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Booking.com blocking emails - Before start Online check-in

V
Userlevel 1

Is anyone else facing problems with sending before start/before start reminders to booking.com guest?

We are pushing very hard to get our guest so check-in online, however I see that booking.com is not accually forwarding these emails to the guest. In MEWS it shows as sendt. 

 

I have tried to make a booking myself at booking.com and it is not working. 

I tried to remove the Sigin box, in the email templets, with just a link however it is still not working. Funny thing is that when I send the bill it has acually worked. 

 

Does anyone know how to fix this?

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Best answer by gabriela.smrckova 27 June 2024, 15:04

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J
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Hello @Vegard Kaspersen !

Yes it sucks! Last time I checked emails were forwarded to the guest’s actual email account with links working, but links in the booking.com app were not working / removed.

It’s a booking.com “security” policy, aka prohibit hotels from “stealing” guests away from booking.com, I guess…

MEWS’ solution is the SMS-Package to send SMS with prestay links to guests, as we do get the real phone number … but for us, results are not very good, only a fraction (10-20%) of guests actually use the online pre-checkin service. I am not entirely sure why, but I think there may be a couple of reasons for that:

  • links in emails not working after forwarding from booking.com or expedia.com
  • MEWS guest portal asking for credit card details (I am not sure… sometimes guests are required to enter a credit card to complete online check-in, sometimes not - the process and setup is not really transparent to me)
  • wording of the mailing - maybe we can improve online checkins by using a more compelling wording? Any best practive recommendations / text samples anyone?

To any MEWSer who may feel concerned about it: it would be great if an effort to get in direct contact with booking.com and expedia.com to get the mails from @mews.li whitelisted and correctly forwarded could be made!

For us on the receiving end, we can only complain to our booking.com and expedia.com account manager and/or support to get them to feel some heat … :-(

Regards,

JP.

V
Userlevel 1

Hello @Vegard Kaspersen !

Yes it sucks! Last time I checked emails were forwarded to the guest’s actual email account with links working, but links in the booking.com app were not working / removed.

It’s a booking.com “security” policy, aka prohibit hotels from “stealing” guests away from booking.com, I guess…

MEWS’ solution is the SMS-Package to send SMS with prestay links to guests, as we do get the real phone number … but for us, results are not very good, only a fraction (10-20%) of guests actually use the online pre-checkin service. I am not entirely sure why, but I think there may be a couple of reasons for that:

  • links in emails not working after forwarding from booking.com or expedia.com
  • MEWS guest portal asking for credit card details (I am not sure… sometimes guests are required to enter a credit card to complete online check-in, sometimes not - the process and setup is not really transparent to me)
  • wording of the mailing - maybe we can improve online checkins by using a more compelling wording? Any best practive recommendations / text samples anyone?

To any MEWSer who may feel concerned about it: it would be great if an effort to get in direct contact with booking.com and expedia.com to get the mails from @mews.li whitelisted and correctly forwarded could be made!

For us on the receiving end, we can only complain to our booking.com and expedia.com account manager and/or support to get them to feel some heat … :-(

Regards,

JP.

Thank you for the feedback!

I hope that MEWS and Booking.com/Expedia can find a solution for this.

We are already using the SMS package, but there is still a lot of information that guests miss out on without email communication. And I would love both to cosumize the text as well as at what time it is sent to the guest. 

Currently, our workaround is to ask guests from Booking.com/Expedia to send us their email address via the automatic messages in Booking.com. However, this approach seems somewhat unprofessional and involves a lot of manual effort.

C
Userlevel 1

We have the same problem. Since around three days, nothing works with e-mails sent to booking.com alias-adresses. Also specifying [email protected] in the booking messaging preferences as safe does not help. We are at the point, where nothing goes through any more. I can’t even send an e-mail saying only “hello” to an alias address. Mews sends it successfully but booking.com seems to block it. We need to send guests Door codes and Mews confirmation numbers in order to enable them to check-in but everything is being blocked by booking.com. Booking.com support is absolutely useless. I have just spent half a day explaining to support employees how their own system works with e-mails, alias-addresses and their messenger. The only thing they can tell, is that you should use the booking.com messenger. However to send the guests the mews confirmation number (qr-codes don’t work anymore anyways) the booking.com messenger is no help. We as hotels cannot get into contact with technical support, apparentely only mews can do this.

So @Mews Community Team could you escalate this to your technical or connectivity team to solve with booking.com? We are absolutely unable to have a professional communication with our guests at the moment and the guest experience is absolutely horrible for OTA guests.

 

 

A
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@Mews Community Team @richard.valtr @Olga Goude @antonia.bernhardt @James.taylor @Sarah.Masterton-Brown @MarketaOupi 

I’m just tagging every Mewser I know here, in the hope I get someone to pick this up.

Mews, this is a BIG issue for us. Automated guest emails, online check-in and payments have just become useless if we cannot communicate with our booking.com guests. Which is about 70% of them.

We’ve checked and starting from the 7th of June not a single automated email has gotten through the booking.com messaging service for any of our properties. We have had our security settings in the Extranet properly set up way before that, and have not made any changes in this period. Something else has changed, most likely on the booking.com side. Our emails show as successfully delivered in the mail queue, but nothing is being forwarded to the guest by booking.com.

I’ve spoken to our account manager at booking.com, but there’s nothing he, we or I can do about this, we need Mews to fix this with Booking.com. 

P.S.
A workaround to ask guests on booking.com to send us their email address, so we can email them a link where they have to fill out their personal details and credit card is not feasable. This sounds more like phishing than most actual phishing does. I wouldn’t fill in any of my details online if a hotel approached me in this way.

barb00sa
Userlevel 4
Badge +1

Dear Colleagues, 
I think I have the solution to this, or at least how it works for us. 
Go to your Booking.com account, click on "Properties" at the top and go to "Messaging Preferences". 
Under security settings, go to "Your email addresses".
Enter all the email addresses of your own hotel that you send messages to, but also "[email protected]" and "[email protected]". Don't forget to enter all the emails that you send messages from, because from now on, only these addresses will be able to send messages to customers through Booking.com. Also, under "Your Approved Links," you can add links to driving directions or links to your own hotel, which I am sure will be included.

I hope this works for you. I have no problems with it anymore.

Robin Schluter 
Hotel St. Pol 
 

V
Userlevel 1

Dear Colleagues, 
I think I have the solution to this, or at least how it works for us. 
Go to your Booking.com account, click on "Properties" at the top and go to "Messaging Preferences". 
Under security settings, go to "Your email addresses".
Enter all the email addresses of your own hotel that you send messages to, but also "[email protected]" and "[email protected]". Don't forget to enter all the emails that you send messages from, because from now on, only these addresses will be able to send messages to customers through Booking.com. Also, under "Your Approved Links," you can add links to driving directions or links to your own hotel, which I am sure will be included.

I hope this works for you. I have no problems with it anymore.

Robin Schluter 
Hotel St. Pol 
 

Thanks for the info Robin. 

I have done this, however I am still not getting the online check-in part to work for some reasone. 

The bills are going out but not anything before start :S

barb00sa
Userlevel 4
Badge +1

To many placeholders  perhaps ????

https://help.mews.com/s/article/placeholders-bookable-services-mail-templates?language=en_US

C
Userlevel 1

Dear Colleagues, 
I think I have the solution to this, or at least how it works for us. 
Go to your Booking.com account, click on "Properties" at the top and go to "Messaging Preferences". 
Under security settings, go to "Your email addresses".
Enter all the email addresses of your own hotel that you send messages to, but also "[email protected]" and "[email protected]". Don't forget to enter all the emails that you send messages from, because from now on, only these addresses will be able to send messages to customers through Booking.com. Also, under "Your Approved Links," you can add links to driving directions or links to your own hotel, which I am sure will be included.

I hope this works for you. I have no problems with it anymore.

Robin Schluter 
Hotel St. Pol 
 

Hi Robin, thanks for the input.

Unfortunately that does not work for us either. I also put every e-mail that could possibly affect anything in the list and every possible link. But still, even a message that has only one word in it gets blocked.

Claudio Berger

 

 

T

@Mews Community Team @richard.valtr @Olga Goude @antonia.bernhardt @James.taylor @Sarah.Masterton-Brown @MarketaOupi 

I’m just tagging every Mewser I know here, in the hope I get someone to pick this up.

Mews, this is a BIG issue for us. Automated guest emails, online check-in and payments have just become useless if we cannot communicate with our booking.com guests. Which is about 70% of them.

We’ve checked and starting from the 7th of June not a single automated email has gotten through the booking.com messaging service for any of our properties. We have had our security settings in the Extranet properly set up way before that, and have not made any changes in this period. Something else has changed, most likely on the booking.com side. Our emails show as successfully delivered in the mail queue, but nothing is being forwarded to the guest by booking.com.

I’ve spoken to our account manager at booking.com, but there’s nothing he, we or I can do about this, we need Mews to fix this with Booking.com. 

P.S.
A workaround to ask guests on booking.com to send us their email address, so we can email them a link where they have to fill out their personal details and credit card is not feasable. This sounds more like phishing than most actual phishing does. I wouldn’t fill in any of my details online if a hotel approached me in this way.

Hi all,

We have the exact same problem, also since the 7th of June… Called with multiple booking.com employees and they they know nothing about it, or direct me to the ‘Go to your Booking.com account, click on "Properties" at the top and go to "Messaging Preferences". ‘

Where we added all mails but it still does not work. 

I'm basicly just replying in the hope we could get a answer or a ‘we're working on it’ from mews.

Thanks!
Tim Huitzing
Bell Hotel

T
Userlevel 1

I am writing to confirm that we are also experiencing the same issue you described with sending messages via Booking.com, despite adding all possible email addresses and links to the "Messaging Preferences" as suggested by Robin.

Unfortunately, this solution did not work for us either, and our messages continue to be blocked.

Could we get an official position from Mews on this issue?


Best regards,

Thomas

gabriela.smrckova
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Hello everyone👋

I am Gabriela from the Mews Product team. I am really sorry you are experiencing this issue and I want to thank you for your patience.

We have been in touch with Booking.com about this topic for quite some time now. The solution they shared and suggested was already mentioned in this thread above (thank you, Robin!).

In order for emails to be delivered and the links to work (not be removed or broken), Booking.com allows Mews customers to whitelist the sender email and the URLs for the landing pages. For before-start emails, the process should be as follows:

  1. Log into your Booking.com extranet account.
  2. Under the ‘Property’ tab, select ‘Messaging preferences’ to access the new ‘Security settings’ page.
  3. Complete the 2FA to access it.
  4. Set up ‘Your email address’ (for those of you not using the ‘Email sent from your own domain’ feature, it is [email protected]).
  5. Set up ‘Your approved links’ (for any link leading to the Guest portal—whether it is an online check-in, online check-out invite link, chat link, etc.—it should be enough to insert the domain https://app.mews.com).

I noticed that some of you mentioned that you had done this and yet the emails are still not being delivered. We checked our email logs to ensure we are sending everything correctly to Booking.com. All the details were shared with Booking.com earlier today to figure out where the issue may lie so that we can provide you with a solution. As soon as I hear back from Booking.com, I will immediately share the information with you.

Once again, we realize this is really crucial and we are doing our best to find a solution. Thank you again for your patience.

Gabriela

A
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Hi @gabriela.smrckova ,

Thank you for the reply. I’m glad to hear it’s being worked on by Mews.

Setting up our security settings properly in the Booking.com extranet is a standard answer from the booking.com customer service, and doesn’t help us further in this case. 

The issue is, that we have set these up properly, and e-mails from Mews are still not getting through.

Strangely enough, emails from our own domain (company email address) that we have whitelisted in the extranet are coming through.

So the issue is specifically with Mews. Or the Mews email domain.
Is it possible that Mews has been sending from a different domain than Mews.li or Mews.com?

If you have anyone with technical knowledge on the booking.com side, you’re welcome to offer one of our accounts for them to check: das Cityhouse (booking.com property ID: 6728188) and listed in Mews as a bookable service under “Oftang GmbH | Zillertaler Unterkünfte”.

If you could get Booking.com to check their logs and provide the reason for a specific email to be blocked from forwarding we would most likely find out the issue. You can use this email as an example, maybe?
 



They, or you, are also welcome to call me if any further details are required. Simply call our main phone number and ask for Andreas, they’ll connect you.

Each email send since 7th June has been blocked by booking.com, while security settings in the extranet have been properly set up.


Our self-service concept is currently a complete disaster. We need a solution, fast!

J
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Hello @gabriela.smrckova and everyone else around here!

How about if we all together strongly asked booking.com (and expedia, btw) to either

  • provide the real guest email if connected via channel manager OR
  • forward all emails sent to the proxy-email verbatim 1:1 to the real email account

I know, I know … unlikely to be successfull 😅 … but… I couldn’t restrain myself from writing it 🤐

BTW, the “security” settings in booking.com messaging are ridiculous, because what’s the point in allowing only certain email senders? Email sender can be easily (like, really very trivially) forged anyway…

Another option: (requires MEWS development) There is a messaging API for booking.com: https://developers.booking.com/connectivity/docs/messaging-api/understanding-the-messaging-api/

MEWS could implement a separate messaging integration for booking.com reservations (posting a message using the API to a specific reservation is possible - see https://developers.booking.com/connectivity/docs/messaging-api/managing-conversations/#retrieving-a-specific-conversation-by-conversation-type-and-reference )

Using the API should be save to post any kind of attachments, links and text, I would believe, but requires in-depth verification with booking.com and development. Then for booking.com messaging they could use the API instead of sending emails.


Regards,

Jean-Philipp.

 

Sanne
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Hi everyone! I followed the steps to whitelist the sender's address in Booking.com, but without any luck. I made a testbooking in one of our hotels through my private Booking.com account. According to the mail queue, I should have received the email ‘automatic settlement failed’ and 'before start’ but I have not received anything at all. 

@gabriela.smrckova another example - FYI 

@Jason.Warnaar FYI

gabriela.smrckova
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It looks like the mews.li domain is just filtered out at the mail servers for the @guest.booking.com addresses

 

but the transactional emails do come through ? and for our hotels, we use our own domain for sending emails (including the before start etc) and these are blocked. my guess is that booking.com is not allowing a specific placeholder or call to action that MEWS is using. Most likely due to the fact that MEWS is asking for the guest e-mail in the first step of the online check in when guests have booked via third party ;)

Good point!

I just double checked, and in fact you are right! Payment receipt (only text content) seem to be delivered, as well as invoices. So I guess you are right, must have something to do with the included links to https://app.mews.com :-(
MEWS, can you confirm that? And hopefully sort this out with booking.com …?
Regards,

JP.

Sure, here is the revised version of your text:

---

Hey Jean-Philipp,

Yes, we are pushing Booking.com to provide us with a solution, and we share the info you provide to speed things up for you. I am still waiting for them to update me with any solution that would actually help.

One thing that broke through today, though, is that a couple of hotels that send emails from their own domain, but didn’t get them delivered, found that it now works after they added the [email protected] sender address too. If I am not mistaken, this isn’t the case for anyone else here (but just in case it is, please go ahead and try this, too).

For everyone else, I will keep you posted about the progress. 

Gabriela

​​​

J
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Hello! @gabriela.smrckova and everyone else!

We also have the same issue now, since about June 6 mews.li emails are not delivered to booking.com messaging system. Before June 6 we can see that the pre-stay mails etc. are visible in the messaging history.

However, we are seeing that mails from our own domain and also from our pre-stay upselling mailing provider are delivered. So that makes me believe that it’s an issue with the mews.li sending domain beeing somehow put on a blacklist at booking.com - that may be well due to an automated spam protection system, and thus might be totaly unintentional.

We had a similar problem with another big corporate customer, who just put mews.li domain on their blacklist, because they generally received a lot of phishing and spam from that domain (mails with forged sender address) - if mews correctly applies DMARC, DKIM and SPF there should be no reason for recipient servers broadly rejecting @mews.li since it’s technically easy to filter out the good from the forged ones… As far as I know, MEWS mails ARE properly DKIM signed and all, at least last time I checked a few month ago. So there must be some kind of misconfiguration, or unreasonable treatment on the booking.com side.
So, in summary, I think it’s really just a mail delivery problem that can happen to every domain every now an then, but must be addressed immediately by the mail admins of both sides - they need to look at their logs and figure out whats really going on - and TALK to each other NOW.

Regards,

Jean-Philipp.

J
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I would like to add, that it might help to get some serious attention by submitting individual support tickets with booking.com… since it’s virtually impossible to get someone knowledgeable directly… welcome to the world of bots, AI, outsourced support and cloud-whatever ;-)

Regards,
Jean-Philipp.

A
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@j.spiess I’ve submitted tickets for 11 of our properties. None of them have managed to get someone on the booking.com side who even understood what the problem was.. And even if it would, there’s not much I can do without knowing technical details of the mail server and systems of Mews. Only Mews can solve this with Booking.com together.

@Mews Community Team it would help if I had a contact, email address or phone number on your end, that I can have booking.com reach out to. If I ever do manage to reach someone there.

J
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Hello!

I have talked to our Account Manager at booking.com this morning. Even in their internal communication platform they have no information on this yet. He promised to post the question internally and see if others are seeing this too. It might help if you described the issue to your account managers and asked them to look in their internal platform and increase the attention to the issue.

Also @Mews Community Team  please ask your mail admins or people how have some sort of technical contact with booking.com to have another look at this and contact their peers at booking.com.
It looks like the mews.li domain is just filtered out at the mail servers for the @guest.booking.com addresses. Someone must find the responsible person for managing the blocklist/spam protection at those servers…

Regards,

JP.

mauritsbots
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It looks like the mews.li domain is just filtered out at the mail servers for the @guest.booking.com addresses

 

but the transactional emails do come through ? and for our hotels, we use our own domain for sending emails (including the before start etc) and these are blocked. my guess is that booking.com is not allowing a specific placeholder or call to action that MEWS is using. Most likely due to the fact that MEWS is asking for the guest e-mail in the first step of the online check in when guests have booked via third party ;)

Questions? Brainstorm? Contact me!
gabriela.smrckova
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Hello everyone 👋

so I just heard back from our contact on Booking.com side and they checked the cases we ahd shared with them on Monday morning and their solution was as follow:

We can see that the properties have themselves opted into the user setting of BlockAll for both email and urls.

If they don't want this they can go to Extranet and untick this BlockAll for email and urls both. This BlockAll setting (in the same place as the rest of the allowlist settings in Extranet) takes higher precedence than the individual entries added in the allowlist.

Could you please check if you have this BlockAll option unticked (and whitelisted the domain and the email address at the same time)? If it is ticked, please, go ahead and change the setting, if you already have this unticked, please let me know, I will get Booking.com to investigate further your specific case. 

Thanks a lot for your cooperation and help,

Gabriela

J
Rank
Userlevel 4
Badge +3

Hello everyone 👋

so I just heard back from our contact on Booking.com side and they checked the cases we ahd shared with them on Monday morning and their solution was as follow:

We can see that the properties have themselves opted into the user setting of BlockAll for both email and urls.

If they don't want this they can go to Extranet and untick this BlockAll for email and urls both. This BlockAll setting (in the same place as the rest of the allowlist settings in Extranet) takes higher precedence than the individual entries added in the allowlist.

Could you please check if you have this BlockAll option unticked (and whitelisted the domain and the email address at the same time)? If it is ticked, please, go ahead and change the setting, if you already have this unticked, please let me know, I will get Booking.com to investigate further your specific case. 

Thanks a lot for your cooperation and help,

Gabriela

 

Hello @gabriela.smrckova !

That’s what it looks like for us (and has been like this since ever):

 … not working … :-(

Regards,

JP.

mauritsbots
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Thanks a lot for your cooperation and help,

Gabriela

hi Gabriela, you have been sent back into the bushes by BKG.. as with what @j.spiess writes; this is exactly what we are all doing.. for our hotels we can see the transactional emails (autorisation failed, passed etc) coming through just fine, but the before start is being blocked. 

Questions? Brainstorm? Contact me!
J
Rank
Userlevel 4
Badge +3

It looks like the mews.li domain is just filtered out at the mail servers for the @guest.booking.com addresses

 

but the transactional emails do come through ? and for our hotels, we use our own domain for sending emails (including the before start etc) and these are blocked. my guess is that booking.com is not allowing a specific placeholder or call to action that MEWS is using. Most likely due to the fact that MEWS is asking for the guest e-mail in the first step of the online check in when guests have booked via third party ;)

Good point!

I just double checked, and in fact you are right! Payment receipt (only text content) seem to be delivered, as well as invoices. So I guess you are right, must have something to do with the included links to https://app.mews.com :-(
MEWS, can you confirm that? And hopefully sort this out with booking.com …?
Regards,

JP.

V
Userlevel 1

Thanks a lot for your cooperation and help,

Gabriela

hi Gabriela, you have been sent back into the bushes by BKG.. as with what @j.spiess writes; this is exactly what we are all doing.. for our hotels we can see the transactional emails (autorisation failed, passed etc) coming through just fine, but the before start is being blocked. 

Agreed. This dose not solve the problem. 

I have

Hello everyone 👋

so I just heard back from our contact on Booking.com side and they checked the cases we ahd shared with them on Monday morning and their solution was as follow:

We can see that the properties have themselves opted into the user setting of BlockAll for both email and urls.

If they don't want this they can go to Extranet and untick this BlockAll for email and urls both. This BlockAll setting (in the same place as the rest of the allowlist settings in Extranet) takes higher precedence than the individual entries added in the allowlist.

Could you please check if you have this BlockAll option unticked (and whitelisted the domain and the email address at the same time)? If it is ticked, please, go ahead and change the setting, if you already have this unticked, please let me know, I will get Booking.com to investigate further your specific case. 

Thanks a lot for your cooperation and help,

Gabriela

Hi Gabriela,

 

This dose sadly not fix the issue. I have added all links in the confirmation/beforestart/BFS reminder emails, as well as all our sender adresses. 

For some reason our bill templet is going trough - even with links attached.

 

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