When guests book reservations at your property through Online Travel Agencies, i.e. OTAs, such as Booking.com or Airbnb, these agencies generate temporary, masked guest email addresses to communicate with the property.

Since these email addresses are valid only for a short period of time, properties are unable to extend the full benefits of loyalty programs to these guests and to communicate discount offers linked with direct bookings in the future. Mews lets you obtain verified emails of guests booking through OTAs when they check in online through the guest portal and stores them in their customer profile.

How Mews obtains and saves a guest's verified email address

When Mews receives reservations from OTA emails, such as those ending in agoda-messaging.com, guest.airbnb.com, guest.booking.com, m.expediapartnercentral.com or @guest.trip.com, the system asks guests to verify their email by providing a personal email address during online check-in. Note: If a guest provides an email which already exists in another customer profile, Mews adds it to the Notes section in their customer profile. Staff can then decide to merge the two profiles or not.

When a guest receives an email invitation to online check-in, the link brings them to online check-in where they: 

1. Enter their personal email address.

2. Fill in and sign their registration card.
3. Enter the verification code from the verification code email. 

4. The system then verifies the personal email address and saves it to the customer profile. After email verification, you have two customer profiles:
   • One with the OTA email address and personal information the guest fills in during online check-in, and
   • the second empty profile with the verified personal email address obtained from online check-in. 

5. Mews automatically merges customer profiles which have a second profile in the system to maintain a single profile for each unique customer.

Note: By selecting the Action log tab from a customer's profile, you can easily see any changes, including automatic merging.

 

If the guest does not enter a code to complete the email verification: 

• They can fill out and submit their registration card, but they cannot complete the online check-in process further. In this case, Mews does not create and merge a second customer profile with a verified email address. 

 

You can learn about the Customer profiles report here.