Overview

This page covers booking request management, so you can successfully handle incoming booking requests and payments, if enabled.

Step 1: The request

The moment a request is submitted, it’s created in Floatist (the boat, dates, and the guest’s own contact details) and it lands in your request queue as Pending.

A request can be submitted in one of two ways:

A guest fills in the form themselves on your marketing site.
Your own team enters it on the guest’s behalf, for example while taking a phone call. See Taking phone bookings.

If payments are enabled on your site, this request step happens before anything to do with payment. A request is always created as soon as someone enters the required fields and clicks Request a Booking in the booking flow. So you always have the lead (who asked, for what, and when) even if there’s drop-off while paying the initial payment.

Step 2: Payment

Whether payment is part of this step at all depends on whether your account has online payments configured. That’s a per-account setting (see Payments).

If payments are on, the guest can make their initial payment right away, from the same confirmation page they land on after submitting. There’s no separate step for them to find.
If payments are off (or a specific request has no pricing attached), the guest instead sees a message that your team will follow up with payment details. Nothing is charged automatically, and there’s nothing for the guest to click.

Either way, accepting a request never depends on payment having happened first. Your team can review a request and click Create booking whenever you’re ready. Payment status and the accept/archive decision are two independent things.

Who handles this

Reviewing the request queue, accepting or archiving requests, and taking phone bookings on the live site all belong to whoever holds the Booking manager role. See Roles and permissions. Configuring whether your account accepts online payments is a separate, Admin-level setting handled together with Floatist support. See Payments.

What’s in this section

Taking phone bookings: entering a request live on the phone with a guest.
Reviewing requests: triaging the queue, contacting guests, and deciding the outcome.
Confirmation page: what the guest sees after submitting a request, whether or not payments are enabled.
Payments: how the initial payment gets paid, and how your team reviews payments in Floatist.
Emails: every email this flow can send, and exactly when.