Accept or reject booking requests

The Tentative Bookings feature gives you final control over whether a booking will happen. The booking goes into your calendar with question marks on it until you decide to accept or reject the appointment. You can customize the emails that go to your booker based on whether the booking is accepted or declined.

This feature is available on Professional and Teams plans.

Activate tentative bookings

Tentative bookings can be activated on any of your booking pages on a case-by-case basis. There may be some pages where you use Tentative bookings and other booking pages where you allow bookings to go straight to confirmed. 

1. Navigate to Additional options: Notifications. Under the action After new booking made toggle the Tentative bookings to On. 

2. Click the notification to create an email depending on whether you accept or decline the booking. These emails work in the same way as the other emails in your workflow.

Edit email before acceptance of booking

Once tentative bookings have been activated, the button on the booking form will turn from Confirm Booking to Request Booking.

1. Ensure that you edit the  Confirmation email to booker (that is sent out as soon as the booking is requested) to inform the booker that their booking isn't confirmed, and when they should expect a final decision. 

You can also delete this initial Confirmation email to booker if you don't want them to receive an email before the booking is confirmed. 

Edit After booking message

1. Customize the message After booking that displays on the screen after booking to reflect that this is a request for a meeting, not a confirmation. 

Configure accepted/rejected email to booker 

1. Customize the accepted and rejected emails that go to the booker if you accept the booking or if you decline it. You can provide more details about their booking in this email now that the booking is accepted. 

?? on Tentative Bookings

All bookings will initially appear with two question marks at the beginning of the Booking Title. Once you confirm these bookings, the event will refresh and the question marks will be removed.

Confirmation emails to you will also start with two question marks in the subject line, prompting you to accept or reject the booking.

Managing tentative bookings

The confirmation email you receive will include details of the bookings plus accept/reject buttons. Using these buttons you can accept or reject a booking directly from your email without being logged into YouCanBookMe. 

If you are using Tentative bookings on a team booking page, be sure to include the following line in the confirmation email to team member so each team member can manage their bookings:

{IF-TENTATIVE}**This meeting isn't confirmed**  {ACCEPT} {REJECT}{ENDIF-TENTATIVE}

You can also manage all of your tentative bookings from your bookings dashboard. Login to your account and click on Bookings from your dashboard. Here you'll see a list of all your bookings along with the current status.

1. Click Details to review each booking, or click the arrow next to Details to Accept or Reject it. You can only accept or reject bookings that have not occurred yet. 

Once you select accept or reject on a booking you have the decision to send the acceptance email you've created to the booker or not, or to edit that email with additional emails specific to that booker.  

Please note

We've come across an issue with Tentative bookings not syncing properly with iCloud. Our team is currently looking into this issue and we'll make sure to keep you updated as soon as we have more information. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. 

For further questions, contact our team at support@youcanbook.me.

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