How to email your past guests so they book with you directly next time

A past guest has stayed, knows your rooms and your staff, and needs no booking site to find you again. The booking they make next can be a direct one, with no commission on it.

Guests who first booked through a booking site are still your guests once they arrive. Asking for their permission at the desk is how they join your own list.

The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 sets the rules for personal data in digital form in India, including data collected on paper and typed in later, such as a registration card copied into a spreadsheet. It calls whoever decides why and how the data is used, here the hotel, a Data Fiduciary, and the guest a Data Principal. This is OneHorizyn's summary of the Act's own words, not legal advice:

• Consent: it must be free, specific, informed, unconditional and unambiguous, given with a clear affirmative action, and limited to the data needed for that purpose.
• Notice: when you ask, or before, tell the guest what data you will keep and why, how they can withdraw their consent and use their other rights, and how they can complain to the Data Protection Board of India.
• Plain language: the request must be in clear and plain language, which the guest can read in English or in any language of the Constitution's Eighth Schedule, with the contact details of someone at the hotel who answers questions about it.
• Withdrawal: the guest can withdraw consent at any time, and doing so must be as easy as giving it. Once they do, you stop within a reasonable time, and so must anyone who sends emails for you.
• The purpose given: the Act lets a business use data a person gave for a purpose, such as a receipt, for that purpose. Writing about future stays is a purpose of its own, so ask for it on its own.
• Erasure: erase the data once the guest withdraws, or once it is reasonable to assume the purpose is no longer served, unless a law requires you to keep it, and make anyone who holds it for you erase it too.
• Security: take reasonable safeguards against a breach, and tell the Board and each guest affected if one happens.

The Act says it comes into force on dates the Central Government notifies, which can differ from one part to another, and rules made under it fill in details such as the form of a notice. Check the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology's pages for what applies on the day you read this, and ask a lawyer if you are unsure.

Ask once, at the moment the guest gives you their details, in a sentence they can say yes or no to. The registration card, the checkout desk and the confirmation of a booking on your own website are the natural places.

• Leave the box empty for the guest to tick, or ask them to write yes. Gmail's guidelines for senders also ask them to avoid boxes that are ticked already.
• Ask for email and WhatsApp separately. WhatsApp's own policy asks a business to have a person's permission before messaging them, and suggests asking for each kind of message.
• Keep a record of each yes: the date, how it was given, and what it covered.
• Have the same question ready in Hindi and in your region's language: the Act asks that the guest can read the request in English or in any language of the Eighth Schedule.
• On your website's booking page, put the same question beside the booking as a box the guest ticks.

Never buy or borrow a list of addresses. Gmail's guidelines say not to send to people who didn't sign up, and not to buy addresses from other companies.

Guests who booked through a booking site reach you with contact details the site passed on for that stay. Read your contract with each site before you write to them about anything else, and ask them yourself at the desk instead.

A spreadsheet is enough for a small hotel: one row for each guest who said yes, with their name, email address, phone, the dates and kind of their last stay, what they came for (a family trip, a wedding, work), the date and way they gave consent, and the date they withdrew it, if they did.

• Keep it in one account or file that belongs to the hotel, never on staff phones.
• Give access only to the people who send the emails.
• When a guest withdraws, stop writing at once and erase their row.
• Erase the rows of guests whose purpose is clearly over. Gmail's guidelines also suggest taking off your list people who never open or read your emails.

In Google Contacts you can keep the list as a group: next to “Labels”, click “Create label”, name it and click “Save”; then tick the guests, click “Manage labels”, choose the label and click “Apply”. Google's help shows typing a label's name in Gmail's “To” field to add everyone in it. Put it in the “Bcc” field instead, so that no guest sees another's address.

Send a few useful emails a year rather than many. Time each to when the guest came, and give each a reason to book on your own website:

• A thank-you the day after checkout, with your Google review link, and nothing to sell.
• Before the same season next year: a family who came for the Diwali holidays hears about Diwali; a couple who came in February hears about February.
• Six to eight weeks before your busy dates, with the dates, the price and what is included.
• Before your quiet months, with a reason to come then: a longer stay for less a night, a weekday rate, a meal plan included.
• On the anniversary of a wedding or event held at the hotel, if the family said yes to hearing from you.
• When something new opens: a restaurant, a pool, new rooms.

Each email: a subject line that says what it is, one reason to book direct, the price where you can give it, one button to your own booking page, your phone and WhatsApp, and at the foot a one-click way to stop receiving them, with your hotel's name and address.

A thank-you email can carry your review link, but Google strictly prohibits offering incentives, such as free or discounted goods or services, in exchange for reviews, so never tie the book-direct offer to one.

• Gmail, for a small list. Google's help says a personal Gmail account may reach its limit if one email goes to more than 500 recipients, or more than 500 emails are sent in a day; you can usually send again within a day.
• A free tier of an email service, which adds the link to stop receiving emails and counts opens and clicks for you. Mailchimp's Free tier, for one, allows 250 contacts and 500 emails a month, at most 250 a day, with Mailchimp's branding on each email. Read the limits on any service's own pricing page before you start.
• Your booking engine or property management system, which may already hold guests' emails and a way to write to them: ask its provider.

Whichever you use, send from an address at your hotel's own domain, the same one for every email of one kind. Gmail's guidelines ask every sender to set up SPF or DKIM for its domain, and senders of more than 5,000 messages a day to Gmail addresses to set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC and to let people opt out of marketing emails in one click, with a clearly visible link in the email. Whoever runs your domain or website can set these up.

WhatsApp can reach a past guest too, with the same permission. WhatsApp's Business Messaging Policy says a business may message someone only after they have shared their number and agreed to receive messages, and must respect every request to block, stop or opt out, whether it comes on WhatsApp or anywhere else.

• Broadcast lists in the WhatsApp Business app reach only people who have saved your number in their phone's contacts, up to 256 in each list, and each guest's reply comes to you as a private chat.
• People can block or report a business, and WhatsApp says its systems may then limit how many messages the business can send.

The guide to WhatsApp Business for hotels covers setting it up.

• Tag the link in each email (utm_source=past-guests, utm_medium=email, and the email's name as utm_campaign), so that Google Analytics shows the visits it brought (see the guide on digital marketing for hotels).
• Give each email's offer its own name, so that a booking made by phone or WhatsApp can be put down to it.
• Each month, match the names on new direct bookings against your list, and count the past guests who came back.
• Count how many asked to stop after each email. A jump after one email says it wasn't wanted.
• If your email service counts opens and clicks, read them, but judge each email by the bookings it brought.

A past guest who comes back through a booking site still came back. Note them too, and ask them at the desk to book direct next time.