Ask for marketing consent at the right moment

Most hotels are sitting on thousands of past guests they cannot message. The reason is rarely complicated: nobody ever asked for permission.

On WhatsApp that is not a grey area. Meta's own documentation is explicit: "Before messaging people on WhatsApp, businesses are required to obtain opt-in permission", and may only message people who have given their phone number and that permission (Get opt-in for WhatsApp, Meta for Developers, read 28 September 2026).

This post is about practice, not law. Your own data-protection obligations are a conversation for whoever advises you. What follows is how to build the habit, so that in a year you have a list you can use.

When to ask

• After a good stay. Right after checkout, and right after a positive feedback reply, guests are most likely to say yes. Someone who has just written "we loved it, thank you" is in a very different frame of mind. That moment already sits in the six messages a guest gets.
• During online check-in. Add a clear opt-in box to the form. The guest is already filling things in, and one extra question costs them a tap. Keep it short, because every extra field is somewhere a guest can drop off.
• Import what you already have: existing marketing lists, with their consent records. If you cannot find the record of how someone joined a list, treat that list as unusable.

The pattern behind all three: ask when the guest is already interacting with you and already feels good about it. Do not run a standalone "please consent" campaign. Asking permission by sending an unpermitted message is the wrong way round.

How to ask

Keep it honest and specific: "Would you like us to send you occasional offers and news on WhatsApp? You can stop anytime." One question, and one tap to answer.

Meta's opt-in guidance sets two requirements worth writing straight into your wording: businesses "must clearly state that a person is opting in to receive communication from the business", and "must clearly state the business's name that a person is opting in to receive messages from" (same page). So name the hotel, and say what you will send. "Updates" is not a description. "Occasional offers and news" is.

Three practical points:

• Use your own words. The question should sound like the hotel, not like a cookie banner.
• Make "no" easy. A visible "no thanks" next to "yes please" gets you a cleaner list than a question people can only ignore.
• Ask once per guest, not once per stay. A guest who declined last year does not need asking every visit.

What to record

The consent is only as good as the record of it. For each guest, keep:

• the answer, yes or no;
• the date;
• where it was asked: online check-in, post-stay message, front desk;
• the exact wording they saw, by version.

That last one is the one everybody skips and later wishes they had not. Keep old versions on file.

Why it matters

With consent, a guest list stops being an archive and becomes something you can work. You can run win-back campaigns at fixed intervals after a stay (300, 600 or 900 days, for example), or before the season a guest usually visits. Those are illustrations, not proven numbers. A city hotel and a seasonal country hotel will not share intervals, and you will only find yours by testing.

The seasonal version is the more interesting one. A guest who has come in the last week of October for three years running does not need a generic autumn offer in March. They need one message in late August.

There is also a cost argument. Marketing messages go out as approved templates, and you are only charged when a template message is delivered. From 1 October 2026 the replies are charged too: Meta starts charging per message for service messages, the free-form answers sent inside the 24-hour window, free since November 2024. Each business number gets 1,000 of them free a month, with no roll-over, and a number with no payment method on file stops delivering once that tier is gone. Sort your billing by 30 September 2026. (All read 28 September 2026.)

So a badly targeted campaign now costs twice: the template, and the conversation it starts. Send fewer, better-targeted messages.

Honour the exit

Meta's guidance asks businesses to "provide clear instructions for how people can opt out of receiving specific categories of messages" (opt-in page, as above). Treat that as the floor, not the target.

Guests who know they can stop anytime, including by simply telling the assistant "stop", trust the channel more. Make the opt-out work in plain language, not only through a link, and make it stick everywhere at once: the campaign tool, the property system, any export. Nothing damages a channel faster than someone who opted out and got messaged anyway.

And keep the categories separate. Someone who does not want offers may still very much want their booking confirmation and their arrival details.

What not to do

• Don't message past guests who never opted in "just once". There is no "just once". It is the message that teaches people to block you.
• Don't hide consent inside the booking terms. Consent buried in a checkbox is consent you will not want to rely on, and it produces a list that performs badly.
• Don't buy or borrow a list. Permission is not transferable.

What to do on Monday

1. Add the opt-in question to online check-in, in your own words, naming the hotel.
2. Add it to the post-stay flow, after a positive feedback reply.
3. Decide where the answer is stored, and check you can export "yes" and "no" separately.
4. Test the opt-out yourself, end to end, from a real phone.

Takeaway

Your guest list becomes a marketing asset the moment each guest has said yes, so ask at the moment they're happiest.