Create and send recommendations

Recommendations allow you to send customers a pre-built basket, with a personal message ready to book. They are ideal for customers you have direct contact with already or if you have people enquiring about your products and you want to create a bespoke booking ready for them to purchase.

Some good uses of recommendations include:

• You receive a direct enquiry about an experience and you want to reply with a custom quote.
• After talking to a customer on Live Chat about your experiences, you want to get them to book right then and there.
• You have a customer who is slightly nervous about booking a large trip and want to give them a more personal touch when booking.
• You have a customer who is unsure about booking and you want to drive urgency by recommending a package of experiences for.
• You want to offer a special package of experiences to an individual customer.
• You want to put together a high-value, bespoke booking for a larger party or corporate booking.
• You want to up-sell a customer in to purchasing extras or another experience.

How to create and send recommendations

1. In your dashboard, go to Bookings > Recommendations, and click New Recommendation. 
2. Fill in the details of your recommendation:
   • Recommendation title
   • Customer email address
   • Personalised message - note that your message is limited to 1200 characters. (optional)
   • Guest count (optional)
   • Expiry date (optional)
   • Image (leave blank to display hero image of selected experience)
3. (Optional) Add custom terms and conditions.
   • When this is used, the recommendation terms will replace the standard terms stored for your company. This is useful for adding terms and conditions specific to the bespoke booking.
4. Click Save.
5. The recommendation has now been created into an empty pending booking which you can edit in the same way as a regular booking.
   • Note: Bookings created as part of a recommendation have no lead booker/user account tied to them until the customer logs into their account via the recommendation link or books the recommendation.
6. By default, the assignee is the person who created the recommendation. If another member of your team should manage the recommendation, you can change the Assignee.
7. Click View booking > Edit booking to add items to the recommendation. Choose an experience, accommodation, or package from the list. You can add as many products as you like.
8. Once you have finished adding items to the booking, click Update booking.
9. Hit Confirm.
10. When you're ready to send the recommendation, click View (under the recommendation settings), copy the Share link and paste it in an email or message to your customer.

Recommendations will allocate the necessary stock or resources required to provide the experience in the recommendation. This ensures that it remains bookable for your customer and that you don't overbook. As an example, if you have one stock remaining for a variant and you create a recommendation with it, the variant will be marked as sold out. 

After you've sent the recommendation, keep track of the status of your recommendation under Bookings > Recommendations. You can also see when a customer has opened, viewed, and booked your recommendation.

• You can search for recommendations by customer name and email.
• You can filter the list by assignee.
• Under the Bookings > All Bookings view, there is now a Sales Channel column to identify the source of the booking such as Online store, Platform, or Recommendation.