SMS: what's different

What this covers

How text messages differ from emails — in what they contain, what they cost, and what they need from you. Requires the manage-settings permission (Owner or Manager) to turn them on.

Which messages exist as SMS

Five:

Confirmation — the booking is confirmed
Reminder — before the booking
Update — the date, time or pax changed
Cancellation — the booking is off
Table ready — for a waitlist guest

There is no SMS review request and no SMS for event bookings — those are email only. All five are off until you switch them on.

SMS is deliberately short

Each message is one line and stays under the length that counts as a single text. That is a cost decision: a longer message would be billed as two, doubling what every send costs you.

So an SMS carries only the essentials — the guest's first name, your restaurant name, the date, the time, the pax, and your phone number. If you want a guest to have the full details, the email is where that lives. Most restaurants send both: email for the record, SMS for the nudge.

Times are always 24-hour in SMS

Whatever your restaurant's time format setting says, and whatever the app and your emails show, every time in a text message is written in 24-hour form — 19:30, never 7:30 PM.

This is deliberate, and it is not a bug to report. A text is stripped of all context: there is no layout, no branding, nothing to tell the reader how to interpret "7:30". Someone glancing at a notification can read "7:30" as morning. "19:30" cannot be misread by anybody. Your handset cannot reformat it and neither can the guest's.

Dates are written in your restaurant's language — so a French-speaking restaurant's texts read "23 avr. 2026" where an English one reads "Apr 23, 2026".

Your phone number is in every message

Taken from Property Settings → Restaurant. Nearly every handset turns a phone number in a text into something you can tap to call, which makes it the fastest route a guest has back to you — so it is worth checking that the number you have saved is one somebody answers during service (link Restaurant profile).

The wording is fixed

You cannot edit SMS text. The messages are written and maintained centrally, and translated into the languages Tabledoo supports — your restaurant's language decides which version a guest gets, not the guest's own language.

If the wording is wrong for your restaurant — a phrase that does not work in your market, or a mistranslation — that is worth reporting rather than working around, because a fix helps everyone on your language (link Reporting a problem).

What a text needs to go out

The type switched on under the SMS column.
A valid mobile number on the guest's profile, with its country code. This is the commonest reason a text does not arrive: a number saved as 07700 900123 with no country code cannot be dialled internationally. Tabledoo's phone fields ask for a country, so use them rather than typing a bare number.
A guest who has not opted out (link Guests who opt out).
Enough credits.

A landline saved as the guest's phone number will simply fail. Nothing warns you, because Tabledoo cannot tell a mobile from a landline reliably across every country.

What it costs

Each text spends credits from your balance, and how many depends on the country the guest's number belongs to — not on where your restaurant is. A text to a local mobile may cost one credit where a text to a distant country costs more.

Credits are taken when the message is sent. If the provider fails to accept it, the credits are returned to your balance automatically and both the charge and the refund appear in your credit history — so a failed send does not quietly cost you anything. Full detail in How SMS credits work.

Good to know

No credits means the text is skipped, not delayed. It is not held and sent later when you top up — that moment has passed. The email, if that channel is on, still goes.

You cannot reply to a Tabledoo text, and neither can the guest usefully. Replies do not reach you. That is why your phone number is in the message — it is the intended way back. The one reply that does something is STOP, which opts the guest out.

Guests generally cannot tell it is automated, and will occasionally reply expecting a human. Make sure whoever watches the phone knows guests may ring in referring to "the text you sent".