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Increase adoption of online check-in with link send through SMS

  • 27 May 2023
  • 9 replies
  • 150 views
A
Userlevel 3

Hi guys,

In order to increase adoption of the online check-in by the guests (we don’t actually have staff on-site, so they must, at some point) we are looking for a way to communicate the online check-in link through SMS messaging. Either through an integration, or through a self-build API interface, or any other way that’s possible.

Anyone have an idea on how to do this?

We’ve been looking for ways to automize the check-in process, and Mews recently did a wundeful update allowing the main booked to add details for companions. Now we need to increase guest adoption for this. And many don’t bother to read their emails.

There’s a few messaging systems that integrate with Mews, and offer their own check-in solutions. But none seem to get it fully working for an Austrian property that needs to collect information on all guests and their companions.

Anyone have any helpful ideas on this? Will be much appreciated!

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Best answer by MarketaOupi 30 May 2023, 09:42

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9 replies

MarketaOupi
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Userlevel 6
Badge +1

Hello @andreas !

thank you for this great question! ⚡

This feature is absolutely on our roadmap for this year as a paid add-on. 

Regarding integrations - they aren´t able to send out our online check-in link, so there isn´t one I can recommend at this time. 

So stay tuned - follow our release notes and I hope our solution will be ready soon! 🍀

Have a great day! 🌞

Markéta - Community Coordinator @ Mews
A
Userlevel 3

Hi Markéta,

That’s great to hear! I look forward to see what you guys are building for this.

Small tip from me, the registration of phonenumbers is lacking a bit in the online check-in environment. Often we get no international dialing code, or someone forgets the 00 or +. This makes for errors in the SMS sending. Perhaps a simple dropdown menu with the country code would solve this problem ;)

Nik Holmqvist
Rank

Hi @andreas  wanted to follow up and see how the SMS feature is working for you? 

A
Userlevel 3

Hi @Nik Holmqvist,

Thanks for checking up on us!

Here’s our thoughts so far:

Great work on the check-in form recently!

We are super happy with the recent changes to the check-in form!
The process seems to be working a lot more smothly for guests. Good job!

One small thing is data validation on the phone number, I’ll explain below:

Improperly formatted phone numbers

Very often we get phone numbers which have one or more of the following:

  • No country code
  • Country code twice, like this: +49004912345678
  • No + or 00’s in front of the country code

Some of these are easily fixed by a few lines of code. And some data validation on the booking form (and also the check-in form!) of the phone number would help a lot.

We see that many guests are not receiving an SMS because of a bad phone number. And these are exactly the people we want to be reaching.

Standard text

The standard text of the SMS makes people suspicious. Would be good to be able to personalise it to our needs. It’s too ‘general’.

A {bookableServiceName} placeholder would do wonders in our specific use case ;)

There is no option to manually send out an SMS

While the main reason for us to want SMS is because guests are unable to click the link in our emails.
If they contact us about it, it would be great to be able to send it to them when they ask for it. Or re-send after we’ve fixed an improperly formatted phone number. 

Short check-in url

This is so much better! Why is this short url not implemented in the emails yet??

Many people read our emails inside the booking.com app, which strips all html.
This means the button doesn’t work, so we show them the url. But this url is 220 characters long so they cannot copy&paste it. The short url in emails would increase check-in adoption a lot!

 

I have to mention this again: give us access to the url!

The check-in url should really be accessible by us, the hotel, in some way, and short.

We get up to 10 emails per day from guests saying “The check-in link has expired, can you send me a new one please?”. 

Which means, they’ve received our email through an OTA, it’s been stripped of html, and they’re trying to copy&paste the link by hand. Which doesn’t work because it’s too long. They see a message from Mews saying “Link expired”.

In this scenario, the guest has already fumbled with this for at least 5 minutes. Then we have to ask them to send us their email address so we can bypass the OTA message system. Just so they can get a link from us.

All this a lot of needless trouble, and frankly feels a bit suspicious to many guests. Especially since we’re asking them for their credit card details in this way and most OTA’s are telling them “don’t communicate outside of our platform, it’s dangerous”.

The short url is secure enough

Last time I mention it, I promise. But here’s how many combinations a 26 character hex code gives you:
40.011.416.521.957.800.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000

The hex code in the email is 200 characters long, I think theres less grains of sand in the sahara than the combinations possible from that ;)

J
Userlevel 3
Badge +1

Hi @Nik Holmqvist,

Thanks for checking up on us!

Here’s our thoughts so far:
 

Hi @andreas & @Nik Holmqvist  !

 

Andreas, this is a perfect summary! I can only second that feedback!!!
Regards,

Jean-Philipp.

Marlon Meiser

@andreas We're using the guest journey tool straiv.io 

There we're sending SMS with the (short) check-in link to our guests. However it's not the mews check-in portal, but the own one of straiv. That works great for us.

If you have any questions about that, let me know.

Regards,

Marlon 

J
Userlevel 3
Badge +1

It’s a question of what we expect to be built-in … 🤔

On the one hand it’s great to have many third party integrations, on the other hand that comes at an additional cost and leads to some duplicate implementations for features and fragementation of systems.

So I think that there should be some discussions where MEWS shall be headed.

What is considered core functionality that will always be included with all subscribtion tiers, what functionallity is not considered to be part of MEWS in the future?

Let me give an example: Automated Upgrade-Upselling. I wouldn’t consider that a core feature of a PMS, nevertheless it seems a lot of effort is put into an implementation, although there are integrations that are offering a similar, or better, functionallity. For housekeeping there would be a lot of improvements possible, that I would actually consider core features of a PMS, but there is no much effort visible to improve there...

For the guest journey, there is no clear view of whether that should be PMS or Add-on, since digital guest journey developed faster than tradional PMS providers could provide functionality for - therefore a lot of very advanced third-party solutions grew in the past years. That’s a good example where easy third party integrations are a great thing to have, as it allows rapid adoption of new technologies or digital trends. However, today the general expections would be that a PMS offers basic and robust guest journey (at least pre-checkin / legal registration requirements) features out of the box … right ? Especially from a modern cloud-only solution like MEWS...

So, I think it’s important for us customers to demand core functionality to be defined and improved as much as reasonably possible. Otherwise we will end up with MEWS becoming a payment processor with attached billing and database/API functionality for (paid) third party services to provide for the actual PMS functionality. Of course, I am painting an exagerated dark picture, but I hope my point is clear.

What are your thoughts ?

Have a nice day,

Jean-Philipp.

A
Userlevel 3


@j.spiess thanks for the backup :)

@Marlon Meiser thanks for the offer! We’ve actually looked at Straiv, and yes it looked very interesting. If we decide to look deeper into them I will definately take you up on that!

Tom McDonald

I second your call for better data validation with phone numbers @andreas! We have a self service property where guests are sent text messages containing information about accessing their rooms, but hardly any of the texts are delivered successfully because they are not stored in Mews in the international standard “E.164 formatting”. It would be fantastic if at the point of making the reservation, guests/employees selected their country from a drop down menu and simply entered the rest of their mobile number. This would enable Mews to integrate much better with 3rd party messaging services.

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