OTA Messaging Guide

Guests who book through a portal do not write to you by email: they write in the portal's chat. This screen brings those conversations inside Vezpa, with their whole history, and lets you reply without going into each channel's extranet.

Which portals have a chat

Four of them: Booking.com, Airbnb, Expedia and VRBO. They are the only channels whose messages the channel manager transmits: a booking that came from another portal, or one you took over the phone, has no conversation here, and that is not a fault.

How you get here

• from the «Messages» tab in the bottom bar, which also carries the unread count;
• from Configuration, entry «Messages»;
• from a booking's detail, entry «Messages»: there the list holds only that conversation, and the concluded-stays button does not appear because it is not needed.

What a row tells you

The three badges to recognise

On a computer, two panes

From 1200 pixels wide upwards the screen splits: the list on the left, the open conversation on the right. Up and Down move through the list, Home goes back to the top and Enter opens the highlighted conversation. On phone and tablet the list stays, and tapping a row opens the conversation full page.

Refreshing the list

A new message comes in from the channel manager as soon as the guest writes it, and it fires a notification on your phone. The list you already have open, though, does not redraw itself: reload it with «Refresh» in the bar, or by pulling the list down.

Reading a message in another language

Inside the conversation, next to a foreign-language message, there is the «Show translation» button; while the translation is on screen the same button becomes «Show original» and takes you back.

Not every message has the button: it appears when a translation exists. Sometimes the portal sends one with the message, sometimes Vezpa adds it afterwards; when there is none, the original stays.

Replying

The «Write a message» box sits at the foot of the conversation and grows to five lines. On a computer Ctrl+Enter (or Cmd+Enter) sends, while Enter on its own starts a new line: that way a long message does not go out half written. The box is shown to the roles that can reply: see Who can read and who can reply, further down.

Jumping to the booking

The conversation header, when there is a linked booking, is tappable and opens that room's card. It is the way to the check-in, the payments and the documents without going back and hunting for it in the list.

Copying a message

Next to every bubble there is the «Copy message» button, which puts the text on the clipboard. The text can also be selected with a finger or the mouse, if you only need part of it.

Going back over closed conversations

The list leaves out conversations of finished stays by itself. The «Show concluded stays too» button brings them back, and once on it becomes «Hide concluded stays». In the «Messages» tab of the bottom bar the button may live in the tools menu, if the screen is narrow.

What stays out of the list, and what never does

There is a single cut: conversations of a booking whose check-out has already passed stay out. The boundary is your property's today, not the server's: someone leaving this morning stays visible all day. Three categories are never cut:

• conversations with unread messages, whatever the stay dates — a guest writing after checkout about an invoice or a forgotten item has to stay reachable, and the counter in the bar counts exactly this list;
• pre-booking inquiries, which have no departure date at all;
• conversations of a stay that is current or still to come.

The cut hides, it does not delete: «Show concluded stays too» brings the whole history back, and from a booking's detail its conversation opens anyway, even if the guest left months ago.

Automatic messages land in the chat

Automations — the messages Vezpa sends on its own before arrival, after departure, once a payment comes in — do not travel only by email. When the booking comes from one of the four portals with a chat, Vezpa may deliver them inside the conversation, and you find them here alongside your own.

The route is chosen by the content of the message, and the rule is worth knowing because it changes what the guest reads:

• A text with no contact details in it (no web address, no email, no phone number) is delivered to the chat by preference: that is where a portal guest looks.
• A text that does contain a contact — the payment link, the online check-in link, a phone number — tries email first, at the guest's real address.
• If there is no email address, or it is one of the channel's forwarding addresses, that text goes to the chat. There Vezpa always removes email addresses, phone numbers and links to other sites, but keeps its own links (vezpa.it and the property's active custom domain) wherever the portal lets them through.

Where Vezpa's links get through, portal by portal:

• Airbnb: always. Airbnb allows links once a booking is confirmed, and Vezpa only receives confirmed bookings.
• Booking.com: always. Booking.com replaces the links you have not approved with [Link was removed], so take the extranet step once: Property → Messaging preferences → Security settings → «Add a link» → vezpa.it (plus your own domain, if you use one: the check-in link starts from there). Until then the guest reads the message but not the link.
• Expedia and VRBO: never; the links are removed.

An attachment, on the other hand, never goes into a chat: a PDF invoice only leaves by email, and if there is no email Vezpa does not send a crippled message, it tells you.

Who can read and who can reply

Anyone with access to the property can read the conversations, and read them in full. Replying needs permission to write on bookings: the Manager, the Assistant and the User have it. To the Revenue Manager, the Wellness Operator, the Housekeeper and the Observer the reply box does not appear at all: in its place, at the foot of the conversation, there is a grey padlocked row reading «Read only: replies to the guest are sent by whoever manages the bookings.»

For those four roles the unread dot stays lit even after they have opened the conversation, and that is deliberate: the counter belongs to the property, not to you, and clearing it would hide the message from whoever has to answer it. There is no per-user read state: that would be a different feature.

Demonstration properties do not send

On demo accounts the reply does not go out to the channel, and it does not even stay in the conversation: Vezpa stops before writing it. You see the sending-failed notice, but no bubble appears. That is deliberate, and it keeps a test property from writing to a real guest.

Bubbles with no text

Some portals forward events that are not messages (a pre-approval, a system notice): rows with no text at all. Vezpa does not draw them, because an empty bubble suggests a fault rather than an event with no content.

A message with an attachment shows the file itself: a photo appears in the bubble and opens full screen with a tap, where «Share» passes it on; a PDF is a line you tap to open. Files arrive a few seconds after the message. If one cannot be had — a format other than photos and PDF, or a file the portal no longer provides — the bubble says so: open it on the portal.

• I cannot find a guest's conversation. If the stay is over, the list cuts it: switch on «Show concluded stays too». If the booking did not come from Booking.com, Airbnb, Expedia or VRBO, there is no chat at all.
• The list is empty. On a property that has not received any message yet, that is normal. Try «Refresh»: the list is re-read from the server, it does not update by itself while you look at it.
• A booking three months away is at the top. The order follows the date of the last message, not the arrival date. That date is written on every row.
• Instead of the guest's name I read the portal's name. It means the channel did not send a name and there is no linked booking to take one from — typically a pre-booking inquiry.
• The reply did not go out. The message stays in the conversation, marked «Sending failed», and the row still moves to the top. Try again: if the portal was briefly unreachable, the second attempt gets through.
• It says a conversation identifier is missing. That is a value the portal requires and that Vezpa does not hold for that chat. That reply has to be written from the channel's extranet; later conversations work from here again.
• I replied to the guest's email and never heard back. If the address ends in a portal domain it is a forwarding address: use this screen.
• I see an automatic message without a link I had written. In the chat only Vezpa's links survive: the address of another site, an email or a phone number typed into the text are removed. Vezpa's own links ({link_self_checkin} and the like), on the other hand, never arrive removed: if the chat would remove them, the automation does not go out and the send log says so. See Automatic messages land in the chat above.
• The concluded-stays button is not there. It does not appear when you arrived from a booking's detail: there the list is already that one conversation.
• I cannot see the box to reply in. Your role can read the conversations but not write on bookings: in place of the box there is the grey row starting with «Read only». Ask the Manager to change your role, or let somebody with the permission reply.
• I opened the conversation and the unread dot is still there. That happens to the roles that cannot reply, and it is deliberate: the counter belongs to the property, and clearing it would hide the message from whoever still has to answer.