Provisional Bookings allow you record a booking in the calendar even though it has not been confirmed yet.

Unlike Booking Requests, Provisional Bookings behave in the same way as a Confirmed Booking. You can edit their details at any time, and you cannot double-book over a Provisional Booking.

Similarly, you can invoice and take payment against a Provisional Booking. If you record full payment against an invoice for a Provisional Booking, the booking is automatically changed to a Confirmed Booking.

There are two main ways to use Provisional Bookings:

1. The customer is given the opportunity to Confirm or Cancel the booking – this is the default way of working, and is useful for verifying Booking Requests
2. As an initial status for the booking before full or part payment is taken. This is described further down this page.

Creating a Provisional Booking #

The Status field on the New Booking page allows you to indicate if a booking is a Provisional or Confirmed Booking. Except when reviewing Booking Requests, the default value for this field is Confirmed, but it only takes a click to change to to Provisional

Provisional Booking Emails #

The standard email template for a provisional booking provides the details of the booking together with two buttons – one to Confirm the Booking, and one to Cancel the Booking. The Customer can use these buttons to automatically confirm or cancel the booking, which means that you do not need to personally update the booking in this instance.

When the customer uses one of these buttons, the status of the booking is automatically changed. A confirmation or cancellation email is sent to the customer, and a notification email is sent to your venue’s booking administrators.

If you do not want to include these buttons on the provisional booking email, either remove them before sending the email, or change the email template. You should also remove the text at the bottom of the email with the links.

There is nothing, of course, to stop you confirming or cancelliing bookings yourself.

Using Provisional Bookings to manage payment in advance #

If you need to take full or part payment of bookings in advance, you can manage this using Provisional Bookings.

1. Edit each email, or the Provisional Booking email template. to remove the Confirm and Cancel buttons and the links at the bottom of the email.
2. Make sure to set each booking with status Provisional when you create it.
3. Once you have created the booking, you can create an invoice for it. You may invoice for full or part payment.
4. Once you record full payment of the invoice, the booking is automatically changed to Confirmed. A confirmation email is sent to the customer automatically.