10 ways to become a bookings and reservations whiz in Trello
Organize and improve your booking management processes in Trello! SendBoard’s Email for Trello Power-Up seamlessly combines your tasks and emails to turn your Trello board into a centralized dashboard for your reservations team.
Trello is a flexible and powerful platform for managing reservations for your guest house, hotel or venue! Its visual system of ‘cards in lists’ makes it possible to build a customized workflow, so that you can manage incoming bookings, as well as communicate with guests and suppliers.
Combined with SendBoard’s Email for Trello Power-Up, you can transform your Trello board into a dynamic booking management platform. By integrating your emails alongside your tasks, your Trello board becomes a centralized workspace for your entire reservations team.
10 ways to become a bookings and reservations whiz in Trello
1. Make the most of Kanban
Trello is based on the Kanban system, which arranges ongoing work as a series of cards in lists. Each card is a to-do item and each list is a step in your workflow. Cards move from left to right through each stage, until they are complete and the whole process can start again. It’s a neat, visual way of viewing your team’s work in progress!
An example of a Kanban workflow. It’s a bit like a dynamic cork board with sticky notes.
By creating a set process for all your to-dos, your team always knows what’s next, and can easily collaborate to problem-solve if they hit any stumbling blocks.
2. Bring your bookings emails into Trello
If you use a booking platform like Airbnb or Booking.com, you’ll know that lots of work often starts as plain old email. And dealing with new booking notifications alongside guest help requests and conversations with suppliers in the same inbox can get messy and confusing!
Imagine being able to combine your tasks and emails on one centralized Trello board. Magic, right? With the Email for Trello Power-Up, instead of sifting through a chaotic inbox, all incoming emails arrive as new cards on your Trello board. From here, you can send and reply to emails – and make the most of Trello’s collaborative tools to handle new enquiries, organize check in and check out processes, and follow up with guests for reviews after their departure.
Learn more about how to connect your email to Trello in our Power-Up help center.
💡 TIP Collaboration is an important aspect of managing bookings and reservations, and delivering a high-quality customer experience. Discover 5 ways to build a collaborative front-of-house team.
3. Maintain a consistent brand image
Even when you’re sending emails from Trello, you can still keep your branding consistent so that you maintain a professional image. Customize the look of your emails by:
Using your own email address. People recognize your business name, so boost trust and create a seamless experience for your customers by sending emails from your own domain name. Read more about how to send and receive email in Trello with your own email address.
Inserting an email signature. Make the right impression in your customer’s inbox ****with a branded email signature, including your logo, company name and contact details.
For more tips, have a look at our top 4 ways to brand your emails with Email for Trello.
4. Link your Trello boards together
Managing reservations often involves different processes that you might want to handle separately – like new enquiries and ongoing bookings. With Trello, you can use separate boards for each workflow, while still maintaining transparency among your team members.
This cool trick is a great way to link multiple Trello boards so that you can send cards or switch between your Trello boards quickly and easily.
It feels just like dragging a card to another board!
5. Automate repetitive email tasks
Responding to common emails (like questions about availability or amenities) can get a little repetitive. This is where Trello automation can really save the day! Here are just a few automation ideas for reservations teams working in Trello:
Build a library of template responses. Manually typing out replies is monotonous work – and can lead to typos and inconsistencies. Save your team time with Email for Trello’s Saved Reply feature that makes it easy to address common requests.
Drag a card to send an email. Set up a Trello rule to automatically send an email when you drag a card from one list to another. This is really useful for booking updates, review requests, or any other emails that have to go out at a specific stage in your workflow.
Although these things only really take a few minutes to do, it’s the type of work that adds up over the long run, so it’s worth giving automation a try! If you need more ideas for how to get the Trello bots to do the heavy-lifting, have a look at our list of 10+ automations to try in Trello.
6. Manage your contacts in one place
Use the Email for Trello contact management dashboard to see all your Trello tasks right alongside your emails and contacts. The at-a-glance activity overview of your email contacts and conversation history makes it easier for your team to keep up to date and stay on top of customer service.
Use the activity view to see recent cards, emails and notes on your current board, or across all your mailboxes in Trello.
You can also add custom notes to any contact. This is a great way to jot down extra details or team reminders like ‘This guest has accessibility requirements’ or ‘Remember to follow up on missing towels at the apartment’.
7. Send email from Trello on the go
Need to send emails while you’re out and about? SendBoard has specifically developed mobile-friendly features for the Email for Trello Power-Up, so that you can send and receive emails with the Trello mobile app.
You can send an email simply by typing a comment using the @reply and @email keywords:
Any text in a comment preceded by @reply will be sent as a reply to all the contacts on the email thread.
Any text in a comment preceded by @email and the contact’s email address will be sent as a new email to the specified contact.
Attend to urgent emails seamlessly from any device!
8. Send emails with a custom button
A simple Trello button combined with a template email creates a powerful automation that you can use to respond to emails with just one click! To learn how to set it up, have a look at our article about how to reply to emails in Trello with a button automation.
You can use it for anything you like, but here are just a few ideas for reservations teams:
Ask for a review after your guest has checked out
Easily share your room and pricing options with new booking enquiries
Send a confirmation email when you process a refund after a cancellation
💡 TIP We’ve collected 10 email templates for reservations and bookings management, to help spark ideas for your own emails.
9. Leverage the power of Trello Custom Fields
Custom Fields are a built-in Trello functionality that can be used to organize the information that’s important to your team. Different data types are supported, which you can tailor to your needs. For example:
Add start and end dates to track the duration of a booking
Create a drop-down list of options (i.e.: single room, deluxe double, penthouse suite)
Include a checkbox on any card to tick off to-dos as you go
Enter a field for any number or text (i.e.: the number of guests or any special requests)
Read our top 4 tricks for getting the most out of Custom Fields to learn more.
💡 TIP You can also seamlessly pass information between your emails and Trello card descriptions or Custom Fields! See our help center for more information about how to use Trello automation to extract details from your emails.
10. Exclude certain emails from the thread
Sometimes it’s important to keep internal discussions separate from any communication you send to your guests. For example, if you’ve been discussing a customer’s dietary requirements with your team, or getting a quote from a supplier for additional cleaning after check out, you might not want your guest to see that conversation history.
If you’re forwarding an email, or looping someone into an existing thread, you can exclude any unwanted messages by choosing to show or hide your conversation history. This handy feature effectively forks your conversation, making it possible to continue multiple email threads on one Trello card.
Unlock your bookings and reservations potential in Trello
By seamlessly integrating your emails and Trello with the Email for Trello Power-Up by SendBoard, you can transform Trello from a useful tool to a fully-fledged booking management solution. Manage your tasks, emails, and contacts collaboratively on a centralized Trello board – upping your team’s productivity and ensuring a streamlined workflow from start to finish!
