Smoobu rebuilt message templates, and hosts can now send from their own domain

Smoobu has rebuilt its message templates from scratch. The company says the old version was short on flexibility and automation, and hosts told them so. The replacement went live on 20 October.

The headline change is the sending identity. Hosts can now send guest messages from their own domain using custom SMTP, including through services like Brevo, and the reply alias on host.smoobu.com can be customised. Guest email that looks like it came from the property rather than from the software is a small thing that matters for a direct-booking business.

What else changed

Timing and triggers got more room. Messages can be scheduled up to 30 days either side of a trigger, rather than the tighter window before. There is a new Add-on Purchase trigger that fires when a guest buys something from the Guest Guide, which makes upsell follow-ups possible without manual work. The online check-in trigger now also recognises Chekin and Stellar forms.

Sending conditions are new and they are the most useful addition for anyone running a lot of properties. A template can be restricted to paid or unpaid bookings, to guests who have or have not finished online check-in, or to stays longer than a set number of nights. That removes a familiar problem, which is sending a door-code message to somebody who has not paid.

Translation is now one click into ten languages, with a daily cap of 30,000 characters. Hosts can set a fallback language for guests whose own language is not covered.

The dashboard is easier to work in. Templates sort by stage of the guest journey and filter by property, trigger and channel, and the language flags, channels and extra recipients are visible without opening each one. Templates duplicate in a click. CC and BCC have been merged into a single Additional Recipients field that takes up to ten BCC addresses.

Attachments arrived too: up to five PDF, JPG or PNG files per template.

The limits to read before you plan around it

Attachments are capped at 1MB per file. That is tight. A house manual with photographs or a signed rental agreement will often not fit, so this is suited to a short arrival sheet rather than real documents.

More significantly, attachments do not work on Airbnb at all, and the HTML editor switches itself off for Airbnb, Booking.com and Vrbo. That is the OTAs' doing rather than Smoobu's, but the practical effect is that the richer half of this release applies to your own email traffic and not to guests who booked through a major channel. If most of your bookings arrive via Airbnb, you are getting the conditional rules and the scheduling improvements, not the formatting and the attachments.

The 30,000 character daily translation limit is generous for a handful of properties and restrictive for a large multilingual portfolio doing a bulk rewrite.

Smoobu also does not say which subscription tiers include any of this, so hosts on lower plans should check before building a workflow on top of it. And there is no migration note in the announcement, which presumably means existing templates carry across untouched, but Smoobu has not confirmed it. Worth opening a few of your live templates and checking the triggers survived before the next arrival.

Coming next

Smoobu has flagged template previews, a WhatsApp integration, bulk one-off sends and wider AI translation with suggested replies. The WhatsApp piece is the one to watch, since it is where a lot of guest conversation actually happens and it would route around the OTA messaging restrictions that limit this release.