When an automation doesn't send, it's usually one of a handful of things. Work through these in order — the first two account for most cases.
If the message eventually arrived and you're wondering why it took a few minutes, this is expected behavior for anything driven by your PMS.
Triggers that depend on your PMS — New Reservation Created, Reservation Status Change, Check-in and Check-out Upcoming, and Online Check-in Completed — fire when the change reaches Hello Hotel from Mews. Most of the time Mews sends a webhook and that happens within seconds. If a webhook is missed, a background job runs every 5 minutes and picks up whatever is outstanding, so the automation fires on that next pass instead. Mews can also take a moment to send the webhook in the first place.
So a PMS-driven automation normally runs within seconds, and occasionally takes a few minutes. See Understanding Mews Data Sync for how sync timing works.
Triggers that don't involve your PMS — like Inbound Message and Guest Tag Added — aren't affected by this. They run on events inside Hello Hotel.
If an automation is consistently taking much longer than 5 minutes, that's worth reporting.
An automation only runs while it's active. Open the automation and confirm it's enabled, not paused or still in draft.
Triggers are more specific than they first appear:
New Reservation Created fires once per reservation, when a *confirmed* reservation appears for the first time. A reservation that was already in Mews before you connected won't trigger it, and a status change on an existing reservation won't either.
Reservation Status Change fires on a transition from one status to another — not on a reservation simply existing in a given status.
Online Check-in Completed fires once per reservation, and only inside your configured daily send window.
Conditions are evaluated when the automation reaches that step, not when the trigger fires — so a guest whose data changed in between may no longer match. If a condition reads from your PMS (Stay & Reservation, Room Status, Payment & Billing, Identity & Compliance, Booking Channel, Booking Source, Reservation Date), it's read live from Mews at that moment.
See Using Conditions for what each condition checks.
Workflows using PMS-based conditions show a Needs PMS badge until a PMS is connected, and won't run those steps without one.
Guests without a phone number in Mews never reach Hello Hotel at all, so nothing can send to them. See Contacts Not Syncing from Mews.
Some triggers deliberately fire only once per reservation. Online Check-in Completed is the clearest example — if a guest completes online check-in twice, or the reservation is modified afterward, the automation won't send a second time.
If one guest didn't get a message that everyone else got, check whether that guest had already triggered the same automation earlier in their stay.
If your automation includes a delay, it will show as Waiting in the execution log until the delay completes. That's normal, not stuck.
Two things to know about delays:
A "Until time of day" delay whose time has already passed today waits until that time tomorrow. A trigger at 10:00 PM with a delay until 9:00 AM holds overnight.
Delays survive restarts — a waiting automation picks up where it left off.
See Using Delays.
If you've worked through the above and an automation still isn't behaving, use the chat widget in the app, in this help center, or on hellohotel.co, or email us at [email protected]. Tell us the automation name, the guest or reservation involved, and roughly when you expected it to run — that's usually enough for us to trace it.
