Testing is a crucial part of launching your transactional emails (confirmation, modification, cancellation). To ensure a successful launch and that accurate information and reservation details are being provided to your guests, we have provided this checklist and best practices to assist you in fully vetting these campaigns and to prevent issues or gaps being discovered later on.
Subject Line
- Confirmation vs Modification - Make sure your emails specify what they are in the subject line: is the reservation confirmed, canceled, or being modified?
- Did you include merge tag values in the subject line, such as name or res #? If so, confirm these are pulling through correctly and determine if fallback values are necessary.
Body
- Check for standard typos and grammatical errors.
- Confirmation vs Modification - should be differentiated, make sure the wording for confirmation vs modification is correct.
- Ensure that all buttons and links work and take you to the correct web page/action when selected.
Booking Policies
- Check cancellation and deposit policies - make sure the wording is the correct customer-facing verbiage, and dates are correct.
- Special events or holidays - might require unique policies for deposit or cancellation, make sure dates are correct
- Check your segments, OTA/Owner/Comp Exclusions - Are there certain reservations that should not receive a confirmation email at all or have rate suppressed? What about the other email types like pre-arrival or cancellation? If owners and comps get confirmation, should the rate be suppressed?
Segments & Scheduling
- Transactional - Which reservations should not receive an email? OTAs, Wholesales, Comps, House, Owners, etc?
- Modification - Under what circumstances do you want a change on the reservation to trigger a new email notification to the guest? Options to choose from are: Check-in Date, Check-out Date, Rate Code, Room Rate, Room Type Code, Room Type Charge Code, No. of Adults, No. of Children, Total Amount Due and Guest Name.
- Cancellations - Typically, this would go to all guests but are there specific circumstances where certain reservations should be excluded?
Dynamic Content
- With dynamic content you can have the content that displays within a transactional campaign automatically adjust for each guest based upon their reservation information and/or demographic information. Please follow THIS guide to set up dynamic content prior to testing your transactional campaigns.
Testing Call
During your implementation period you will have the option to have a testing call with your IPM if desired. We will check that the following merge tags are coming through the way you want them to be displayed on a guests email.
- Confirmation # - PMS vs Online Booking Engine # (CRS)
- Check in & check out dates
- Rate - Avg vs Daily
- Taxes - Called out separately or included in total
- Resort Fees/Parking Fees/Pets Fees
- Total - Confirm amount matches PMS
- Room Type - confirm it is guest-facing description, not PMS code
- Rate/Package Code - confirm it is guest-facing description, not PMS code
- Guests - # of adults
- Guests - # of children
- Additional UDF’s, if contracted