Guest invitation at booking or check-in
Invite an unlinked guest so their stay is credited to their Journey membership.
When a guest stays with you but is not linked to a Journey member, the stay's points sit in escrow rather than landing in a wallet. This pattern closes that gap at the moment you have the guest's attention — at booking, or at the desk.
The sequence
Find unlinked stays
GET /v1/partner/reservations with the memberLinked filter to isolate
guests who are not yet linked to a member.
Send the invite
The vguests guest-invite endpoint sends by email or SMS. You supply
the channel, the contact value, the originating app, and the brand, venue
and reservation context.
The guest claims
The guest follows the link, and linking assigns the stay to their membership.
Timing matters
An unlinked stay's escrowed points expire after a 30-day claim window. Invite early. An invite sent after the window has closed will still link the guest, but the points from that stay are gone.
- SMS links are short-lived — about an hour. Send SMS when the guest is in front of you, not as part of an overnight batch.
- The public invite-send route is rate limited. It is designed for interactive use, not bulk sending. Handle 429 with backoff.
How linking actually decides
Understanding this saves a lot of "why didn't it link" tickets:
- The reservation's guest email or phone is matched against the member's verified contacts — unverified contacts do not count.
- If a contact matches, the name is then compared with fuzzy matching.
- Outcomes are auto-link (contact and name both match), queued for human review (name mismatch, or phone and email point at different members), or no link.
Linking is re-evaluated at several points, not just at import: when a member verifies a new contact, when a guest follows a claim link, when they claim by id, and when an administrator resolves a queued case. A stay that did not link on day one can still link later.
Scopes and PII
Guest invites touch personal data, so they require the guest PII permission in addition to the general guest read permission. Without it, the guest contact fields you need will be masked.
Partners do not configure member messaging. Journey sends member-facing notifications; the invite endpoint is the transactional exception you trigger directly.