Guest messages from Booking.com and Expedia can arrive in your Unified Inbox alongside every other channel, so your team is not working three inboxes and missing whichever one nobody opened today.
The two OTAs reach Bookboost by completely different routes, and knowing which is which saves you setting up the wrong one.
Which OTA works how
Expedia connects directly. You add Bookboost as a provider in Expedia Partner Central, and messages, reservations, and attachments come through as they are sent. There is no email involved. See Set up the direct Expedia integration.
This covers Expedia, Hotels.com, Travelocity, Orbitz, Cheap Tickets, Wotif, Ebookers, Mr Jet, Lastminute, and Hotwire. Vrbo is the exception.
Booking.com arrives by email. Booking.com does not offer a direct messaging connection, so it emails your property a notification and that notification is routed to Bookboost, where a parser turns it back into a readable guest message. See Setting up Booking.com to send guest messages to Bookboost and What is the Booking.com email parser?.
No other OTA is supported. There is no route for Agoda, Airbnb, or anyone else.
Finding your inbox address
The Booking.com route needs the address Booking.com sends to. Go to Settings > Channel Integrations and copy the address for the property.
Select the correct property first. Each property has its own address, and a group that sends everything to one address will see messages land against the wrong hotel.
If you are routing email yourself
Where you need a rule in your own mail provider to move Booking.com notifications on to Bookboost, redirect rather than forward. Redirection preserves the original sender details, and the parser needs them to identify the guest. A plain forward arrives from you, not from Booking.com.
The rules themselves, per provider, are in Redirect replies to Bookboost.
Test it end to end
Once it is set up, send a message through the OTA and check three things in order:
For Booking.com, the notification arrives in the mailbox it is addressed to.
It reaches Bookboost.
It appears as a guest message in the Unified Inbox, against the right property.
If it stops at step two, the routing rule is not firing. If it stops at step three, the address is probably from the wrong property.
What this does not do
It does not give you the guest's contact details. Neither OTA shares a personal email address or phone number, so an OTA conversation is a way to reply, not a way to add the guest to a campaign.
It does not cover other OTAs. Booking.com and Expedia Group only.
It does not merge the two routes. Setting up Expedia does nothing for Booking.com, and the reverse.
It does not move your message history. Conversations that happened before setup stay on the OTA.
What to do next
OTA conversations are matched to the right guest profile automatically. See Automatically link Booking.com and Expedia messages to guest profiles.
Getting help
Open Help at the bottom of the left menu and choose Talk to Us, or email support@bookboost.io.