We've made some changes to the way you can manage guests in Caterbook.
Booking > Guest records screen.
The two different pop-ups for managing Guest "Details" and "Bookings" have been merged into a single screen with two tabs.
Launched by clicking the 'person' icon, any guest associated with multiple bookings also has a tick on this icon.
We've added three new optional statuses that you can use to tag guests for specific scenarios, and which appear in various workflows.
- VIP - for customers you might want to pay special attention to.
- No-show - as it says, any guest who has had a booking marked as a no-show will automatically have this status tagged to their profile (except where one of the other two statuses has already been set).
- Red flag - this is specifically for guests who you may not want to rebook with you due to a prior incident.
An existing status can be changed, or removed completely, using the (x) on the drop-down.
Once a status is set, we then colour code any advisories on subsequent screens as follows:
- VIP = green
- No show = yellow
- Red flag = red
Repeat guests.
Firstly, a quick reminder of how we identify a repeat guest.
As an example, a second booking being made in the name of "John Smith" would need more information to match it with than just First name + Second name (in order to be 'suggested'). One, or more, of Email, Telephone, Address 1 or Postcode would need to be present in both the first booking and the new one being created.
Please bear in mind the difficulty with matching OTA guests. These frequently have a temporary, booking specific OTA email address, rather than the guest's own email - for example jsmith12345@guest.booking.com. If you can, you should encourage staff to update OTA bookings on arrival with the guest's own contact information.
Merging guest records.
As a reminder, from the Guest records screen you can search by name and select which guest 'instances' you want to merge. A blue 'Merge guests' button will appear:
You'll then click to choose which existing record to 'keep' and merge the others into:
Where you'll see the new statuses.
As above, you'll see our newly merged guest with 3 bookings shows as a VIP (green icon) on the Guest records screen.
On creating a 'New booking' from the menu or the Calendar screen, if you 'Search guests', any status is highlighted with the relevant colour in the suggested results:
If this step was skipped, on adding the guest (again, in both New and Calendar bookings) you'll see this highlighted in the suggestion pop up if there's a match:
In the booking record, you'll now see any status that's been set for this guest above the booking notes, and if they are a returning guest, some additional information about the number of visits and last date of arrival:
And on the 'Guests' tab, in the row for the lead guest is an icon linking back to their guest profile, making it easy to view past bookings and update any status flags.
Finally, if a guest with a status set makes a website booking (assuming we can match their profile), you'll get both an alert on the Dashboard screen and an email to the property advising you of this, so that staff can make a decision about how to proceed: