How to customize booking notifications
In this article
One major benefit that Resos brings is the option to personalize the text of the booking notifications that are automatically sent to your guests via email (or SMS notifications if you enabled this) so that you maintain the communication in your preferred tone. This doesn’t only enhance your customers’ experience, but it also keeps your communication consistent on all the channels, and gives you the opportunity to upsell and let your guests know about different events or promotions that you’re offering during a certain period.
If you are deciding when to use text messages, first review the restaurant SMS messages add-on and its relationship to confirmations, reminders, staff alerts, and usage pricing.
If you’d like to read more about the types of booking notifications that you can enable with Resos, check out this support article!
For the commercial overview, see how custom design and guest-facing text keep the booking flow consistent with your restaurant.
For wording you can adapt, use the restaurant booking confirmation templates. Choose the extra sentences you need rather than repeating the default booking details.
Steps to customize the text
In order to customize the text for booking notifications that your guests receive, you’ll have to follow these steps:
- Log into your Resos profile.
- Go to Menu → Settings & add-ons → Communication → Texts.
- Choose the type of notification you’d like to edit: Booking confirmation, Booking status changed, New message on booking or Booking reminder.
- Choose the language in which you’d like to edit the text for (Resos gives your guests multiple languages to choose from when booking): English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, German, Norwegian, Polish, Finnish, Albanian, Swedish, Greek, Ukrainian.
- Add top text, bottom text or both.
- Optional: if SMS messages add-on is enabled, you have the option not to include the extra text in these or to create a shorter version for these.
Note: The system only adds extra text to the top and/or bottom part of the default text that is super simple and used by all the restaurants out there. You can add different texts in different languages, it’s all up to you. The image at the top of your booking emails is your Booking page image (Menu → Settings & add-ons → Bookings → Managing bookings → Booking page & widget), so there is no separate logo upload for notifications: change that image and the emails follow. If the Custom design add-on is active, the emails also pick up its colors, font and corner rounding. The default text itself is not customizable yet.
What you cannot change in the email
The note above covers what you can change. These parts are the same for every restaurant, so it is worth knowing before you go looking for a setting:
- Your restaurant name is always printed over the header image. It sits in the middle of the image, and the image carries a dark overlay so white letters stay readable on top of a photo. Neither the name nor the overlay can be switched off. If the name is hard to read, choose a Booking page image with a calmer area in the middle.
- The layout cannot be edited. Every restaurant shares one email template. You cannot rearrange the blocks, supply your own HTML, or move where your branding sits.
If the top and bottom text fields cannot say what you need, write to hi@resos.com and describe what the email should tell your guests.
Layout of the booking notifications
Perhaps you’re wondering what the default together with the extra text looks like on your customer’s side. The information that is crossed with a black line represents personal information. Here are a few examples with extra text added before and after the default one:
- Booking confirmation
- New message on booking
SMS Booking confirmation & Reminder, as well as SMS Reminder with the short version: the yellow line is the extra top text and the red line is the extra bottom text.
Contact details on no-show and payment receipts
Receipts for no-show fees, deposits and prepayments are sent by Stripe, not by Resos. The support email and phone number printed on them come from your own Stripe account, so you change them in your Stripe Dashboard rather than anywhere in Resos. Your restaurant name, email and phone number were copied across once when the Stripe connection was first made, and editing them in Resos afterwards does not update the receipts.
Which email address does what explains where each of your addresses is set, including this one.
Type of notifications
The system sends two types of notifications: email and SMS notifications. Here’s some information about these:
- Email notifications: Resos sends email notifications automatically, as long as the customer provides their email address for online bookings or the staff member asks for it for manual bookings.
- SMS notifications: in order to send SMS messages, you need to enable this add-on. The SMS sender name can be changed by going to Menu → Settings & add-ons → Communication → SMS messages, and over there, you can also notice that SMS notifications are charged extra (depending on your currency).
How SMS messages are billed
Switching the SMS messages add-on on costs nothing by itself, and it is available on a paid plan. You pay only for the messages that go out, on top of your subscription.
A text message holds a fixed number of characters, and a longer one is sent and charged as several messages, so length is what drives the bill. Emoji and special characters shorten the limit further. The maximum length of a single text message has the character counts and the tips for staying inside one message. Two things help from this page: keep any extra top and bottom text short, and use the shorter SMS version described in step 6 above.
The rate depends on the country of the number the message goes to, so there is no single figure. It is invoiced in your own subscription currency. Go to Menu → Settings & add-ons → Communication → Notifications and follow the SMS pricing link on that page to see the rates per country.
Turning SMS off for guests
Go to Menu → Settings & add-ons → Communication → Notifications. The To guests section is only on that page while the SMS messages add-on is active. Under To guests there is one SMS switch.
That single switch covers every SMS your guests receive: booking confirmations, status changes, new messages on a booking, reminders, confirmation requests and feedback requests. There is no separate switch per message type.
Turning it off does not move existing bookings over to email. An email only goes out when the booking holds an email address and email notifications are enabled on that booking. A booking that was set to SMS only keeps no guest channel once the switch is off, so that guest stops receiving notifications entirely, even if an email address is on the booking. For a booking that arrived from your booking page or your widget, the channel is locked and cannot be corrected from the dashboard; check any SMS-only bookings you already have before you turn the switch off. Bookings from other sources, such as Reserve with Google, keep an editable channel.
Your own alerts are controlled separately. The To you section has its own SMS switch for new-booking alerts, so you can keep staff alerts arriving by SMS after you have turned guest SMS off, or the other way round.
Reminders you build yourself are the one place with a channel choice of their own. A reminder addressed to a Custom recipient has its own SMS and Email switches, while a reminder sent to the guest follows whatever that guest chose on their booking.
Choosing email or SMS for one booking
The channel is decided per booking, by whoever created it.
- Online bookings: the guest chooses. When SMS is active, the booking page shows Keep me updated via: with an E-mail and an SMS checkbox, and the guest ticks the ones they want. The block is hidden when Required contact information (under Menu → Settings & add-ons → Bookings) is set to E-mail (hide phone field) or Phone (hide e-mail field), and that setting then decides the channel. For a booking made on your booking page or in your widget, the choice cannot be changed afterwards from the dashboard; bookings from other sources, such as Reserve with Google, stay editable.
- Manual bookings: you choose. When you add or edit a booking yourself, the booking form has E-mail and SMS switches for the guest. The SMS switch is only shown while guest SMS is on in your notification settings.
Using your own SMS provider
You cannot connect an outside SMS provider or your own gateway account to Resos. All messages are sent through the Resos gateway.
The one sender setting you control is the SMS sender name at Menu → Settings & add-ons → Communication → SMS messages. It is what guests see as the sender, it has to be between 3 and 11 characters, and if you leave it empty the messages show “Restaurant” as the sender.
Your sender name is not used everywhere. Some countries do not allow a name as the sender, or require it to be registered with the mobile networks first. Guests on a number in one of those countries see a Resos number or the Resos sender name instead. There is nothing to configure for this, and it does not change what the message says.
Still unsure which notifications your guests should receive, or what a change will cost you? Write to hi@resos.com and we will look at your setup with you.
