We can send SMS reminders to customers, day-contact, assigned staff, and self-signups when a reservation starts.

The first thing you need to do to take advantage of this feature is to enable it in settings:

Actual delivery of the SMS message requires accurate phone numbers. You can update numbers for users and customers even after they’ve been assigned to a reservation. For staff, visit the “Users” menu item and edit a user. Update their phone number to an SMS capable one:

For customers, visit the “Customers” menu item and edit any customer to modify their phone number:

In addition to getting your data straightened out, the itinerary view will also collect phone numbers before the start of the reservation and send an SMS to anyone who’s signed up when the reservation starts.

Anyone who signs up in this way will get two messages - one to confirm that they signed up for notifications, then another when the reservation begins.

A few more things to know about pre-trip notifications

• Notifications are only sent for reservations with a status of “Accepted” or “ready to go”, to avoid embarrassing messages to undecided customers
• Notifications require SMS capable numbers - if a phone number is for a landline or has a typo then no notification will not go out and nobody will know it failed. We do our best to validate a number up front, but actually sending a message successfully is the only way to know for sure. Anywhere in Farebox that accepts a phone number will gracefully handle readability characters like parens and dashes
• Both customers and day-of contacts will also get the reminder message, if they have a phone number specified.
• We keep a sent-receipt for every notification, so each person scheduled to get a message will only get that message exactly once. We track this by phone number, so even if a customer that’s already on your reservation also signs up for reminders on the itinerary page they’ll still only get one reminder total per reservation.
• SMS Self-signups on the itinerary are turned off automatically at the start of the reservation. This is the earliest start time and does not look at the “Start showing to customer” bar form the schedule.