Why SMS deserves a real strategy, not an afterthought
Email open rates for hospitality businesses typically sit somewhere between 15-25%. SMS open rates routinely exceed 90%, and most of those opens happen within three minutes of the message landing. That gap is why SMS has become one of the highest-leverage channels available to restaurants, cafes and hotels — but it's also exactly why getting it wrong is so costly. A text message is more intimate than an email. Send too many, send irrelevant ones, or send them without proper consent, and you don't just lose a subscriber, you damage the relationship and risk a real compliance problem.
Start with consent, not with the list
In Canada, SMS marketing falls under CASL — Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation — which applies to commercial electronic messages including text. CASL requires either express consent (the person actively opted in, ideally with a timestamp and record of how) or, in narrower cases, implied consent from an existing business relationship. Every message needs to clearly identify who's sending it and include a straightforward way to opt out, and that opt-out needs to actually work immediately, not "within 10 business days" the way some legacy systems handle it.
The practical implication: build your SMS list deliberately. In-venue sign-up with a clear description of what subscribers will receive, a checkbox at checkout or on your reservation platform, or a dedicated keyword-to-join system are all legitimate ways to build consent. Buying or scraping a list, or opting people in automatically because they gave you a phone number for a reservation, is not compliant and exposes the business to real regulatory risk.
Message frequency: the line between valuable and annoying
There's no legal cap on how often you can text a consenting subscriber, but there's a very real practical one. Most hospitality businesses find the sweet spot is somewhere between two and four messages a month — enough to stay top of mind and communicate genuinely useful things, not so much that subscribers start associating your name with an unwanted interruption. Every message should earn its place in someone's inbox. If you're texting weekly "just to stay in touch," you're training people to opt out.
The highest-value use cases, ranked
Not every SMS use case delivers equal value. Based on what actually moves the needle for hospitality businesses, here's a rough order of priority:
- Reservation reminders. A text two to three hours before a booking meaningfully reduces no-shows, with almost zero downside — people generally appreciate the reminder.
- Last-minute cancellation alerts. When a table or room opens up unexpectedly, an instant text to a loyalty segment can fill it within the hour.
- VIP or loyalty-tier offers. Reserved for your best customers, these feel like a genuine perk rather than a blast promotion.
- Time-sensitive event or seasonal promotion. A limited-run menu item or an event with real urgency justifies the interruption.
- General newsletters or "check us out" messages. These are the lowest-value use case for SMS and are usually better handled by email, where the expectation for lower-urgency content is already set.
Write for the format, not like an email
SMS has no subject line and very little patience for preamble. The first line needs to communicate the entire point of the message — what's happening, and what the reader should do. "Hi! We hope you're having a great week, we wanted to reach out about..." wastes precious attention that a text message doesn't have to spare. Lead with the offer or information, keep the message under 160 characters where possible, and include one clear call to action, not several competing ones.
Segment before you send
Not every subscriber deserves the same message. A guest who visits weekly and a guest who signed up once and never returned are different audiences with different needs — the first wants VIP-tier recognition, the second might need a genuine win-back incentive. Basic segmentation by visit frequency, spend level, or how recently someone engaged turns a blunt broadcast list into something closer to a personal outreach, and it measurably improves both engagement and unsubscribe rates.
Automate the reminders, personalize the offers
Reservation reminders and cancellation alerts are the easiest wins to automate — connect your SMS platform to your reservation or booking system and let trigger-based messages fire without manual work. Save the manual, personalized touch for higher-value moments: a birthday message, a genuine thank-you after a big event, or an invite reserved for your top-tier guests. The mix of "reliable automation for operational messages" and "human touch for relationship messages" is what makes an SMS program feel considerate rather than robotic.
Measure what actually matters
Open rate is nearly always high with SMS, so it's not the metric that tells you much. Track redemption rate on offers, opt-out rate per campaign (a spike tells you a message missed the mark), and — most importantly — revenue or bookings directly attributable to SMS campaigns. If a campaign type consistently produces high opt-outs relative to redemptions, retire it rather than repeating the mistake.
The bottom line
SMS is one of the most effective channels available to hospitality businesses precisely because it's rarely used well. A short list of genuinely useful, properly consented, well-timed messages will outperform a large list of generic blasts every time — and it'll keep your subscriber base intact instead of hemorrhaging opt-outs. Build the list right, respect the format, and use it for what it's actually good at: immediate, relevant, time-sensitive communication.