Your post stay email should ask for one thing, and which one depends on where the reservation came from. Booking.com sends its own review request 48 hours after checkout, so a guest who arrived through it should hear from you about coming direct next time. A guest who came through your own site will get no review request at all unless you send it. Either email goes out 24 to 48 hours after checkout. Both are below, ready to copy.
How to decide what to ask for
Most template guides load that one email with a thank you, a feedback request, a review request and an offer for the next stay. Others spread the same set across a sequence of messages. A guest reading on a phone has time for one of them.
The platform collects the review from the guests it sold you. Your email to those guests can invite the next booking instead. Nobody is collecting a review from a guest who came through your own site, so that email asks for the review. If you also sell through Expedia or Vrbo, look in each extranet at what goes out after checkout before you write yours.
The two emails
Copy whichever one fits and put your own details in the brackets. Read it out loud before you send it.
For a guest who booked on your own site.
At checkout, while the guest is still at the desk, write one line about the stay into the notes field on the booking. Two days later you copy that line straight into the email.
Guests do use that reply line. When one does, answer the same day, tell them what you are doing about the problem, and leave the review out of your reply. Some of them write the review later anyway.
For a guest who came through a platform.
The second email offers a perk because of the price clause in your Booking.com contract. In the US and Canada that clause says Booking.com gets the same price, conditions and availability you give anyone on your own website, app, phone line or front desk, or better. The one exception is a closed member rate. Guests have to opt in, sign in with a password, have a profile and have already booked once as a member, and you never show that rate publicly. A code mailed to a departed guest is not a closed member rate, so read the parity section of your own agreement before you put a number in the email. Rate parity for a small operator goes through the wording line by line.
If your agreement rules out a lower price and you do not run a member rate, the email still has plenty to carry: the room they liked held for their dates, or the number that rings your own phone. Neither of those appears on a platform listing.
Why the two asks do not go in the same email
The FTC's Reviews Rule does not ban incentives for reviews. The rule forbids tying the incentive to a positive review, in plain words or by implication. An email that puts a code beside the review link can carry that implication to the guest even when you did not intend it.
WebRezPro cites Litmus research putting average engagement with an email at nine seconds. Nine seconds covers one sentence and one link, so a second request in the same email goes unread.
Where the email address actually comes from
A platform booking does not come with the guest's own email address, so what your one email can ask for depends on how the guest found you.
| How they booked | The address you hold | What your one email can ask for |
|---|---|---|
| Your own site | The one the guest typed in | The review |
| Booking.com | A forwarding alias the platform issues, which is not the guest's own address and can stop working once the booking closes | A reason to come back, sent to an address the guest gave you at the property |
| Airbnb | A forwarding alias, and Airbnb's policy bars you from asking for anything better through it | The Airbnb review, asked for inside Airbnb; say the rest at the door |
| Collected at check in | Theirs, and yours to write to | Either one, once you have said what you will send |
If you take Airbnb bookings, read Airbnb's Off-Platform and Fee Transparency Policy once in full. It prohibits "soliciting guests for their email, postal address or other communication channels using the Airbnb messaging system or email alias after a booking", and "selling, sharing or using guest contact information for marketing communications or signing guests up for contact lists". It also says you "may not ask guests to review an Airbnb stay on a non-Airbnb website". The one carve-out is that you "may require additional contact/identity information if it is required for legal or compliance reasons", which is how the policy read when I checked on September 2026.
GuestIntro describes what hosts try instead: scrape the forwarding address, or ask the guest to message them directly next time. GuestIntro says those hosts get nothing out of it and put the listing at risk.
You collect the address on site. At most properties the guest is already handing it over in a few places:
- the arrival form or registration card at check in, on paper or on a tablet;
- the wifi sign in page, if yours asks for an address before it lets a phone on;
- the message you send before arrival with the directions and the door code, when you ask the guest to confirm their details.
Two short lines on the form do it: "Your email, for the receipt", and under it a box marked "Tick here if we may write to you once about staying with us again". At the desk you say the same sentence out loud, and a guest who does not want it leaves the box empty. An address collected that way is one you can write to, with the guest's permission on record beside it.
When to send it, and how many a year
Within 24 to 48 hours of checkout. GuestIntro puts the deadline there and says a later message arrives once the trip has faded, reading as an advertisement. For most of your departures a platform has already booked its own message into that window. The table below, checked on August 2026, shows who is asking and when.
| Channel that sold the stay | Who asks for a review, and when | What you control |
|---|---|---|
| Booking.com | Booking.com emails the guest 48 hours after checkout; three months to answer, 36 months of visibility | Your reply only |
| Airbnb | Both sides have 14 days after checkout, and Airbnb publishes when both have written or the window closes | Whether you write yours first |
| A booking on your own site | Nobody, unless you ask | All of it |
| Your own tools | Lodgify schedules one for the morning after checkout; Hospitable's rule skips a guest who already reviewed; OwnerRez sends none automatically | Which guests get it at all |
Send one email per stay, and keep that count separate from the number you send a guest across a whole year. GuestIntro puts the yearly limit at four or five useful emails for a guest you want back, and says a weekly sales push earns an unsubscribe quickly. One email after each stay uses one or two of those, which leaves room for a note at another time of year.
An automated sequence that fires three or four times after a single checkout uses most of the annual limit on one stay. Mews recommends sends at 24 hours, 7 days and 30 days after checkout. ResNexus recommends a second thank you months later carrying a loyalty discount. An operator who follows both recommendations sends four emails about one stay: at 24 hours, at 7 days, at 30 days, and again some months after that. Guesty's guide to the reservation cycle lists exactly one message after the stay, a thank you with a request to post a review.
If your system sends review requests on a schedule, make it skip the guests who have already left one. An operator on the OwnerRez community forum put the check in their own words: "I have automated messaging that goes out asking for a review. This filter would not send the request out if the guest has already left a review." Without that filter, a guest who reviewed you the day after checkout gets the same request again a week later.
The rules in the US and Canada
An email that carries an offer counts as commercial email. The FTC's CAN-SPAM guide says the law makes no exception for business to business email, that a message to former customers has to comply, and that penalties run to $53,088 for each separate offending email. So the rebooking email needs a working unsubscribe link and your postal address at the bottom of it.
In Canada the consent has to exist before you send the message at all. Under Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation, express consent means "someone has agreed (verbally or in writing) to receive a commercial electronic message from you". Implied consent is recognized only in certain circumstances, an existing business relationship such as a past purchase among them, and it "is generally time-limited". The message also has to carry your business name, a mailing address, and a phone number, email address or web address that stays valid for at least 60 days, plus an unsubscribe mechanism, all of it as the rules read when I checked on September 2026.
The tick box on the arrival form collects the address and, in Canada, the consent along with it.
What went wrong when we sent ours
We sent a version of the second email from MINT @Naschmarkt, our 18 serviced apartments in five apartment types in Vienna, and for weeks almost nothing came back. The problem was on our own site. The only field where a guest could type a code sat at step 3 of checkout, behind the dates, the apartment and the guest details, so a guest holding one had to keep going on faith to find out whether it existed at all. The field showed a code as grey placeholder text that had never been wired to anything, so anyone who typed what was in front of them got no discount and no explanation. We spent that month blaming a welcome popup for the missing direct bookings. The buried code field was doing more of the damage.
We moved the field up to the first step of checkout and emptied the placeholder. A returning guest code works for us at MINT because Booking.com applies no parity in Austria, which is why the American version of that email above offers a benefit.
So before you send anything, mail the template to yourself and try to use your own code on your own phone. If it takes you more than a minute to find where the code goes, work on the checkout before you send the email. The direct booking website test walks the rest of that path.
What to do this week
- Split last month's departures into two lists by the site that sold each stay. Your reservation record already carries that field.
- Pick the one review site you want to grow, and copy the direct link to its review form into the first template.
- Decide what the second email offers, and make it something you can honor on a full night.
- Add the line and the tick box to your arrival form, so next month's platform guests leave you an address.
- Send both to yourself and try them on a phone before a guest sees either one.
For the wider view of what a returning guest is worth, and the other things you already own that reach one, I wrote keeping guests booking direct after checkout.
If you want a hand with the split, book a call and we will go through last month's departures with you.
