Help CenterTouch Stay integrates with Anytime Booking to import your units and then automate the sending of invitations for confirmed bookings. If you don’t have a Touch Stay account yet then you can sign up here for a free 14-day trial. Once you have a Touch Stay account, then follow the steps below.
Login to your account
Sign-up or your 14 day free trial
Step 1. Connect your accounts
First, you need to authorise your Touch Stay account with Anytime and will need both your account number and an API key for this. Anytime support can provide you with the API key, reach out to their support and ask for an API key to connect to Touch Stay. Your account number can be found on the “Your Account” page in Anytime, hover over your account name at the top left and copy the Account No.
Once you have your Account No. and the API key from Anytime, head to the Account page within your Touch Stay account, go to the Integrations tab and click “Connect” underneath the Anytime logo. Paste your Account No. and API key into the boxes and click Save.
Step 2. Match Guides
Once authorised, you can match any existing Touch Stay guides to your Anytime units. Use the drop-downs to select the correct Anytime units for each Touch Stay guide. You can map multiple Anytime units to a single Touch Stay guide. When complete, click “Match Selected”. If you don’t have any to match, then just click “Skip”.
Step 3. Import Units
If you have any remaining unmatched units from Anytime then the next screen allows you to import those into Touch Stay. Simply check the ones you want to import and click the “Import Selected” button. If you don’t want to import any, or don’t have any remaining, then just click “Skip” whilst leaving the selections blank.
Touch Stay will import the following:
- Unit Name
- Unit Address
Each unit imported will create a new Touch Stay guide. If you want to link multiple units to a new guide then import one Anytime unit to generate the Touch Stay guide record and then go back through the matching step to link the additional units to the new guide.
Step 4. Check Your Content
Matching or importing rentals won’t automatically sync reservations from Anytime, so now is the time to check the content of your welcome books and make sure they’re in tip-top shape and ready to share with your guests.
If you’re new to Touch Stay then check out the Getting Started page for hints and tips on the quickest way to build out your welcome book content.
Step 5. Set up your Message Templates
To send out messages to guests from bookings that come from Anytime you’ll first need to create some message templates using Memo. The bookings from Anytime will then follow your message workflow and any default settings as defined by the templates that you create.
See the Memo help articles for how to add message templates and create a notification journey for your guests.
Step 6. Sync and Forget!
Once your welcome books are ready and Memo message templates are in place then you can start syncing with Anytime.
The sync settings can be found on the Integrations tab under the Settings option for Anytime, select “Reservation Sync Settings”.
Here you can choose whether to import all your future reservations or have Touch Stay only import new reservations. If you are new to Touch Stay then choose “All reservations”. If you are already a user of Touch Stay messaging before you connect your Anytime account, then it’s best to choose “New reservations only” to prevent duplicate reservations being imported.
Next, select the guides to start syncing by using the checkboxes (note the “Select All” option at the bottom left) and click Submit.
If you have selected “All reservations” then all your future dated bookings from Anytime will now be imported and will generate invitations and schedule email or SMS messages based on the booking details and your Touch Stay message templates. All future bookings for Anytime units matched to Touch Stay guides with the sync active will also now be imported automatically.
Sending invitation links to Anytime explained
When your Touch Stay and Anytime accounts are connected and you’re ready to start syncing reservations, you can optionally choose to send each invitation link back to Anytime for use in the Anytime messaging system, as well as using Memo (or instead of). This can be useful if you want to take advantage of the message triggers in Anytime and, for example, only send your guidebook link to guests after they have paid their deposit in full or signed your terms and conditions. If this sounds useful to you, then these are the steps to follow.
Activate the sync
Go to the Account page, then the Integrations tab and within the Settings menu for Anytime find the “Reservation Sync Settings” option.
Next, set the “Send links to Anytime” option to “Yes”. Select which guides are to have the sync active by marking the check boxes, note there’s a “Select All” option at the bottom left. Click Save when ready.
Add the Token to any relevant message templates in Anytime
The Touch Stay guide link has its own Token in the Anytime edit message screen called “TouchStay Guide Link”.
Wherever you place this Token in an Anytime message template it will be replaced by the link to your Touch Stay guide when the message is sent out.
Contact Anytime support if you need any help in creating message templates and using Tokens in Anytime.
WARNING: A note about Anytime message timing: there will be a slight delay between the booking arriving in Anytime and the link being sent back from Touch Stay whilst our respective systems process the booking, generate the link and pass it back. Therefore we recommend NOT adding your "Touch Stay Guide Link" custom field to Anytime messages that are sent out as soon as the booking is received. Instead, we recommend adding a message ~1 hour later or perhaps the next day that's dedicated to introducing guests to everything they'll find in your guide book.
What happens if I’m already using Memo? If you’re already using Memo, then when you activate the “Send links to Anytime” option (Step 2 above) we’ll send the link for all your future bookings to Anytime. Note that we won’t change any of your existing invitations in Touch Stay, so your Memo messages will all continue to send from Touch Stay as scheduled.
If you want to stop using Memo for future bookings then you would need to archive the relevant Memo message templates. This prevents them from being added to any future bookings that come in. See this article for more details about archiving your Memo message templates. Note that archiving message templates won’t affect any existing invitations, if you want to cancel any Memo messages that are already scheduled then that will need to be done manually by removing each message from the relevant invitation.
If you decide to stop using Memo for some, or all, of your messages, it will likely be easiest to transition away from using Memo and allow existing guest invitations to complete their Memo message journey, rather than deleting scheduled Memo messages and then trying to set up messages in Anytime to catch each guest at the correct point in their message journey.