Send Notifications To All Your Guests Immediately
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📆 Oct 5th 2021 - 3min read
Notifications creates a whole new opportunity to increase engagement and keep guests informed during their stay, wherever they are.
Our first dive into this aspect of our digital hotel compendium was adding support for Scheduled Notifications. This allow you to setup notifications to appear on your guests smartphones ahead of time and on a recurring basis.
But what if you wanted to send an alert to all your guests, that is time-sensitive?
With our Version 3.0 update being announced today, we are introducing an exciting new feature, we call 'Immediate Notifications'.
With Immediate Notifications, you can notify guests wherever they are instantly, by sending it to the Hinfo app on your guests smartphones.
This is especially important if a notification is time-sensitive and most (if not all), guests are not currently within their guest room.
How It Works
Immediate Notifications work by visiting the Notifications tab of your property's Hinfo CMS account to create a new notification.
You can provide a title and brief message to appear in the notification and a longer message, phone number, website address etc. to appear when guests tap to view the full immediate notifications details.
Shortly after sending an immediate notification, you will be able to see the total number of notifications sent a how many tapped to view full details to gauge the level of engagement.
Auto Translate
Auto Translate has also been integrated into our Immediate Notifications feature.
If your property has an active Auto Translate membership, we will translate your notification details to each respective language (where needed) and send the notification in the correct language to each guest (English by default).
This integration now allows you to send notifications to guests, that are translated and sent in real-time, for them to receive wherever they are during their stay. This is a game changer!
Use Cases
Just like Scheduled Notifications, there are several benefits for using Immediate Notifications.
These include but are not limited too:
- Promote specials night at your in-house restaurant mid-afternoon to increase last minute bookings,
- Promote on-site activities running each day at a resort,
- Advertise a local restaurant or attraction which you could on-sell this opportunity for them,
- Provide updates on an emergency or natural disaster related incidents (more on this below).
Guest Service Requests
Another service we announced today as part of our Version 3.0 update is support for Guest Service Requests.
These requests allow for increasing in-house restaurant bookings, request times for use of on-site facilities such as a tennis court etc.
When you send an immediate notification, you can select any of the Guest Service Requests you have previously published to appear in any section, to also be accessible when viewing the full details for each immediate notification you send.
Emergency Use Cases
Our Immediate Notifications can be used for any emergency type scenario.
If your property was to experience a power outage, rain/hail or wind damage, or are suspect to a natural disaster like a tsunami, cyclone, bushfires etc., you can provide all of your guests updates, instantly.
The entire immediate notifications feature is built on an guest opt-in basis and limited to 1 per day, to comply with guidelines and policies from Apple.
The only exception we are making to this rule, is in the case of emergency situations, as this may require frequent updates and are helpful when it comes to your guests safety.
Abuse of this feature may result in temporary/permanent banning of this feature for your property, to make sure our Push Notifications license with Apple and Google remains for all other properties/guests.
