Leaving Hostaway because of their booking fee?

Fields in new scheduled emails not displaying

Marinas Edge
Jul 4, 2013 11:02 AM
Joined Oct, 2012 73 posts

Awesome work on email scheduler. This is a huge improvement.

I was experimenting last night and the fields I added to the body of email didn't come through. For example, instead of the property name I got pname.

Let me know if I have done some thing wrong.

Damon

Paul W
Jul 4, 2013 4:14 PM
OR Team Member Joined Jun, 2009 10 posts

This is happening because you changed the field code. You colored the "BID" part (without the curly brackets) red. That makes the code invalid because the actual HTML of the code now shows something like "{<span>BID</span>}" under the covers. You can see what I mean by looking at the HTML view of the email template. The original code of "{BID}" needs to remain unchanged in order for the transformation to work correctly. If you want the Booking ID to be red, put the red color around the entire code. In other words, put the the curly brackets inside the red part.

Remember to use the preview button when creating email templates to see how it will look after transformation. If you can still see the field codes in preview, then something is wrong.

-Paul

Marinas Edge
Jul 4, 2013 6:04 PM
Joined Oct, 2012 73 posts

Awesome. THANKS and happy 4th of July!

Marinas Edge
Jul 4, 2013 11:10 PM
Joined Oct, 2012 73 posts

ok that worked, but now there seems to be a different issue. I uncheck the checkbox for "overwrite all current bookings to use these settings", I hit save, and when I re-open to edit, it is checked again. This resulted in 50 emails in my wife's inbox this morning :(.

Thanks again

Michelle J
Jul 5, 2013 7:31 AM
OR Team Member Joined Jan, 2011 403 posts

Hi Marinas Edge,

That checkbox is used to control what happens to the scheduled emails already in place for current bookings. So when you add or update templates, it allows you to update all the current bookings in bulk instead of having to run around and manually touch each one.

If a booking has already sent a scheduled email for that type of template, it won't be sent again. To see what I mean, open a future booking, go to the Email tab and look at the bottom of the page. See the scheduled email there? You can add, update or delete the scheduled email at the booking level.

The reason you got 50 emails all of a sudden is because you added a booking that was 0 days after booked and you had 50 future bookings. When you saved the template, the system went and created a scheduled email for all of those future 50 bookings and since the scheduled sending time (0 days after booked) was past, they all went out.

Does this make sense?

-Michelle

Michelle J
Jul 5, 2013 7:33 AM
OR Team Member Joined Jan, 2011 403 posts

I took the liberty of looking at your template. You've fixed the field code issue (notice how it's showing in Preview mode now?) but you've set the template to be disabled. Because it's disabled, new bookings will not automatically generate a scheduled email based on this template. You can only add scheduled emails MANUALLY based on this template. To do that, open a booking, go to Email tab and click Add Scheduled Email. You can then select this template from which to create a scheduled emails. If you want every new booking to automatically create a scheduled email based on this template, re-enable the template.

-Michelle

Marinas Edge
Jul 5, 2013 11:16 AM
Joined Oct, 2012 73 posts

Does this mean anytime I add a new scheduled email After an event has happened it will apply to everything that previously happened? Example: send a survey email 2 days after departure? Will it send to everyone that has already left? Send a check in email 7 days before, will it send to all or only future check ins?

Also, what is the time zone that the system uses? Example: My property is in Chelan, I want to send a reminder to my maid service that says "reminder, unit xxx needs to be cleaned tomorrow", what time (pst) will it go out?

Thanks.

Damon

Michelle J
Jul 5, 2013 10:22 PM
OR Team Member Joined Jan, 2011 403 posts

Hi Damon,

No. Scheduled emails are only ever auto-created for FUTURE bookings. If you add a template and leave the "add to current bookings" checkbox selected, it will only apply to any bookings whose arrival days have not yet occurred. If the booking already has a scheduled email of that type, it will not create a second one. And if the scheduled email was already sent, nothing will happen. We make sure not to double them up or blanket old bookings.

All scheduled emails are sent at roughly 12:30 AM PST. This is roughly 30 minutes after the morning collector services have run (the things that collect scheduled payments and security deposits).

-Michelle