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Adding OpenKey's Pre-arrival Link to Email Templates

This article will help walk you through the steps of how to embed OpenKey's check-in confirmation link into your existing pre-arrival emails.

OpenKEY HOST Communication Tab

Important Note: The pre-arrival link will only be valid for your guests up to 24 hours prior to arrival, so be sure to send it no earlier than one day prior to arrival.

This link will allow you to perfectly tailor your pre-arrival communication to include your branding, desired instructions, when your guests should expect to receive their key, etc. 

When the generic pre-arrival link is clicked by a guest, the page that the guests are redirected to will request that the guest provide their reservation confirmation number and last name to access the check-in confirmation portal. However, you may have guests that booked via a third party (OTA) like Expedia or Booking.com, and may not have direct access to ThinkReservations' confirmation number. To ensure that the guest has access to the right confirmation number, the best practice is to do the following:

  1. Include ThinkReservations' confirmation number in the same email template, so that guests have it readily available.
  2. Add ThinkReservations' personalized variable for the reservation's confirmation number to the generic link.

Instructions on how to format OpenKey HOST's generic Pre-arrival Link

Whether you are creating a new email template or using an existing email template, the instructions on how to formate the generic link into your templates will be the same.

  1. Log into your OpenKey HOST account, navigate to the Communication Tab, click on Email Form, and then highlight and copy the generic Pre-arrival link that OpenKey provides you. 
  2. In the email template that you would like to add the pre-arrival link to, paste that link into the body of the template.
  3. Next, we want to format the link to automatically populate the ThinkReservations Confirmation Number on to the end of the link, by adding the highlights portion of the link below to the generic link that OpenKey provided you:

To turn that edited link into a clickable text link, the only thing we have left to do is properly format that URL using HTML. To do that you will need to copy your now customized pre-arrival URL into the highlights portion of the example below:

<a href="https://arrival.openkey.co/xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/?booking=${reservation.confirmation_id}">Pre-arrival Form</a>

An example of what this will look like is an email template is as follows:

If properly formatted, when this email template is sent to your guests, the template should look like the example below:



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