As part of their strategy Expedia will try to own the correspondence with the guests because their strategy is to build loyalty to their brands. Because of this Expedia will not provide the hotel, PMS or Loopon with the correct email to the guest and instead provide a temporary email that the hotel, PMS and Loopon will use and that goes through Expedia.
Consequences
Expedia commonly closes the temporary email address after some time from guest checkout. We have commonly seen that they close after 24 hours - blocking any attempts from the hotel, PMS or Loopon to send information to the guest, although there have been variations to this time and it is subject to change from Expedia.
This affects:
- Survey responses, since not all surveys can be delivered, affecting response rate.
- Survey reminders, since reminders are sent to an email that is closed by Expedia and affecting response rate.
- Closing the loop responses from the hotel since they are sent to a closed email.
Countermeasures
Loopon will not pause or schedule surveys to be sent later if the recipient is an Expedia email, since we will try to use the time window available as well as possible.
Hotels that would like to use the true guest email in their correspondence to avoid the consequences mentioned above, could ask the guest for their actual email during check in and update it in the PMS, thus avoiding the consequences altogether. Any such measures might be regulated by your agreement with Expedia.