I think I would take the WhatsApp route, because it’s more conversational and you can provide more information. Just curious with which chat solution you are working if I may ask? :) 

​@Georg Gaag we do use Chatlyn for most of the guest communication. Wien based company. We are on the journey with them since day one … 5 years ago. Started with the chat bot and grown together with most of the communication on WhatsApp and now trying to get MEWS communication on there as well. 

Nice, thanks ​@Johannes Rott!

I tried Chatlyn as well and we were the first Mews customer for them. But a year ago the solution was not really ready. Now they have developed a lot and I think the Mews integration got much better. 

I think it really brings value to guests if they can chat via WhatsApp and when it’s integrated with the PMS. :) 

I had a demo with Chatlyn recently. It seems like a solid system. I’d prefer using WhatsApp over SMS, especially with the extra features a solution like Chatlyn can offer. Have you been able to include your online check-in links?

​I think right now it’s not possible to send the check-in link via WhatsApp: Online check-in URL | Community 

Therefore I fear that currently the only option is via SMS (or email). But Mews is working on it. 

I'm happy to follow along with your experiences! We have deliberately chosen not to use SMS and prefer WhatsApp instead. We're currently running a pilot with Duve in one of our hotels, but so far we’re not impressed – we're still looking for a better partner for WhatsApp communication. We'd like to reduce the email overload coming from Mews, and we do see WhatsApp as the best way to achieve that.

I have heard good things about runnr.ai as well. 
​@Sanne are you able to send online check-in links via Duve? 

​@Georg Gaag, Duve can not use the Mews magic link for online check-in, so we use Duve online check-in. I have been speaking with Runnr.ai in the past and I also think they are a suitable solution… I hope to follow up with them soon, once the pilot-phase is completed. 

it is in testing so as soon as i have a feedback i will let you know about that… :-D

We used STRAIV before but switched now to MEWS and look forward to an integration on whatsapp.

Until then,… we might acitvate the SMS service as most of our booking.com costumers are blocked.

Hi ​@Johannes Rott what are your further experiences with Straiv? We now only use Straiv as an online guest directory. What was the reason you switched to Mews? 

​@Sanne the experience was great with Protel but we do not see a need as MEWS offers the needed stuff as well.

Hello everyone!

really interesting thread!

It would be good to gather some half-way reliable stats on conversion (as in “guest completed online CheckIn”) of email only vs sms vs email+sms. But Mews doesn’t show any stats on that. Also click-through rate for email and sms would be nice to have. Without stats it’s really hard to assess value of the sms service.

BTW: I am wondering what’s the hype with WhatsApp - maybe I am not “modern” enough (although I consider myself to be tech enthusiast), but I just don’t see a great advantage of any proprietary messaging service, besides maybe some kind of E2E encryption, when we have common standards like email or SMS/RCS….?

I can think of people being reluctant clicking on arbitrary links in SMS/WhatsApp messages due to widespread scam campaigns… so I think it’s key to communicate trust and security, but how exactly? Sms is definitely not easy to verify, whatsapp - I don’t know enough to judge, as I refuse to use it ;-)

we have recently switched to Mews Enterprise subscription and now use our own domain name for sending emails from mews - I cannot say for sure yet, but my gut feeling is that this increased online check-in rate a bit.

My point: if an email is sent with all modern verification options (DKIM, SPF, DMARC), it’s at least relatively easy to establish trust (provided the sending domain is easily associated with the sending entity).

another issue with SMS sending: we often receive no (hotelbeds) or mangled/incomplete/unusable phone numbers (expedia) …

also, the mews.com and mews.li domains are not universally known and trusted. Allowing to use the hotels own domain for the booking engine and guestportal, like in emails, would maybe help - technically doable - at least for the enterprise subscriptions. Same with payment requests/links (I once had a guest who refused to pay using the link, only after placing a new booking through booking.com to establish trust and verify our identity through booking, kind of, he agreed to pay)

I believe that the most guest trusted way to accept messages from hotels is through the channel the booking was initiated from. So if there was a way to integrate any messaging service directly with the major OTA’s messaging services, that might yield the highest response rate. What do you think? But I am not aware of anything like that being available, even though booking.com for example does provide an API for their messaging.

Maybe an idea that’s easier to achieve than full integration: allow guests to login to the mews guest portal with a generic link ( like http://guestportal.mews.com/) with the OTA Reservation number and Name for example… then an automated message could be sent from within the OTAs messaging systems…

Just consider Amazon or ebay… would you trust a message received via email or sms that relates to your order? Or would you rather ignore it unless received officially from the platform you ordered from? People are trained to stay on platform, and in the travel business the experience breaks everywhere, unless booking directly with the hotel, and even then it often breaks - booking engine on oneoagebooking.com, webpage on hoteldomain.com, online checkin auf mews.com, emails from mews.li, some sms and WhatsApp mixed in in between, that’s really not working towards establishing trust and transparency.

We have a road ahead - ideas welcome ;-)

just my two cents 🤔🙂😂

kind regards,

jp.

​@j.spiess 

Yes, of course—we’d love to better track the outcomes of our online check-in process. Currently, it's only possible to see basic data in the reservation overview and statistics, but it's not as detailed as we need.

We’re getting onboarded with MEWS BI tomorrow, so we’re hoping that might open up more possibilities in terms of data granularity. Ideally, we’d like to see the number of online check-in links sent versus those actually used, and also have the option to exclude certain segments, such as touristic groups, who aren’t able to use online check-in anyway.

Regarding communication channels: WhatsApp isn’t just a hype for us—it’s actually been quite effective. We've had most of our correspondence via Chatlyn on WhatsApp, such as confirmations and in-room communication (especially since we no longer have phones in rooms).

We’ve seen some friction though—for instance, we haven’t been able to successfully send online check-in links via Booking.com, even though the sender and link are whitelisted. That’s one reason why we’re now looking to test SMS—just to see if there's a measurable impact before we commit to setting up WhatsApp for this purpose.

Lastly, we love your idea of a guest portal—we previously used Straiv and appreciated that it allowed us to share more than just check-in links, like restaurant opening hours and other useful info. That kind of flexibility is definitely something we’d like to reintroduce.

​@Johannes Rott 

thank you for sharing your experience with whatsapp and chatlyn! Definitely something to keep in mind, although I still don’t like to have Meta too much involved, for … reasons ;-)

Mews integrated “Guest portal” as you brought up is a good idea, but that’s not what I was referring to. In the mews terminology the “guest portal” is where the online CheckIn/Out takes place - that’s where the check-in link is going to - the core functionality everyone really needs. Extending that to be a digital all round guest info site is probably beyond mews current scope, especially as there are many third party solutions to that.

BTW: I don’t think that mews business analytics provides more insight into online Checkin link performance. Let us know if you find it helpful in that regard…

best regards,

jp.

​@j.spiess sure i will keep you guys posted.

One more question regarding WhatsApp messaging: any insight about how data protection  rules work with this. I mean, for hotel initiated whatsapp messaging there is hardly an explicit consent given in advance, is implicit consent (guest places a reservation, has a WhatsApp account) enough to submit PI data via a third party?

IANAL, so bear with me :-)

​@j.spiess I think Chatlyn and Runnr.ai have an API integration with Booking.com. It cannot send online check-in links though, because this is a Mews limitation, but it’s still helpful I think. 

I also dislike Meta, but WhatsApp is very popular among guests… 

At least, you get a verified Meta profile, which helps with the trust. 

the do have the integration to MEWS as well. They are working on a solution for the check-in link but not sure on the outcome.