ZaK F.A.Q. - How to request Online Check-in from the guest?

If you want your guests to complete the Online Check-in before arriving at your property, you should send them the specific form! You can send them our reservation confirmed template, or you can create your own template with a link to the online check-in.

Let's see how to proceed!

TEMPLATE CREATION

You can create and customize your template from the section below, with the help of the related documentation. Here, by clicking on ADD NEW TEMPLATE you can create a new template. Or by clicking on the two-black-squares icon, you can create a copy of our default template and then edit it:

↳ Useful Link: ZaK > Settings > Templates

☞ Docs: ZaK - Templates: your text models

Within the template, you can use the keyword "checkin" to add a link in the text that automatically redirects to the Online Check-in. But you will see that this keyword is available twice. The first one is with user registration and the second one is without registration, as indicated in brackets:

Let's see the difference between them.

1. ONLINE CHECK-IN WITHOUT REGISTRATION

Using the keyword "checkin" without registration means that the guest will receive an email with a link to check in. By clicking on this link, he will immediately be redirected to the page where he can enter his personal data:

Therefore this is the quickest and easiest way, as the guest only has to click on the link and fill in the required information.
However, this is not always possible, which is why we have also introduced an online check-in where authentication is required from the guests before they can proceed. We'll discuss this in the section below.

2. ONLINE CHECK-IN WITH USER REGISTRATION

If you also want to send the online check-in link to Booking.com reservations, then you need to use this keyword. For security reasons, Booking.com "breaks" our online check-in link, so that it can't be clicked. To avoid this, it's necessary to make the link more secure by requiring the guest to enter "unique" data. For this reason, the required parameters can't be pre-filled by ZaK, but must be entered by the guest himself.

Therefore, if you use this keyword with registration, when the guest clicks on the link he must first authenticate himself by filling in the following fields, then he can access the online check-in:

We remind that ZaK doesn't check the accuracy of all these fields, but only tries to understand if the customer is real. For example, the guest can make a mistake in entering the name, but if the reservation code and the email are correct then he can proceed anyway.

However, all these data are included in the email you send, so the guest can easily retrieve them. We therefore recommend that you also include the reservation code (e.g. AS-0034) in the template that you send to the guest, so that he can also find this information.

Once the template with the online check-in link is ready, you can choose whether you want to send it manually or enable automatic sending.

HOW TO SEND THE TEMPLATE MANUALLY TO THE GUEST

If you want to do this manually, you need to access the reservation detail and go to the MESSAGING section. Here, click on the letter icon to send a message to the guest:

Now under "Template" choose the message to be sent (of course the one with the check-in link) and click on SEND:

HOW TO SEND THE  TEMPLATE AUTOMATICALLY TO THE GUEST

If instead you prefer ZaK to do everything, you can enable the automatic sending from the section below, with the help of the related documentation:

↳ Useful Link: ZaK > Settings > Communication

☞ Docs: ZaK - Communication: automatic and manual emails

In this way, when a reservation will be created as confirmed ZaK will send the template you choose, including the check-in link.

If you prefer, you can also use two different templates:
- create a template with the link WITH registration and enable it only for OTAs (orange icon), so as to solve Booking.com issue.
- then create a template with the link WITHOUT registration and enable it for reservations not coming from OTAs (blue and pink icon), so that they are not asked to authenticate.

Of course, you do not have to enable automatic sending for confirmed reservations. You can also create a specific template to request online check-in and enable it to be sent, for example, 3 days before arrival:

The confirmed reservation template is the most commonly used, but you are free to customize the messages as you wish and choose how you want them to be sent to your guests!