Booking Emails and Reminders
Most no-shows aren’t rude. People forget. A clear confirmation and a reminder the day before fix most of that, and they need to come from an address your customers’ inboxes trust. Core Bookings sends a plain-text email for every booking change, schedules reminders, and lets you rewrite each message without touching code.
Everything lives in one form at Bookings → Settings → Emails. Saving it never sends mail.
What Customers Receive
Each booking change sends one customer email, picked from what just happened:
| Sent when | |
|---|---|
| Booking confirmed | A booking is confirmed, including after payment or a claimed waitlist place. |
| Awaiting payment | An approved request or claimed waitlist place still needs online payment. |
| Request received, awaiting approval | A customer requests a service that needs staff approval. |
| Request approved | Staff approve a request that needs no further payment. |
| Request declined | Staff decline a request. Their reason isn’t included. |
| Booking rescheduled | The customer or staff move a booking. |
| Booking cancelled | The customer or staff cancel, or a customer withdraws a request. |
| Refund issued | A full or partial refund is verified. |
| Remaining balance paid | The remaining online balance is paid. |
| Appointment reminders | At each reminder time before a confirmed appointment. |
| General booking update | Everything else, such as expired requests and payment reviews, plus any event set to follow it. |
Confirmation, approval and reschedule emails attach the appointment as a calendar file, and calendar apps update the same entry when it changes. Customer emails go out in the language the booking was made in.
Edit the Templates
- Under Emails for each booking event, open the event you want to change.
- Edit the Subject and Message, or tick Use the general booking update instead of this email.
- Click Save email templates.
A blank subject or message restores that event’s default. Keep {manage_url} if customers should be able to change their booking. The placeholders table on the screen lists everything you can use:
{name},{service},{when}(in the customer’s timezone),{staff},{location}and{site}.{status}and{payment}print readable labels such as Confirmed and Paid.{refunded}shows the amount refunded so far.{previous_when}shows the earlier time of a rescheduled booking. Its line is left out when that time is unknown.{manage_url},{meeting_url}and{portal_url}link to the private booking page, the video meeting and the customer dashboard.- Modules add their own when they’re on, such as
{invoice_url},{discount},{referral_code},{card_url}and{answers}.
Schedule Reminders
In Email delivery and reminders, set Hours before appointment. You can have up to five, for example 48,24,2. The default is one reminder 24 hours before, and a blank field turns off new reminders.
- Changes apply when appointments are next confirmed or rescheduled.
- A reminder is only sent if the booking was made early enough for it.
- Reminders are sent by the background worker, so run it from system cron every minute for on-time delivery. See Setup Checks and Operations.
Sender and Delivery
- Delivery provider: WordPress mail (through your SMTP plugin, if you have one) or Brevo templates with a Brevo API key. With Brevo you can set template IDs per message, per customer event and per reminder time. A template ID of 0 uses the plain-text email.
- From name: blank uses the site name.
- From address: blank keeps the address WordPress or your mail plugin already uses. Pick an address on a domain your mail service may send for, or messages fail SPF and DMARC checks.
- Reply-To address: blank uses the site’s administration email.
- Calendar file: untick to stop attaching the .ics file.
Staff and Admin Notifications
Under Staff and administrator notifications, choose the Recipients: The staff member assigned to the booking (on by default) and Administrators at the addresses below, with up to ten Administrator addresses. Under Send for, pick New confirmed bookings, Cancellations and Reschedules.
Nobody is emailed about a change they made themselves. Approval requests and calendar conflicts always go to the assigned staff member. Staff emails link to the appointment in the admin, never to the customer’s private link.
Good to Know
- Emails are plain text. There’s no HTML designer, and no preview sends a test mail.
- Failed or pending emails show on Bookings → Settings → Operations, where you can retry them. To send a confirmation again, use Resend confirmation email on the appointment.
- Delivery is at least once. In rare cases, a crash right after handing a message to WordPress mail can produce one duplicate.
- For texts as well as emails, see SMS and WhatsApp. For follow-ups on your own timing, see Automations.
- The hosted demo shows this settings screen (view only, with mail turned off). Sign in to the workspace with
bookings-demo/demo.