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How to Optimize the Guest Journey with WhatsApp Templates

This guide walks you through four practical ways to get more out of your guest journey: approving templates properly before they go live, segmenting templates by audience, excluding audiences where relevant, and converting marketing templates into utility templates to reduce cost and improve deliverability.

1. Build, approve, and only then add a template to the journey

Every message in the guest journey starts as a template, and templates should be fully finished and approved before they're ever linked into a live journey step.

The recommended order is:

  1. Create a new template rather than editing a live one directly. Editing live templates influences delivery because during the approval phase, it will not be delivered.
  2. Write the message content, keeping the tone and structure consistent with your other guest communications.
  3. Add the correct buttons underneath the message, matching the action you want the guest to take or the information you want the guest to read.
  4. Submit the template for approval and wait for it to be approved before doing anything else with it.
  5. Only after approval, add the template to the relevant step in the guest journey.

Adding a template to the journey before it's approved risks a broken or paused step if the template is rejected or sent back for changes. Treating "approved" as a hard gate before publishing keeps the live journey stable.

2. Build separate templates for different audiences

Instead of a single generic template, consider building multiple versions of the same message and pointing each one at a specific audience segment. Make sure you give them names so you can find them easily when building the guest journey. Common ways to segment include:

  • Room type – tailor the message to what the guest actually booked (e.g. a family room vs. a suite).
  • Rate plan – adjust tone or offers depending on whether the guest booked a flexible, non-refundable, or package rate.
  • Length of stay – a one-night booking and a week-long stay often warrant different messaging (e.g. late checkout offers make more sense for shorter stays).
  • Booking source – a direct booking and an OTA booking may call for different content or branding.

Segmenting this way lets each guest receive a message that's actually relevant to their booking, which tends to perform better than a one-size-fits-all template. Not every PMS supports all segements.

3. Exclude audiences from the journey entirely

Segmentation isn't only about sending a different version of a message — you can also exclude a segment from a journey step altogether. This is useful when a message genuinely doesn't apply to a group of guests (for example, skipping an upsell message for guests on a rate plan that already includes it, or skipping a step entirely for a specific booking source).

Excluding the wrong audience from a step is a common way unwanted messages reach guests, so it's worth double-checking your exclusion rules whenever you adjust a journey step or add a new segment. 

You can exclude a group by adding the right variant to the guest journey, and there you can deselect the "send message" toggle.

4. Convert a marketing template into a utility template

If you have an existing marketing template, you can have it rewritten into a utility template — for example, by using an AI tool to help reformulate the wording so it fits the utility category rather than the marketing one.

Why this matters: utility templates are typically cheaper to send and less likely to be affected by marketing-specific restrictions, so converting eligible templates can reduce cost and improve deliverability.

Important: the conversion has to be genuine, not just a rewording that avoids marketing language. WhatsApp's utility category is meant for transactional, account-related, or service messages tied to a specific booking or interaction — not promotional content. Meta reviews the category during template approval, so a rewritten template still needs to be submitted for approval like any other template (see step 1), and it can be rejected or re-categorized if the content doesn't genuinely qualify as utility.