ClubSystem update - every booking gets a confirmation SMS

A guest who booked on your website got a text straight away: the date, the table, and a link to cancel if plans changed. A guest who rang the club and had the same booking typed in by your staff got nothing at all - no record on their phone, no way to call it off except by ringing you back. Two guests, the same booking, two completely different experiences.

That gap is closed. Every booking is confirmed the same way now.

The same text, however the booking was made

When your staff enter a booking at the counter or over the phone, the guest receives exactly the message an online booking sends: what they booked, when, and a link that cancels it. Nothing to switch on - it just happens.

Two things follow from that, and both are worth real money:

• Fewer no-shows. A booking sitting in someone's messages is a booking they remember. It survives the week between the phone call and the evening itself.
• Fewer calls to your staff. Plans change. When the guest can free the table themselves with one tap, the slot goes back on sale immediately instead of sitting empty while nobody knows it is free.

A group booking is one booking

When a party takes four tables, that is one booking to the guest and it now reads like one. The text names every table they have, not one of them picked at random, and cancelling from the link frees the whole party's tables rather than a single table out of four. The cancellation page lists them too, so the button never promises less than it does.

One guest, one number, one history

Phone numbers are now stored the same way everywhere - in full international form, whichever way your staff typed them in. Both the public booking page and the panel offer a proper number field with the country code, so an Irish or German number entered at the counter is as correct as one the guest typed themselves.

The practical effect is that a regular is one person in your club's records instead of three near-identical entries. Guests whose number had been written down a few different ways over the years have been merged into a single customer, with their whole booking history attached. When you look someone up before giving them a table, you see everything they have ever booked - not the third of it that happened to match the spelling you searched for.