The Message Center has been updated to make everyday communication easier to manage.
Hotel teams often receive many different types of messages throughout the day: guest questions, housekeeping requests, maintenance issues, staff communication, and announcements. When all of those messages arrive in the same place, finding the right message at the right time can become difficult.
The new Message Center gives teams more ways to filter, search, organize, and personalize their inbox, helping them spend less time looking for information and more time taking action.
This update introduces:
The updated inbox gives you several filters at the top of the Message Center.
Instead of scrolling through every message, you can narrow down what you want to see.
The Combined Mailbox filter lets you choose which type of communication you want to review.
Available options include:
Imagine the front desk receives a guest message asking for towels while the engineering team is trying to find an air-conditioning repair request.
Instead of both teams searching through the same full inbox, they can filter the Message Center.
The housekeeping team can select Housekeeping, while engineering can select Maintenance.
That means less searching and faster follow-up.
You can also filter messages according to their priority.
Priority options include:
This makes it easier to identify which messages may need attention first.
During a busy check-in period, the inbox may contain several routine requests along with an urgent maintenance issue.
Rather than reviewing every message individually, the team can filter for Urgent messages first and address the most important situations before returning to standard requests.
The updated Message Center also lets you filter messages based on their current status.
Depending on the available options, teams can quickly focus on messages that are:
A supervisor beginning an afternoon shift can filter the inbox to show Unanswered messages.
Instead of reviewing every conversation from the morning shift, they can immediately see which messages still need attention.
This can be especially helpful during shift changes.
The new Actions menu gives teams more control over messages without having to manage each one separately.
When messages are selected, available actions can include:
If checkboxes are enabled in Preferences, multiple messages can be selected and updated together.
Imagine a manager reviews ten messages from the previous shift and confirms they have all been handled.
Instead of opening each message individually, the manager can select them and mark them as Answered at the same time.
This can save several small steps throughout the day.
Messages now include letter labels that help you quickly understand where each message came from.
The labels are:
| Label | Message Type |
|---|---|
| S | Staff |
| A | Announcement |
| H | Housekeeping |
| M | Maintenance |
| G | Guest Message |
Announcements may include communication from OpenHotel or from an Enterprise organization.
The labels provide quick visual context before you even open the message.
For example, seeing an M immediately tells you that the message is related to Maintenance, while a G identifies guest communication.
This is especially useful when the inbox is busy.
Sometimes you know a message exists, but you do not remember exactly where it is.
The new Advanced Search provides additional tools to help locate it.
You can search using options such as:
A manager remembers that a guest reported an issue earlier in the month but cannot remember the exact date.
Instead of scrolling through hundreds of messages, the manager can enter a keyword such as air conditioning, select a date range, and narrow the search to the appropriate message type.
This can make finding older communication much easier.
Hotel teams can now create their own folders inside the Message Center.
Select + Add Folder from the left-side menu, or create a new folder while using the Move to Folder option.
Folders can be used in whatever way makes the most sense for the property's operation.
A hotel might create folders such as:
A guest reports a problem that has already been sent to maintenance but requires a manager to follow up the next morning.
Instead of leaving the message mixed in with the general inbox, the team could move it into a Manager Follow Up folder.
The next shift knows exactly where to find it.
A new Preferences section gives each user more control over how the Message Center works for them.
Go to:
Message Center → Settings → Preferences
From here, users can customize several options.
Users can choose whether messages open with:
This lets each person select the interaction that feels most comfortable.
Users can decide whether checkboxes appear next to messages.
Checkboxes are especially useful when working with multiple messages at the same time.
For example, you could select several completed conversations and mark all of them as answered.
The Combined Mailbox preferences let users choose which message categories should appear by default in their combined inbox.
This gives teams more control over what they see when opening the Message Center.
A front desk user may want Guest Messages and Staff communication visible together, while another employee may need housekeeping and maintenance communication more frequently.
Rather than forcing everyone to work from exactly the same view, the Message Center can better match the user's daily responsibilities.
The new Message Digest option allows users to send Message Center information to an email address.
Users can enter an email address and select the available digest frequency.
This can help managers stay informed even when they are not continuously working inside the Message Center.
A general manager may not monitor the Message Center throughout every shift.
A Message Digest can provide another way to review communication and stay aware of activity.
It can also be useful for managers responsible for more than one area of the property.
Consider a busy hotel on a Saturday afternoon.
A guest asks for extra towels. Another guest reports that the air conditioner is not cooling properly. A supervisor sends a staff message, and an announcement is also waiting in the inbox.
With the updated Message Center:
The result is a Message Center that is easier to navigate and better suited to the way hotel teams actually work.
You do not need to use every new feature at once.
A good place to start is to:
Small changes can make a busy inbox much easier to manage.