Email Notifications

Josh Astor

In addition to scheduled notifications, it would be helpful to be able to create notifications that are triggered manually by the user. These would be for issues such as queries to customers for further information as to their requirements. The need for these to only be triggered manually is that in some cases, the customers provide full information with their booking, and in some cases they don't. Only the last group need a follow up, which would annoy the first group if it was sent out automatically.

Josh Astor

Yes that works. but it requires a change of status. The problem with that is that the status would have to then be put back to, say, "FULLY PAID", which would then trigger an inappropriate email thanking them for a new payment that they had not in fact paid. OK, we could ask the 17 year old girl on the desk to go into the config area and disable the "FULLY PAID" automatic notification first, then change the status of the booking, then go back in and re-enable it.

But I think you can see the problems with that. Time consuming and fraught with risk. What if she forgets to re-enable?

Josh

checkfront_aaron

Hi Josh,

When statuses are changed manually in Checkfront, you are first greeted with a pop-up window asking for more options which include "Send email notification for this status". You can choose not to send the email notification by unchecking the box beside it (see here: http://screencast.com/t/MfICMywkSYN).

This should help you to decide whether or not to send notifications when statuses change.

Cheers,

Josh Astor

OK that's good. We'll do that then. Thanks.

Ashincabo

I agree with you Josh, there needs to be a better way.  I have unfortunately had the bad experience on several occasions the need to provide a partial refund to a client.  To do this, I need to manually change to deposit, then make the refund, then the system automatically triggers the paid message when I make the change to the invoice.
When I forget, the system send the Deposit message, plus the paid message when I make the change to the invoice.

Not ideal.

checkfront_aaron

Hi Ashin,

I understand your concern for the issue in regards to refunds going to deposit status and does not give you the same notification as to when manually changing the status. I'll create a feature request/update with our dev team to make sure you have full control when you want to send notifications.

Let me know if you have any further questions.

Cheers,

TurismoCaNica

Josh...We are having the same problem with issuing partial or full refunds (Usually a result of a client Canceling a reservation so the Status has already been set to CANCEL as a result of the client action.  When we issue the POS Refund the system then sets the status back to Reserved or Deposit and sends out the email notification automatically saying thanks for the deposit or reservation...bad bad bad.

And we are not going to turn off notifications for the same reason as you said. I do have another thread in the forum but unfortunately no clear answers from support yet. Refunds (full or partial) are a way of life in the hotel (and retail in general) so it is unfortunate that this workflow seems to have been missed completely from the system.

harryha

I think it would be great to have manual notifications for the user to use.

Also think it would be handy to have the ability to select a specific time of day when notifications are sent as I have noticed notifications are sent out around the same time when the booking was made.