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Large Booking Confirmation Chase

Example prompt: "For any booking of six or more people that hasn't been confirmed yet, draft a friendly confirmation request, chase the guest seven days before, three days before, and the day before, and ping the front-of-house manager in Slack the day before if the table's still unconfirmed."

The Problem

The Saturday night table of eight is the booking that defines whether the room runs at a profit or a loss. A six-cover table no-show on a Saturday night is the equivalent of giving the floor staff the night off for that section — except we have already paid them, already prepped the food, and already turned away the four-top that would have taken the slot. Most front-of-house managers chase large bookings by hand on the morning of, sometimes a day or two before, and the chase gets dropped on the busy days that need it most. A short, polite confirmation ask at the right time gets a reply nine times out of ten, and the tenth time is exactly when we want to know about it so the table can be released or re-pitched.

How GloriaMundo Solves It

We build a workflow that scans the reservations Google Sheet every morning and flags any booking of six or more covers in the next seven days that has not been marked as confirmed. A conditional step decides which rung of the chase ladder to fire — seven days out, three days out, or the day before — based on how close the booking is to today and whether previous rungs have already fired. An LLM step drafts a short, friendly confirmation request in the restaurant's voice, with the booking details (date, sitting, party size, any pre-orders) and a single one-line ask for the guest to reply yes or no. The draft saves into Gmail and either auto-sends or waits for sign-off — that switch lives in the workflow's settings so each restaurant can pick. The day before the booking, if there is still no reply, the workflow does not send a fourth chase to the guest — it posts a red-flag message in #floor on Slack to the front-of-house manager with the booking, the chase history, and the guest's phone number from the sheet, because the right next move at that point is a phone call from a human, not another email. Glass Box preview shows the booking, which rung of the ladder will fire, and the drafted message before anything goes.

Example Workflow Steps

  1. Trigger (scheduled): Every morning at 9am.
  2. Step 1 (integration): Read the 'Reservations' tab in Google Sheets, filtering to bookings in the next seven days with party size six or more.
  3. Step 2 (code): For each row, compute the days-to-booking and check the 'Chase Log' tab to see which rungs of the chase ladder have already fired for this booking.
  4. Step 3 (conditional): Decide whether to fire the 7-day, 3-day, or 1-day rung, or to escalate to the manager because the day-before rung has already gone unanswered.
  5. Step 4 (llm): Draft a short, friendly confirmation request with the booking details and a one-line ask for a yes-or-no reply, tuned to the rung — gentle at 7 days, more direct at 3 days, brief and warm the day before.
  6. Step 5 (integration): Save the message as a Gmail draft to the guest's email address (or auto-send if the workflow's settings allow it for this restaurant).
  7. Step 6 (integration): Append a row to the 'Chase Log' tab with the booking ID, the rung, the timestamp, and the Gmail message ID so the next morning's run knows what has already been done.
  8. Step 7 (integration): For the escalation case — day-before rung already unanswered — post a red-flag message in #floor on Slack tagging the front-of-house manager with the booking row, the chase history, and the guest's phone number from the sheet, because the right next move is a call.

Integrations Used

  • Google Sheets — the 'Reservations' tab as the system of record, and the 'Chase Log' tab as the dedup register so the same chase does not fire twice
  • Gmail — the per-guest confirmation drafts, saved to the manager's inbox or auto-sent depending on the workflow's settings
  • Slack — the #floor channel for the day-before escalation when the workflow's right next move is a call from a human, not another email

Who This Is For

Front-of-house managers and owner-operators at independent restaurants and gastropubs where a six-plus table no-show on a Saturday night is the booking that defines the week's P&L, where reservations are held in a Google Sheet (or sync into one from the booking platform), and where the manager currently chases by hand on the busy days that need it most.

Time & Cost Saved

The chase itself is fifteen to thirty minutes a day done by hand, and it is the work that gets dropped on Friday afternoon when the floor is being turned around for service — exactly when it matters most. The bigger saving is on the no-show line. A six-cover no-show on a Saturday at a thirty-pound average spend is one hundred and eighty pounds of revenue plus the cost of the prep. Stopping one no-show a month covers the workflow many times over; stopping a quarter of the no-shows the restaurant currently absorbs is a material change to the year.