Forward Booking Emails from Gmail to Airflow
For most hosts, the booking arrives the same way every time: a confirmation email lands in Gmail. Airbnb, Booking.com, VRBO, Expedia, a direct enquiry — they all funnel into one inbox. The trouble is what happens next, which is usually you reading it, copying the details somewhere, and updating a calendar.
Airflow turns that confirmation into a structured booking record. There are two ways to feed it from Gmail, and you can use both at once.
Option one: forward an email
Every resource you create in Airflow gets its own unique email address. When a booking confirmation lands in Gmail, forward it to that address. That’s the whole setup — no API keys, no developer.
Once it arrives, Airflow reads the email and pulls out the details:
- Guest — name, contact, number of guests
- Dates — check-in, check-out, nights
- Pricing — total, fees and currency
- The property — matched to the right resource
A booking record appears in your portal, ready to invoice and reconcile. If you manage several properties, forward each confirmation to that property’s address and everything files itself in the right place.
This is the quickest way to start, and it works from any device. Open Gmail, hit forward, done.
Option two: connect Gmail directly
If you’d rather not forward anything, connect your Gmail account and let Airflow watch the inbox for you. It scans for unread emails from known OTA senders, routes them through the same extraction flow, and marks them as processed so nothing gets handled twice.
You can run both methods together: automatic scanning on your main inbox, plus manual forwarding for the odd booking that arrives somewhere else — a personal address, a co-host’s inbox, a screenshot from a guest. Nothing slips through.
A Gmail tip: filter and auto-forward
If you’d like to be fully hands-off without connecting your account, Gmail’s own filters can help. Create a filter for messages from your OTA senders and set it to forward to your resource’s Airflow address automatically. New confirmations then flow straight through while you carry on with your day.
That said, the direct connection is simpler and catches more, so most hosts use that rather than maintaining filters.
What gets logged, and what doesn’t
Not every email is a booking, and Airflow knows the difference. Confirmations become records. Review notifications are tagged separately. General enquiries are processed but don’t create a phantom booking. A receipt or a newsletter you forward by mistake won’t turn into junk on your calendar.
This matters because the whole point is trust: if you’re going to stop reading every confirmation by hand, the system has to be right about what is and isn’t a booking.
Why this is the foundation
Email forwarding is the core of how Airflow works. Once a booking is in, everything downstream follows — the invoice drafts in your accounting software, the payout reconciles when it arrives, and the guest record is ready for messaging. For the full picture of what happens after a forward, read How Booking Email Forwarding Works.
To set it up across all your properties, see automation and workflows, or get started.