Zapier integration

I have a zap to extract tasks (repairs, improvements, etc) from reviews. It writes both the reviews and tasks to a google sheet and notifies me of new tasks. The reviews trigger is no longer sending reviews now, though.

I don’t feel like I need more triggers, but would love to have some actions! Such as the ability to trigger a canned response, or post a message to a booking thread….

Here are my zaps:

Get control of booking.com messaging

I’m using it to help move Booking.com conversations away from their broken messaging platform and to direct email, if the guest wants that.

My Hospitable booking confirmation email invites the guest to share their email address if they would like to communicate directly, and then I can move the conversation (largely) to their email. This preserves message formatting, allows links, bypasses filters, and supports emojis.

Zaps involved:

1. New reservation: a zap grabs all reservations and writes them to a google sheet which includes their communication preference as a column. I use this master sheet as a seed for tons of other automations as well.

2. New message: a zap keeps an eye on all messages, and filters for those sent by guests. The zap then checks to see if an email address is found in the message content (sure! reach me at blah@aol.com) and extracts that email address, writing it to the booking sheet, and changing their communication preference to ‘email’.

3. New message: another zap monitors all messages and filter for those being sent by host. It then does a lookup on the google sheet based on the reservation ID and checks to see if the user prefers email. If so, it uses SMTP to send the full contents of the message directly to the guest email from my business email address.

The result is that my Hospitable automated messages reach the guest fully intact, in the guests actual inbox. The message still gets sent via the booking.com app as well, but it’s hacked to death (as they always are).

Drawbacks:

If the guest replies, it does not land in Hospitable, but only shows in my work email. That’s fine by me. My primary goal was to make sure my automated emails (check in instructions, upsells, etc) actually get delivered.

Ways to make it better:

If there was a Hospitable action in zapier (trigger message in hospitable) I could trigger a canned response to the guest letting them know that we’ll move the conversation to email. I do this by hand for now.

Pretty push notifications of new reservations

I use the new booking trigger in order to send a push notification to my iphone via Pushover. This let’s me get a nice clean notice that says something like There is a new booking for the Atwater room for $242. James arrives in 3 days. And the best part is it does so with a cash-register sound. Always a nice addition to dinner with the family.

Review followup to ask for Google and Tripadvisor

The reviews zap monitors new reviews, uses openai to do some sentiment analysis, and if it looks good, sends me a Pushover notification letting me know. I then have an automation on my iphone that I can trigger to send an SMS to the guest thanking them and asking if they could share it on Google Maps and/or Tripadvisor while the review is still fresh (ideally just after they posted it).