Messaging: confirmations and reminders

Choose what goes out

1. On an Office tablet, open Settings › Messaging.
2. Under What goes out, tick each email you want guests to get, and untick the ones you do not.
3. In Reminder, hours before, type how many hours before the booking the reminder goes out. The box takes 12 to 72 hours.
4. Set Quiet hours from and Quiet hours until. A reminder due inside those hours waits until they end, and never goes earlier.
5. Press Save.

What each email does

Each box under What goes out decides one email. All of them are ticked when your restaurant starts.

• Confirmation: goes out the moment a booking is made.
• Reminder: goes out before the booking, at the time you set.
• Cancellation: goes out when a booking is cancelled, including the bookings you cancel by closing a day.
• Booking changed: goes out when the time or the number of guests changes. A new table alone sends nothing, since the guest’s emails never name a table.
• The reminder asks the guest to confirm, on every plan but Free: the reminder’s subject and first line, and the page of their booking, ask the guest to confirm they are coming, instead of only reminding them. Its Confirm I'm coming button is there either way. A booking already confirmed gets a plain reminder, with no button. On Free the box is greyed, and the reminder has no such button.

Emails with no box here

• The waiting list and table alert emails follow their own switches in Settings › Guests & lists.
• On Pro and Enterprise, a message your staff write to a guest from a booking always goes.
• The email asking a guest to confirm their address for a table alert, the email saying a table alert is on, and the warning sent before an unconfirmed table is released, always go.
• A booking with no email address gets no email at all.
• A guest’s unsubscribe stops only the kind of email it came in: the reminder, or table alerts. Everything else still reaches them. Only an address that bounced or marked your email as spam gets nothing more.

Read an email before your guests do

Under each box, press See what the guest reads. The email opens as it will arrive, with your restaurant’s name and details in it, and nothing is sent. It works under a greyed box too, so you can read what another plan would send.

If your booking page is in more than one language, the preview opens in your page’s main language and lets you choose another at the top.

Languages, and what cannot be changed

Each email goes out in the language of its booking: the one the guest booked in on your page. A booking taken in the office goes out in the language the office is shown in.

The wording of every email is written for you, in English, French and Arabic, and cannot be edited. The name guests see is your restaurant’s name, from Settings › General. The address the emails come from is shown under Sending: it is set for your restaurant and cannot be changed.

Where replies go

1. Under Where replies go, type the inbox you read in Reply address.
2. Press Verify. That inbox receives an email with a link.
3. Click the link. The badge moves from Waiting for the click to Verified, and replies from guests land in that inbox.

Until the link is clicked, emails go out with no reply address, and a guest’s reply bounces.

Mail that did not arrive

Mail that did not arrive lists what went wrong on its way to a guest, newest first, each with its reason, under four tabs: Failed, Bounced, Marked as spam and Held back. The thirty most recent are shown.

Where sending again can work, the row has Send it again. It is greyed where it cannot, for example for an address that bounced or marked your email as spam: reach that guest by phone.