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Hello, we run a nature resort at visitlaagen.no. We have integrated with Zapier to give a better experience using automated SMS giving people all the info about their stay, including the code to the lock box of their exact unit on the day of arrival. It’s working like a charm.

However, after having integrated with Booking.com, we got ourselves a problem. Having flexible tickets at Booking.com means that customers are free to rebook their stay at another date. This completely messes up the Zapier integration. 

There is a Zapier field called “Updated” which is supposed to provide info about the altered bookings. This field would probably help, because we could then listen to that field when it returns an updated booking and change it accordingly, However, the “Updated” field seems to return all the available bookings instead, making it impossible for us to discern the updated ones. 

Any ideas on how to fix this?

Best,
Jan

Hei Jan!

I have made a few different SMS integrations with Zapier, so i will try to help if I can!

Just to check a couple of things:

Are you using the direct booking.com to Mews integration?

What is the workflow - are the messages timed to send relative the the booking confirmation date or the arrival date?

Let me know and i will see if i can give some tips about how to set it up.

 

Have you tried the Mews inbuilt sms? I know it is not as flexible as Zapier in terms of content, but you could have the specific room information shown in the Mews guest portal.

Thanks for your response!

To my knowledge (as I didn’t do the actual integration), I believe that we’re using the direct integration, yes. The bookings flow nicely from Booking.com into Mews. No problems there.

The workflow is as follows: We listen to the bookings using the mews/zapier interface, put those bookings into a Google Calendar, the system checks for upcoming stays - and on the day of arrival, we send a specific SMS with all the details for the stay in question to the guest, including the code to a manual lockbox (ie no integration there, just a physical lockbox with the same code from day to day). Since we’re an unmanned resort, there is no checking in or reception needed to be done. We have found no other way of doing this by using MEWS-only systems.

Now, this would be just perfect if we could listen to the “updated” parameter in the Zapier integration - because we could then update the Calendar, thus change the time of the SMS sending. However, since the response  we get from the “Updated” field seems to give us all the bookings instead of the ones having been changed, we have no clue as to which booking(s) are in need of a calendar update.

If you set Mews as the trigger, and choose New Reservation Event as the trigger event, you can tell zapier to send the sms to confirmed reservations arriving within 24 hours (or whatever time period you want).

So it does not matter if the guest has changed or cancelled the reservation, it will only send to confirmed guests arriving today, with whatever the current room information is.

  • Trigger: Mews
  • Trigger event: New Reservation Event
  • Time Filter: Reservations starting within the specified interval
  • State: Confirmed by customer and property
  • Start Time Modifier: 0 (checks from now)
  • End Time Modifier: 0 (this triggers if arrival is within 24 hours)
  • Then the rest of your flow with sms provider etc. 

I will send you a DM to share a template

 

 

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