WhatsApp Business

When you connect your property's own WhatsApp Business account, guests write to your property's number, their messages appear in "Messages" next to the booking, and you reply from that number. This works now.

Open WhatsApp in Settings

What you do

The account is yours, and connecting happens in Meta Business Manager. The card in "Settings" lists the steps:

1. On business.facebook.com, create an app of the Business type, add the WhatsApp product and add your property's phone number.
2. Create a system user with an access token that does not expire.
3. Paste the "Phone number ID", the "WhatsApp Business account ID", the "Permanent access token" and the "App secret" into the card, and click "Connect".
4. Then paste the "Webhook URL" and the "Verify token" that appear on the card back into Meta, and subscribe there to the fields the card names.

"Test connection" checks that it works. If you change something later, click "Save and test". Leave the token or the secret empty and the saved value stays.

What Noren does

• An incoming message lands in "Messages". Noren looks up the matching booking by phone number: first a stay that is running now, then the next arrival, then the last departure. That gives one conversation per guest.
• Your reply goes through WhatsApp from your property's number.
• Noren stores the access token and the app secret encrypted and never shows them again. The secret is how Noren checks that a message really comes from WhatsApp.

Templates and the 24 hours

More than 24 hours after a guest's last message, or if they never wrote on WhatsApp, WhatsApp only allows a template that Meta approved in advance. With "Request standard templates from Meta", Noren submits five, in Dutch, English, Spanish and German. Two are for "Messages": a message that an answer is ready, and a question about a booking. Both ask the guest to write back, so you can carry on as usual afterwards. The other three are the copies for guests who chose WhatsApp (below): the confirmation, the email two days before arrival and a reminder. Each template's status is on the card; "Refresh templates" fetches it again.

WhatsApp for the guest

A guest can choose to also get their emails on WhatsApp, from your property's number. They do that with a box in the booking engine or at online check-in; the box is never ticked in advance, and without that choice Noren never sends them anything on WhatsApp, not even when their number is on the booking. They stop it with "Stop WhatsApp messages" on the page of their stay.

• The email stays the source. The copy only goes once the email has been sent, with the same details (name, dates, booking number and the link from the email), and never instead of the email. If the email did not go, no copy goes either.
• Which emails: the confirmation, the email two days before arrival and the reminders. Not the others.
• At most one WhatsApp message per guest per day. If two emails go on one day, only the first gets a copy.
• The copy is an approved template in the guest's language (otherwise English), so it can also go outside the 24 hours.
• The box only appears once your connection is active and the copies are approved.

Under "Copies to guests" on the card you see, per property, how many messages went this month, how many of them within a day of a message from the guest (free), how many outside that window, and how many guests with an upcoming stay chose WhatsApp.

Costs

Whatever WhatsApp charges, Meta charges your property directly, also for template messages. A copy for a guest is free if the guest wrote on WhatsApp in the last day; otherwise Meta charges it per message. The counter on the card says how many of each. Noren charges nothing for it.

Good to know

• The card only appears in "Settings" for whoever may manage connections.
• "Disconnect" stops the connection; the messages stay.
• In the demo the connection is simulated: no message goes to a real number.