Guardrails and usage limits — Help

What this covers

What stops the assistant giving away a guest's details or booking something impossible, and what happens when your monthly allowance runs out. Worth reading so you can explain it to a guest on the phone.

Identity checks before touching a booking

Anyone can claim to be anyone in a chat window, so before the assistant will look up, change or cancel a booking, the guest must give:

their email address, and
at least two more details that match, from: first name, phone number, the booking date, the booking time, or the party size.

Two details must be supplied and two must actually match. If not, the assistant replies: "To protect your privacy, please also provide at least two of: your name, phone number, reservation date, time, or party size."

This is enforced in the system itself, not merely suggested to the assistant — so it cannot be talked out of it.

Expect the occasional frustrated caller who could not get past this. It is the right trade: without it, anyone with your guest's email address could read or cancel their booking. Take the booking change yourself over the phone.

Other limits

Only future, live bookings can be changed or cancelled — not past ones, and not already-cancelled ones.
Availability is always re-checked against the live engine before a change is saved. The assistant is never trusted to remember what was free a minute ago.
Menu answers only appear if your plan includes the digital menu.
It cannot reach anything else in Tabledoo — not your reports, your staff, your settings or other guests.

Your monthly allowance

Your plan includes a monthly amount of assistant conversation. When it is used up, the bubble stops answering until the month rolls over — your booking page, phone and everything else carry on untouched.

If you are running out regularly, either your assistant is doing a lot of useful work (in which case a bigger plan is cheap compared with the phone calls) or something is looping. You can see your usage on request from support.

What happens to the conversations

Chats are deleted after 90 days, automatically. Guests type real details into chat windows, so they are not kept indefinitely.
Bookings made in chat are permanent, exactly like any other booking — it is the conversation that is discarded, not the reservation.

What to tell your team

The assistant can book, change and cancel — so a guest may arrive having never spoken to anyone.
Its bookings appear in Reservations like any other, labelled as coming from the chatbot.
If a guest says the assistant would not help them, it is almost always the identity check. Handle it yourself and reassure them it is a privacy protection, not a fault.