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Our booking engine is full of details and features. So many that many of our clients and even account managers are not aware of. A hidden gem is the personalization of the email address you send all your notifications to your guests from. We mean the reservation confirmations, cancellation, modifications, pre and post stay emails or room type upselling proposals.
Why is the email address I use to send my notifications that important?
If you make a reservation in marriott.com you get your confirmation from reservations@res-marriott.com. If you do so on hyatt.com, you would get an email from hyatt@t1.hyatt.com. OTAs such as Booking.com and Expedia.com use customer.service@booking.com and expedia@eg.expedia.com respectively. Why do all these brands care about the email address they use to interact with their clients?
- Image and consistency. All interactions with guests should be consistent so that they know it’s you who they are talking to.
- “Reply to” button. When guests have last minute questions or simply want to notify they’ll be getting late to the hotel, they will click on the “Reply to” button expecting that someone in your staff will reply soon. Receiving responses such as the following is highly frustrating for travelers:
Undoubtedly, you should use your own email address when communicating with your guests through your booking engine. At the end of the day, the booking engine represents you and not a third company. Solutions that use addresses such as no-reply@randomdomain.com are inadequate and generate frustration to your guests. Trying to prevent responses with notes such as “don’t reply to this email” is not enough as guests rarely read, especially messages they neither expect nor understand.
What we do at Mirai
We have always let our clients customize the email address they want to use in their notifications. We recommend using the address your reservation’s staff is already using so they will get all your guests’ comments. Independent hotels typically use addresses such as reservations@yourdomain.com and reception@yourdomain.com but any option is valid. Chains have the option to use a centralized address so they get comments from all hotels in a single address.
However, ensuring that your confirmations get to your guests has become more complicated lately as applications such as Gmail or Hotmail might label your notifications as spam if you don’t send these emails correctly.
To send 100% safely your emails from your own email address, a minor change in your DNS allowing the sender (Mirai in this case) to send emails in your name is needed. More than 90% of our clients have this change properly configured.
To make sure all emails get to your destinations, we have improved our communication center so that:
- If your domain DNS is properly configured, we’ll use your email address to send all notifications.
- Otherwise, we’ll use our own email address (reservations@mirai.net) but will add a Reply-To header with your email address so that when your guests reply to your email it’ll be you, and not us, who get the email.
You can rest assured that working with our booking engine, all your notifications will reach their destinations and that you can customize the email address as the big hotel brands do. Two goals in one.
If you notice your confirmations are being sent with reservations@mirai.net and want to use your email address, please contact your account manager to get specific instructions to do that small change in your DNS. Once done, all your notifications will be sent with your preferred email address.
