Booking.com sends you an email notification whenever a guest messages your property. Three settings on the Booking.com side decide whether that notification reaches Bookboost and whether your replies reach the guest intact. Get all three right once, and Booking.com conversations behave like any other channel in the Unified Inbox.
Do these before enabling the parser in Bookboost. The parser has nothing to work on until Booking.com is sending notifications to the right address.
Before you start
Access to your property's Booking.com portal, with permission to change Messaging Preferences.
Your Bookboost inbox email address. Find it in Bookboost under Settings, then Integrations, then Email. If you manage several properties, select the correct property first: each has its own address.
A list of the domains that appear in links and images in the emails you send guests. The section below explains how to collect them in about 30 seconds.
Step 1: Whitelist Bookboost and your own domains
Booking.com's messaging system strips links and images from any domain it does not recognise. If a domain is missing from your whitelist, guests receive your messages with broken links or missing images. This is the step properties most often get partly right, and the one that produces the most confusing symptoms.
Go to your Booking.com property portal, then Messaging Preferences, then Security Settings.
In Allowed email addresses, add your Bookboost inbox email address.
In Allowed domains, add each domain on its own line.
Add these three Bookboost domains, one per line:
guest.bookboost.ioapp.bookboost.ioplatform.bookboost.io
Then add every domain of your own that appears in your guest emails:
Your hotel website, for example
yourhotel.com.Your booking engine, meaning the domain a guest lands on when they click "Book now". Examples:
book.yourhotel.com,siteminder.com,bookassist.com,mews.com.Any upsell, review, or online check-in platform you use. Examples:
oaky.com,revinate.com.Any image CDN you use. Examples:
cdn.yourhotel.com,cloudinary.com.
Format matters. Enter the bare domain only, with no https://, no trailing slash, and no path. guest.bookboost.io is correct. https://guest.bookboost.io/ is not.
How to find your own domains quickly. Open one of your recent Bookboost campaigns. Right-click any link and choose Copy link address. Right-click any image and choose Copy image address. The part between https:// and the next / is the domain. Add it to the list. When in doubt, add it: an extra domain on the whitelist does no harm, a missing one breaks your messages.
Step 2: Send guest message notifications to your Bookboost address
Go to Property, then Messaging Preferences, then Notifications, and find the email address setting in the left panel.
Add your Bookboost inbox email address, the same one you used in Step 1. This is what tells Booking.com to send guest message notifications to Bookboost rather than only to your own mailbox.
Step 3: Add a topic with the contact field
In the same Notifications section, add a topic that includes the contact field, using the Bookboost inbox address from Step 2.
The same Bookboost address is used in all three steps.
After you finish
Send a test message from Bookboost to a test reservation, then open that message inside the Booking.com Extranet.
If the links and images render correctly in the Extranet, and the notification arrives in your Bookboost inbox, Booking.com is configured.
If anything looks broken, the cause is almost always a missing domain in Step 1. Check which link or image failed and add its domain to the whitelist.
Once notifications are arriving, enable the parser in Bookboost so they are turned into readable guest messages rather than raw emails. See What is the Booking.com email parser?.
What can go wrong
Guests see broken links or missing images in your replies. A domain is missing from the Allowed domains list in Step 1. Identify the failing link or image, copy its domain, and add it.
Nothing arrives in Bookboost at all. The notification address in Step 2 is not your Bookboost inbox address, or it belongs to a different property. Recheck it under Settings, then Integrations, then Email, with the correct property selected.
Messages arrive, but as ordinary emails rather than guest messages. Booking.com is sending from a domain that is not listed in your parser configuration. See What is the Booking.com email parser? and add the missing domain.
Messages arrive empty, with no guest name. That is a parsing problem rather than a Booking.com configuration problem. See What is the Booking.com email parser?, and contact support with a link to the conversation.
You are forwarding notifications from your own mailbox rather than sending them to Bookboost directly. This is an inherited setup from before the parser existed. Point Booking.com at your Bookboost address as described in Step 2, because a forwarding chain can strip the sender details the parser needs.
If you manage more than one property
Each property has its own Bookboost inbox address and its own Booking.com Messaging Preferences. Repeat all three steps for every property, and take care to use the address that belongs to the property you are configuring.
The parser settings inside Bookboost work the other way round. They are held once per organisation and apply to every property under it. So the Booking.com side is configured per property, and the Bookboost side is configured once.
What to do next
With notifications arriving, set up the parser. See What is the Booking.com email parser?.
Getting help
Open Help at the bottom of the left menu and choose Talk to Us, or email support@bookboost.io. Include your property name and, if messages are arriving but look wrong, a link to an affected conversation in the Unified Inbox.