10 Zapier and Make Recipes That Quietly Run My Hotel's Marketing Stack

I run a small agency, not a hotel, but I am wired like an operator. The single biggest thing I have learned watching independent hoteliers work is this: you are not losing to the OTAs because your marketing is bad. You are losing because you are buried. Front desk, housekeeping, payroll, the leaky ice machine, the OTA extranet, the seventeen browser tabs. Marketing is the thing that gets done at 11pm or not at all.

So this post is not about strategy. It is about plumbing. Specifically, the ten no-code automations I set up first when a hotel client wants their marketing stack to stop leaking. These run in Zapier or Make (formerly Integromat), they connect your PMS, CRM, email tool and Slack, and once they are live they do their job silently forever. I will give you the exact trigger-action map for each one so you can copy it.

A note before we start: none of this ranks your hotel by itself. Automation is leverage, not magic. But every hour you claw back from copy-pasting is an hour you can put into the work that actually moves rankings and wins back direct bookings. That is the whole game.

Zapier or Make? The two-minute answer

People agonize over this. Do not.

Zapier is the easier on-ramp. More native app connectors, friendlier interface, you will have your first automation running in fifteen minutes. It gets pricey as your task volume climbs.

Make is cheaper per operation and far more powerful once you want branching logic, loops, or to massage data mid-flow. The canvas-style editor has a steeper learning curve but you will not outgrow it.

My honest rule: start on Zapier if you have never built an automation in your life. Move to Make when the bill annoys you or you hit something Zapier cannot do. Most of the recipes below work identically on either; I will use generic “trigger / action” language so it does not matter which you pick.

The 10 recipes

1. New booking lands in your PMS to CRM contact

The foundation. Every guest who books should exist in your CRM as a contact, automatically, with the data you will need for email later.

• Trigger: New reservation in PMS (webhook or native connector)
• Action 1: Create or update contact in CRM (name, email, arrival date, room type, booking source)
• Action 2: Tag the contact with the booking channel so you can tell direct from OTA later

That source tag matters more than anything else here. Once you can segment “booked direct” from “came through an OTA,” every downstream email gets smarter, and you can start running the book-direct math on your own list.

2. New review (any platform) to Slack alert

You cannot respond fast to reviews you do not see. Reviews influence both human guests and, increasingly, the AI assistants people now ask for hotel recommendations.

• Trigger: New review detected (Google, Tripadvisor, or your review aggregator’s webhook)
• Action 1: Post to a dedicated #reviews Slack channel with star rating, text and a direct reply link
• Action 2 (optional): If rating is 3 stars or below, also @mention the GM

A four-star average that gets answered beats a four-point-three that gets ignored. Reputation is a ranking and a reputation signal, which is why I treat it as an active discipline, not a passive one.

3. Website enquiry to spreadsheet plus email reply

Every “do you have availability for August?” form fill is a lead you are probably losing to slow replies.

• Trigger: New form submission on your site
• Action 1: Add a row to a Google Sheet (timestamp, name, dates requested, message)
• Action 2: Send an instant branded auto-reply so the guest knows a human is coming
• Action 3: Post the lead to a #leads Slack channel

The spreadsheet is your safety net and your reporting layer in one. The instant reply is what stops the guest from opening Booking.com while they wait for you.

4. Abandoned booking to follow-up nudge

If your booking engine fires a webhook when someone starts but does not finish a reservation, this one is gold for direct conversion.

• Trigger: Abandoned booking event from your engine
• Action 1: Wait two hours (built-in delay step)
• Action 2: Send a gentle “your room is still available” email with a direct link back to their dates

Keep it human and low-pressure. One nudge, not a five-email guilt campaign. The goal is to recover a booking you already half-earned before the guest drifts to an OTA.

5. Checkout complete to review request

The highest-intent moment to ask for a review is right after a great stay.

• Trigger: Reservation status changes to “checked out” in PMS
• Action 1: Wait one day (so they are home, not packing)
• Action 2: Send a personal-feeling review request email with one obvious link

Timing is everything. Ask while the towels were still fluffy in their memory. This single recipe quietly compounds into the review velocity that helps your Google Business Profile do its job.

6. New direct booker to welcome and pre-arrival sequence

Direct bookers are your most valuable guests. Treat them like it.

• Trigger: New contact in CRM tagged “direct”
• Action 1: Add to a “Direct Guests” email sequence (welcome, local tips, upsell, pre-arrival)
• Action 2: Increment a loyalty or points field if you run one

OTA guests are technically not yours to email freely; direct guests are. This recipe is how you turn the relationship you paid nothing in commission for into a repeat-booking machine over time.

7. Daily arrivals digest to Slack every morning

A small one that the whole team loves.

• Trigger: Schedule, every day at 6am
• Action 1: Pull today’s arrivals from PMS
• Action 2: Format and post a tidy list to #front-desk Slack (name, room, special requests, VIP flag)

No more crowding around one screen at handover. Everyone sees the day at a glance.

8. Negative review to task plus owner email

Bad reviews are operational signals, not just PR problems.

• Trigger: New review with rating at or below 2 stars
• Action 1: Create a task in your project tool (Asana, Trello, ClickUp) assigned to the GM
• Action 2: Email the owner a heads-up with the review text

This closes the loop so a real problem (cold breakfast, slow check-in) gets fixed, not just apologized for. The fix is what stops the next ten reviews from saying the same thing.

9. New blog post to multi-channel distribution

If you are publishing content as part of your SEO and AI-visibility work, do not let it just sit on the site.

• Trigger: New item in your blog’s RSS feed
• Action 1: Draft a social post (Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn) via the relevant connector
• Action 2: Add it to your email newsletter queue
• Action 3: Notify the team in Slack to share it

Content gets the eyeballs you distribute it to. The publish button is the start of the work, not the end.

10. Booking source weekly roll-up to your inbox

The reporting recipe that keeps you honest about your OTA mix.

• Trigger: Schedule, every Monday at 8am
• Action 1: Read the week’s bookings from your tracking sheet (fed by recipe 1)
• Action 2: Count by source, calculate direct vs OTA percentage
• Action 3: Email yourself the summary

Watching that direct-share number tick up week over week is the single best motivator I know for staying invested in your own marketing. It also tells you, in plain numbers, whether your efforts to reduce OTA dependence are actually working.

A quick reference table

Here is the whole stack in one view so you can pick your first three.

How to actually roll this out without breaking things

Do not build all ten in a weekend. You will burn out and you will trust nothing.

Build one recipe. Run it live for a week. Make sure it does exactly what you think it does, including the edge cases, before you build the next one. Boring, sequential, reliable. That is how automation stops being a science project and starts being infrastructure.

A few hard-won lessons:

• Use a test contact first. Run every email recipe against your own address before a real guest ever sees it. One mis-merged “Hi [FirstName]” email teaches you this once.
• Add delay steps generously. A review request that fires the second someone checks out feels robotic. The one-day wait in recipe 5 is doing real work.
• Pass only the data you need. You are moving guest personal information through a third party. Map the minimum fields, keep your connected accounts secured, and make sure your privacy policy covers automated processing.
• Watch your task or operation count. Both platforms bill on volume. Recipe 7 firing once a day is cheap; a recipe that loops over every line item of every booking can quietly chew through your plan. Check the run history.
• Name your recipes clearly. “Zap 14” tells you nothing at 9pm when something breaks. “PMS booking to CRM contact” tells you everything.

The honest bottom line

None of these ten recipes will get your hotel ranking. I want to be straight about that, because the internet is full of people implying that the right tool stack is a growth hack. It is not. Rankings come from genuinely useful content, a clean technical site, real reviews, local relevance and authority earned over time.

What automation does is remove the excuse. When your bookings file themselves, your reviews alert themselves, and your leads reply to themselves, you suddenly have the hours back to do the work that does move the needle. You stop being buried. And a hotelier who is not buried is a hotelier who can actually compete for their own name, reduce their reliance on the OTAs, and win back a healthier share of direct bookings.

If you want help wiring this up alongside the SEO and AI-visibility work that it is meant to support, that is exactly what we do. Book a call and we will map your stack, find the three recipes that will save you the most time first, and connect them to a marketing plan that actually grows direct revenue. Or if you would rather see where your booking-engine conversion is leaking before you automate anything, start with our book-direct conversion work.