We know that no-shows and late cancellations are a massive problem for the hospitality industry, resulting in substantial financial losses each year. To help mitigate some of these losses, we have introduced SMS Reminders.
SMS Reminders is a feature that helps protect against no-shows by giving you the option to set up automated reminders for upcoming bookings. These automated reminders are sent to guests, asking them to reply by either confirming or cancelling their booking, allowing you to free up a table and accept new bookings if necessary. The SMS reminders are fully customisable & can be setup to be sent 12, 24, 36 or 48 hours prior to the booking.
In this article:
How to set up SMS Reminders
First, log in to your Dojo Bookings account.
- Go into Settings on the right hand side & select Guest Communications. You should now see a tab for SMS on the top of the page.
- Enable SMS reminders by ticking the checkbox. If you no longer want to send SMS reminders, you can disable this feature here by unticking the checkbox.
- Define how long before a booking the guest will notified by SMS. This can be done in minutes, hours or days.
- Once you are happy with your selection, hit Save.
What will this look like for my guests?
Depending on how far in advance you have set your SMS reminder, your guest will receive a message before their upcoming booking which will look the same as shown in the picture below. The only difference would be that it would include the name of your restaurant instead of 'Consumer2'.
The SMS reminder will then ask the guest to respond by selecting 1 to confirm the booking or 5 to cancel. After the guest has responded, a follow up message will then be sent acknowledging their response & it will provide full confirmation the booking is either going ahead as scheduled or if it's been cancelled.