How to Uncover the Real Email Address of Booking.Com Guests

Booking.com is a major player in the hotel landscape. Some see it as a business provider, especially in periods when the occupancy rate is low, while others have mixed feelings towards it and resent the high amount of commission it takes. Regardless, the fact remains that in a time when everyone is constantly talking about the guest experience, Booking.com can impede your attempts to personalise guests’ experience in your establishment. As we’ve mentioned in several of our previous articles, one of the keys to a successful guest experience lies in communication. To achieve this, it’s crucial to possess as much information about your guest as possible, and especially their email address.

For the purposes of confidentiality, amongst other things, guests who make a booking via Booking.com are given a temporary email address ending in @guest.booking.com which, of course, takes away any possibility of you being able to communicate with your guests directly. The effect of this can be felt particularly before and after the stay, which leaves the OTA free rein to communicate with the guest, providing information about your hotel and offering additional services provided by its partners (car hire, shuttle…). The platform also sends a satisfaction survey to the guest after their stay, thus preventing you from gathering your own feedback or capitalising on any review portal other than Booking.com. Is this a good or a bad thing?

In absolute terms, the communication efforts undertaken by Booking.com are of partial benefit to you, but you have no control over the conversation with the guest. You also lose the opportunity to gather valuable information which could help you to personalise the guest experience, anticipate their needs, make your own additional sales, and take many other actions.

However, it’s not too late to take back control. We’ve now made it possible to automate the process of collecting the real email addresses for guests who come to you via Booking.com with the help of a function that’s both simple and innovative.

Of course, this doesn’t stop Booking.com from communicating with your guests, but it does allow you to give yourself the best chance of converting these guests into future direct bookings, for example. It’s vital to take over the dialogue with your guests, as this lies at the very heart of a hotel owner’s job. If you’re in control of communication at every stage of the guest journey, you’re guaranteed to offer a truly personalised experience which will have a significant impact on your overall guest satisfaction rate.

There are, of course, other ways to obtain your guests’ details. At check-in, your team at reception could ask the guest for their email address so they can then provide them with information that’s relevant to their stay, for example. During check-out, too, you could offer to send your guest promotional offers, or make them aware of your loyalty scheme. Remember, however, that these methods could create extra work for your receptionists and, when there’s a long queue at reception, they may not be able to take the initiative to ask, for fear of keeping the other guests waiting too long.

As you’ve no doubt understood, automating and digitising some of your hotel’s actions and processes will have a considerable impact on your operations, facilitating and optimising your teams’ everyday tasks and performance. Having the possibility of automatically collecting the real email address of a guest who has come to you via an OTA might seem inconsequential, but the positive impacts it can have on your guest relations, the experience you offer and satisfaction are very real.
Request a demonstration now to find out how you can regain control of your guest communication.