desired or something like that, then we could add a semicolon or a comma to add more than one email and be done with it.
    Then we can send it to our staff, cleaners, inspectors, 3rd party vendors, whomever needs to be advised

    2
  • Tommy

    We agree entirely with @todd byers.

    This is the 3rd-highest-upvoted feature request. Also coming from a software engineering background, this should not be a big lift. The UI is mostly there already and would only need small tweaks, the backend functionality is all built already.  

    We also moved over to Hostaway because it seemed that the company was a tech company at heart, and so prioritized development of the highest-value features for us hosts. The reality doesn't match up. If this were the case, this feature, as the third-most-requested one, would already be selected for development. It's been the third-most-requested feature for over 4 months now. Given quarterly feature development cycles, this one has already seen at least one development roadmap planning session. But it's still not selected for development. The complete radio silence also doesn't bode well. It seems, given the voting results, that this should be one of the most important things for the product team.

    1
  • Meredith

    We completely agree with the above comments. It's very frustrating that these developments aren't being moved on. This seems to us like a rudimentary feature. We've worked with both Streamline and OwnerRez, both of which have what we've all requested as a base level offering.  We've been challenged lately seeing things like the new pricing software as such a focus, while basic feature requests aren't being addressed. It seems to us like potentially the focus is on constant expansion instead of on perfecting the system already in place.

    0
  • Tommy

    @Phil given that 3 quarterly roadmap planning sessions have come and gone since this feature was requested and that it's the 3rd most popular request on here, is it safe to assume that Hostaway has decided to not implement this? I'm asking because we're getting close to a point where this is a bottleneck for us. We'll need to find an alternative if Hostaway has decided to not implement this. To be clear, this is standard in most PMSs.

    2
  • Meredith

    We agree with Tommy and have also been starting to shop other PMS systems. I spoke with a handful at VRMA and still can't understand why this isn't a priority? I've seen quite a bit of work done on the Hostaway financing and how it could help grow our business but not much on product requests from current clients. It's impossible to grow our business if we don't have the infrastructural automations in place to support that growth.

    1
  • Deb

    I'd love this feature as well, it would be amazing if we could program messages that can act as reminders to complete different tasks, like providing guest eLok codes.

     

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  • Todd Byers

    @Yanni
    Thank you

    0
  • Even Glemmestad

    Was just about to enter the same request through your PFR tool. Would love to be able to send an SMS and email notification an arbitrary number of hours before check-in (usually 1 day before) and the same before checkout. This would enable low-tech users to support our business.

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  • Denver

    Has this been added yet?

    0
  • Myles

    9-months... tick tick tick.... crickets are heard in the background... other competing Channel Manager Software Dev Teams implement 3rd party notifications for all Tasks in their dbs...

    ... tick tick tick.... crickets are heard in the background... 

    2
  • Serena with Hostvisors

    The feature may not be as trivial as it seems due to time zone issues.

    0

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