Hotel pre-arrival emails: what to send guests and when

A pre-arrival email is any message a hotel sends between booking and arrival. Send three: a confirmation at booking with dates, room, board, the price the guest will pay and the cancellation terms; a practical note some days before with directions, parking, check-in time and the identity document needed at the desk; and a short arrival-day note.

For example, take a guest who books six weeks ahead, lands late at night and calls the desk to ask where to park. The answer was written in an email nobody opened. Most pre-arrival problems are not service failures; they are messages sent at the wrong time, at the wrong length, or not at all. This guide sets out a three-message sequence, what each message must contain, and where the legal line sits between service and selling.

What should a hotel send between booking and arrival?#

Three messages, each with one job: the confirmation proves the booking, the practical note removes the friction of getting there, and the arrival-day note answers the last question.

The confirmation goes out at booking, automatically, and is a record first and a welcome second. It is the message a guest forwards to a colleague or shows at a border. The practical note carries everything that only matters close to the date: how to arrive, where to park, when the room is ready, what to bring. The arrival-day note is two or three lines: the address, which door, the phone number to call, and the check-in time.

Timing is the hotel's decision, not a fixed rule. A common pattern, offered as an example: one practical note a few days before arrival for bookings made weeks ahead, and the same note on the day of booking when the stay falls inside that window. Set your own timing and write it into the template.

Each message must be readable alone. A guest who opens only the second one should still be able to arrive. Anything that needs a reply belongs in a form, not in a mail thread: a request buried in a reply is a request the night shift will not see. And do not repeat the same content three times; repetition trains guests to stop opening the messages. The same logic applies to the whole guest journey, stage by stage.

What must the booking confirmation contain?#

The confirmation is the guest's proof of what was bought, so it must match the reservation record exactly and be readable without the hotel's system in front of you.

Write arrival and departure dates with the year, and spell out the number of nights. A guest crossing a time zone should not have to count. State the room type and occupancy, including children's ages where they change the price, and the board basis in the words the guest used when booking: room only, bed and breakfast, half board.

State the total the guest will pay, in the currency of the booking, with what is included and what is settled on site. Do not print a tax rate; the rate depends on the hotel's own situation, so confirm it with your accountant. Give the cancellation terms with the last free-cancellation date written as a date, not as "7 days before arrival". A date cannot be miscounted. Add the deposit or prepayment amount, whether it is refundable, and how it will be taken, plus the hotel's full address, a telephone number that is answered, and a named person to reply to.

What belongs in the practical message before arrival?#

The practical note carries what a guest needs in the last days: how to get there, where to park, when the room is ready, and what to bring.

Write directions for a phone: a street address that a map application resolves, plus one landmark. Not a paragraph of turns that assumes the guest is driving from one direction. Cover transfers and parking: whether the hotel arranges a transfer, what it costs and how to ask for it; whether parking is on site, nearby, or has to be reserved. Give the check-in time and what happens before it: where luggage can be left and where the guest can wait.

Then the identity document. Under the Identity Notification Law (No. 1774, Article 9), a lodging place may not accommodate anyone who cannot prove identity with an identity card or another valid official document, so the note should say plainly to bring one (mevzuat.gov.tr, consolidated text, 2026 (opens in a new tab)). Identity is checked in person at the desk, not in advance by email. Say why, in one sentence: Article 2 of the same law requires the operator to keep identity and arrival-departure records day by day, ready for inspection (mevzuat.gov.tr, 2026). A guest who understands the reason argues less at the desk. If your hotel sends these records through KBS, the guest identity notification system, the same document feeds that duty.

Leave out what does not matter yet: the full price breakdown again, the spa menu, restaurant hours for someone landing at midnight. And keep to one link, one purpose. If the message has three links, the guest taps none of them.

How should you handle arrival time and special requests?#

Collect them once, in a form, and confirm in one line; a request that lives in an email thread is a request the night shift will not see.

Ask for the estimated arrival time in the practical note, with a link to the online check-in form rather than a request to reply by email. The form should ask only what the stay needs. KVKK (Law No. 6698, Article 4) requires personal data to be relevant, limited and proportionate to the purpose (mevzuat.gov.tr, 2026 (opens in a new tab)). When the form collects personal data, the guest must be told who the controller is, why the data is processed, to whom and why it may be transferred, the method and legal basis of collection, and the guest's rights (KVKK, Article 10, mevzuat.gov.tr, 2026).

Every special request gets one of three answers: yes, no, or "we will try, and you will know by this time". Silence is the only wrong answer. Put the arrival time on the reservation record so housekeeping, the desk and the kitchen read the same number. Do not promise what the desk cannot deliver at 02:00; a late check-in note should say who is on duty and how the door works. Keep the form short enough to finish in a lift. Every extra field costs completions.

Can you email a guest who booked through another channel?#

Only if that channel gives you the guest's contact details and permits the contact; check each channel's terms and your own contract before you build the sequence.

Some channels pass a masked or relay address, some pass nothing until close to arrival, and some pass full details at booking. The hotel does not decide this; the channel does. Read the channel agreement for what the hotel may send and when, because the rule differs by channel and by contract, and contracts change.

Never work around a masked address to reach the guest directly. It breaks the channel's terms and the guest's expectation of how the booking works. Where the hotel holds no address, the practical information belongs on the hotel's own website and in the handover at arrival, not in an email that cannot be sent. Test rather than assume: make a booking through each channel you sell on and watch what reaches the hotel's inbox, and when. Keep a short internal note of which channel allows which message, and review it when contracts renew. The guest who books direct and the guest who books through an agency should get the same information at the desk, even if only one of them got an email.

How long should each message be, and in which language?#

One phone screen, in the language the guest booked in, signed by a person the guest can reply to.

One screen means roughly what a guest reads while standing in a queue. If it needs two scrolls, it is two messages, and the second one probably belongs in the arrival-day note. Send in the language of the booking. If the hotel cannot, send in English and say so in the first line, so the guest knows what to expect at the desk.

Plain text beats a designed template on a phone: no wide header images, no tables that break, no attachments a guest will not open. Use a named contact and a reply address that a person reads; a shared inbox with no name reads as a wall. Keep the sender name the hotel's name, not a booking engine's, so the guest recognises who is writing. Test on a phone, one-handed, in bad light, with the font size a real guest uses. Approve the template on a desktop, then read it on a phone before it goes out. Short stays sharpen all of this: on a two-night booking, the practical note is most of the relationship the guest has with the hotel before arrival, as with any short-stay service design.

Where is the line between a service message and marketing?#

A message about the booking the guest already made is a service message; anything that sells something extra is a commercial message and needs prior consent.

Under the Law on the Regulation of Electronic Commerce (No. 6563, Article 6), commercial electronic messages such as marketing emails and SMS may be sent only with the recipient's prior consent (mevzuat.gov.tr, 2026 (opens in a new tab)). Article 8 of the same law removes the separate consent requirement for messages about changes to, use of or maintenance of goods or services already supplied, where the recipient gave contact details to be reached. The booking confirmation and the practical note sit on this side of the line.

Recipients may refuse commercial messages at any time without giving a reason, so the refusal has to be easy to find and easy to act on. Keep the consent record separate from the booking record: a reservation proves a stay, not a permission to sell. The Personal Data Protection Board's principle decision 2026/347 (Official Gazette 24 March 2026, No. 33203) states that the privacy notice and the explicit-consent text must be prepared separately, and that no consent text should be offered where processing rests on another legal ground. This article describes the duty in general terms; confirm dates, penalties and your own case with a legal adviser.

The practical consequence: an upgrade offer goes in a separate message the guest agreed to receive, never appended to the arrival-day note.

What to do next#

Write the three messages once, as templates, then send them to your own phone and read them as a guest would. The sequence works because each message answers one question before it is asked: the confirmation removes doubt about what was bought, the practical note removes the friction of arriving, and the arrival-day note removes the last small uncertainty. Fewer questions reach the desk because fewer questions were left open.