Email automation

Last updated: 2026-08-20

Email is the channel every vendor covers in one line and the one that creates the most work in a hotel.

It is also the only channel where a reply leaves the building with nobody sitting beside it. So this page says more about the safeguards than about the feature.

What comes in

Your property's mailbox is fetched and read: enquiries, booking mail, questions about existing reservations. You provide the credentials once, they are stored encrypted, and they are never displayed again.

Including the mail from Booking.com. Messages the portal forwards to your mailbox are recognised and attached to the right case. Matching runs on the reservation number, not on the subject line and not on the headers that normally chain a mail into a conversation: portals rewrite subjects and strip exactly those headers. Replies go only to the portal's relay address, never to the guest's private one.

It does not reply to itself

That sounds trivial. It is the fault every home-built mail automation eventually dies of.

An automatic reply answering an automatic out-of-office, which triggers another reply, escalates to hundreds of mails within minutes. The guest receives all of them, and your sending address's reputation is damaged afterwards.

So several independent checks stand in front of every reply. They recognise the property's own address, a mail we ourselves just sent, an out-of-office notice and a delivery failure. None of them is answered.

There are several rather than one because any single check can be evaded. An out-of-office does not always mark itself as one.

When the reply would go out in the wrong language

Then it does not go out.

On every other channel a guest is waiting, and the worst response would be silence. Email is different: there is an inbox and there are people who look into it. So the stricter rule can apply here. A reply whose language does not match the enquiry is not sent but put in front of a person as a draft.

There is more on Multilingual, including the incident that produced that rule.

Deliverability is half the job

A mail that lands in spam has not been answered.

So this belongs here rather than in a footnote: undeliverable addresses are suppressed rather than written to again. Bounces are evaluated. The state of the sending address is monitored, and when it turns, the system tells you instead of carrying on sending into a hole.

Promotional mail carries an unsubscribe link that works without logging in and cannot be revoked.

What this page does not claim

No reply in seconds. A mailbox is fetched every two minutes. So between "the guest presses send" and "the answer is on its way" there are minutes, not seconds.

We write that down because this website once said the opposite. "A reply in under two seconds" was a sentence naming phone, chat and email in one breath, and for email it was wrong by a wide margin. It was removed, and how it came about is in the methodology.

Anyone who needs instant answers uses phone or chat. That is what they are for.

Limits

A mailbox, not a newsletter tool. This answers guest mail. Campaigns to past guests are a different thing and live elsewhere in the product.

Attachments are not read. If an enquiry arrives as a PDF attachment, the system sees the text of the mail and not the text of the document. That becomes a ticket for a person.

A shared info@ is messy, with us too. If the same address receives guest enquiries, invoices and job applications, the result is more sorted but not clean. A separate address for guests is worth the ten minutes.

The difference

Most systems treat email as the form you fill in when there is no chat.

In a hotel it is the opposite: the channel the long questions arrive on, the group enquiries, the invoices, the complaints after departure. So the channel where a wrong automatic reply costs the most.

Which is why there is more built in here that does not reply than that does.