Reservation reminders
What this covers
The reminder sent before a booking: how to choose its timing, which bookings get one, and how it
behaves across email and SMS. Requires the manage-settings permission (Owner or
Manager).
Of everything Tabledoo sends, this is the message that pays for itself. A guest who booked three weeks ago and forgot is a no-show; the same guest reminded the day before either turns up or cancels, and a cancellation you know about is a table you can resell.
Setting the timing
On Property Settings → Notifications, set Reminder hours before — any whole number from 1 to 168 (one week). The default is 24.
The reminder is sent that many hours before the booking's start time, in your restaurant's own timezone (link Timezone, currency and formats).
Accurate to the hour
Tabledoo checks for bookings due a reminder once an hour. So with a 24-hour setting, a guest booked for 20:00 gets their reminder somewhere in the hour around 20:00 the previous day — not to the minute.
That is the right trade for a reminder, but it means very short settings are unreliable by nature. A 1-hour reminder may arrive 60 minutes before or a few minutes before, depending on where the booking falls relative to the hourly check. If you want people reminded shortly before arrival, 2 or 3 hours is a much more dependable choice than 1.
Which bookings get a reminder
A booking is eligible when all of these are true:
- Its status is pending or confirmed. Cancelled, no-show, already arrived, seated and completed bookings are skipped.
- It has not already had a reminder on that channel.
- Its start time falls in the window the hourly check is looking at.
- The guest has the contact detail for that channel.
Note that pending bookings are reminded too. If you leave online bookings pending until someone reviews them, the guest still gets reminded about a table you have not formally confirmed. Usually what you want — but worth knowing if your pending queue is really a maybe-list.
Email and SMS are tracked separately
This is the detail worth understanding, because it protects you from the two mistakes people expect to make.
Each booking records the email reminder and the SMS reminder independently. Consequences:
- Each fires at most once, ever, per booking. There is no scenario where a guest gets the same reminder twice.
- Turning SMS reminders on later never re-sends the emails. Bookings already reminded by email are not revisited; from then on, future bookings get both.
- A guest can receive both for the same booking, if both channels are on. Some restaurants do this for large parties and high-value bookings. Most find one is enough, and two reads as nagging.
- If one channel fails, the other is unaffected — and the failed one is not marked as sent, so a retry can still succeed.
The two channels are also independent in the settings: SMS reminders work with email reminders switched off, if you would rather only text.
Choosing a value
| Service | Suggested | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Dinner | 24 hours | Lands the evening before — enough time for the guest to cancel and for you to resell the table |
| Lunch | 24 hours | Arrives the previous lunchtime, when a working guest is actually looking at their phone |
| Weekend brunch | 24–48 hours | Weekend plans are made mid-week; 48 hours catches the change of mind earlier |
| Events and set menus | 48–72 hours | You may need numbers for ordering, and a cancellation is expensive. Earlier warning is worth more than a timely nudge |
| Same-day and walk-in heavy | 2–3 hours | A 24-hour reminder is pointless for a booking made this morning |
If you are unsure, leave it at 24. It suits the large majority of restaurants, and it is the value guests are used to from everywhere else.
What the reminder says
The email repeats the booking — date, time, pax, and your restaurant's contact details — so the guest does not have to hunt for the original confirmation. The SMS is a single short line with the same essentials and your phone number, and always shows the time in 24-hour format (link SMS: what's different).
You cannot edit the wording. If the text needs to change for your restaurant, that is a support request (link Reporting a problem).
Reminders and your no-show rate
Your no-show percentage is on the reservation report (link The reservation report). It is the number to watch when you change this setting: note where it sits, change the timing or add the SMS channel, and compare after a few weeks.
Two things to know before reading too much into it. Marking no-shows has to be consistent or the figure means nothing (link Automatic no-shows and completion). And a good reminder often moves bookings from the no-show column to the cancelled column rather than to completed — which looks like more cancellations and is unambiguously a win, because you got the table back.