reminder-sequence

---
name: reminder-sequence
description: Produces the two reminder messages that go out before a table, timed to your own service and your own cancellation deadline, with the send rules, the reply handling and the suppression list, as files you can hand to whoever runs the diary. Use when bookings are made weeks ahead, when guests forget, or when you are about to switch reminders on and want them to reduce no-shows rather than annoy people.
---

# Get the table cancelled in time, or filled

You give this your booking channels, your cancellation deadline, your service times and one week of real bookings with their booking dates on them. You get back two messages, the exact hour each one goes out relative to that specific booking, the rules for when not to send, and what happens when somebody replies. The first message exists to catch the party that is not coming while you can still resell the table. The second exists to catch the one that is coming and has the wrong time. They are different jobs and the skill will not merge them into one.

## What it does

1. **Time the first message to your cancellation deadline, not to a round number of days.** If the guest can cancel free until 48 hours before, the first reminder goes out at 52 to 54 hours before, so there is a waking window in which they can act on it. If your deadline is noon the day before, the reminder goes the previous afternoon. The anchor is always the deadline, because the entire commercial purpose of this message is to convert a silent no-show into a cancellation with enough notice to resell the cover. A reminder that lands after the free-cancellation deadline has passed does the opposite of its job: it tells the guest they are now liable, which makes some of them go quiet rather than reply.

2. **Time the second message to service, and make it the one that is almost never wrong.** Send it on the day, between three and five hours before the sitting, and never before 8am. For a 7.30pm table that is mid-afternoon, when people are still at work and can act. Avoid the hour before service, because a guest who is already on a train cannot help you and a host who is setting up cannot answer a reply. The second message asks for confirmation and gives the address, and that is all. It is the one that catches the party who has the right day and the wrong time, and the one that produces the last-minute cancellation you can still sell to a walk-in.

3. **Put the deadline in message one as a date and a clock time, and say the consequence in money.** "Free to cancel until 8pm this Thursday. After that we keep the £26 deposit." Not "48 hours". Not "terms apply". The Competition and Markets Authority's unfair contract terms guidance says a term can be "grammatically simple and precise, and therefore readable" and still fail the transparency test because "its practical effects and implications cannot be understood". A notice period the guest has to calculate is exactly that, and it is also the sentence they will dispute later. The amount stated here must match the booking page and the confirmation to the penny, and the skill checks all three against each other.

4. **Give one reply route, and decide in advance what each reply does.** Write the four handling rules before the messages go out: a reply cancelling, a reply changing the numbers, a reply changing the time, and a reply asking a question. Each gets a named owner and a response time. If the channel is SMS, decide whether a bare "CANCEL" cancels the booking or triggers a call back, and say which in the message. The CMA's guidance treats a financial sanction as more likely to be fair where "the consumer can easily avoid the sanction becoming due", so a reminder that says "reply to cancel" and goes to an unmonitored number is worse for the venue than sending nothing, because it creates a record of a guest trying to do the right thing.

5. **Write the suppression rules before the messages, because the damage is done by the ones that should not have gone.** Do not send to a booking already cancelled, to a party that has already confirmed, to the same number twice in one day, to a booking made inside the reminder window, or to anyone who has asked not to be texted. Add a rule for the party of one person who booked four tables, so they get one message and not four. Every reminder system that annoys people annoys them through a suppression failure rather than through its content, and the diary owner needs this list on one side of paper before the first send.

6. **Keep both messages service messages, and audit them line by line.** The Information Commissioner's Office describes a service message as covering communications "that aren't promotional but are for administrative or customer services purposes, such as messages to: remind people how to contact you in case of a problem; check their contact details are correct; confirm or remind them about appointments; or update them on your terms or conditions". Both of these messages are appointment reminders and terms reminders. But the ICO is unambiguous about what breaks it: "If your service message has elements that are direct marketing, even if that is not the main purpose of your message, then it will count as direct marketing." One line about the new cocktail list converts a message you are entitled to send into one you are not. Branding is safe: "if your service message contains general branding or logos, this doesn't count as direct marketing".

7. **Separate the marketing question and answer it honestly, once.** If the venue does want to send offers to these numbers later, that is a different permission. The ICO's PECR guidance says: "You must not send marketing emails or texts to individuals without specific consent. There is a limited exception for your own previous customers, often called the 'soft opt-in'", available where the person is "an existing customer who bought (or negotiated to buy) a similar product or service from you in the past, and you gave them a simple way to opt out both when you first collected their details and in every message you have sent". So the output includes a single line stating whether the venue currently meets that condition at the point the number is collected, and if it does not, it says so rather than quietly assuming it does.

8. **Set quiet hours, a send cap and a stop switch.** No sends before 8am or after 9pm. No more than two reminder messages per booking, ever, plus the confirmation. One named person who can stop all sends within five minutes, and the instructions for doing it written down where they will be found on a Saturday night by somebody else. Write the stop procedure as three steps that do not require the person who built the system. The single worst outcome available here is a loop that texts four hundred guests at 3am, and the only thing standing between a venue and that is a cap and a switch decided in advance.

9. **Produce the files, not the advice.** Four artefacts. A schedule file that takes each booking and computes the two send times from its own date, time and deadline. A message library with the two messages in a text version and an email version, each with the merge fields named. A suppression rules sheet, one rule per line, in the order they are applied. A one-page printable for the host station covering what each reply means and who handles it. Every timestamp on the schedule is derived from the booking's own details, never from a fixed rule like "the day before", so that a Sunday lunch and a Friday dinner get different send times without anyone doing the sums.

## Then it checks

1. Every send time on the schedule is computed from that booking's own date, time and cancellation deadline, and no two bookings with different deadlines have the same offset applied.
2. The first message is scheduled to arrive before that booking's free-cancellation deadline, with at least four waking hours in hand, and the check fails loudly rather than sending late.
3. The deposit amount and the deadline in message one match the booking page and the confirmation exactly, compared value by value.
4. Neither message contains an offer, a menu, a promotion, an event, a review request or a social follow. Venue branding is permitted and does not fail this check.
5. The suppression sheet contains a rule for already cancelled, already confirmed, duplicate number, booking made inside the window, and opted out, and the schedule shows the count of bookings each rule removed.
6. No send time falls before 8am or after 9pm in local time, and no booking has more than two reminders scheduled against it.

Any check fails: name it, redo that step once. Failed twice: say what is wrong and stop.

## Rules
- Public information only.
- Never invent a fact, a number or a quote.
- Anything sent in someone's name says whose name it is: the venue name appears inside the message body, not only in the sender ID.
- Never put marketing in a reminder. The ICO's position is that any direct marketing element makes the whole message direct marketing "even if that is not the main purpose of your message", and the practical cost is that a venue loses the ability to send the reminders that were working.
- Never schedule a third reminder. Two messages plus the confirmation is the cap, and a venue that adds a fourth touch is training its guests to ignore all of them, including the one carrying the cancellation deadline.
- Never send a reminder that arrives after the free-cancellation deadline has passed. It cannot recover the cover, and it converts a message the guest would have acted on into a demand for money.
- Never run the sequence without the stop switch from step 8 tested by someone other than the person who built it.
- This output is a working document prepared for the owner's solicitor or data protection adviser to check before it runs at volume, particularly the service message classification and the handling of phone numbers. It drafts messages and a schedule; it is not legal advice and it is not a data protection assessment.

## Built from
- Information Commissioner's Office, "Identify direct marketing", https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/direct-marketing-and-privacy-and-electronic-communications/direct-marketing-guidance/identify-direct-marketing/, no publication date shown on the page, read 14 September 2026: the service message definition that covers appointment reminders and terms updates, and the rule that any marketing element converts the message, which set step 6 and check 4.
- Information Commissioner's Office, "Electronic mail marketing", https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/direct-marketing-and-privacy-and-electronic-communications/guide-to-pecr/electronic-and-telephone-marketing/electronic-mail-marketing/, no publication date shown on the page, read 14 September 2026: the consent rule and the soft opt-in conditions, which is the question step 7 forces the venue to answer out loud instead of assuming.
- Competition and Markets Authority, "Unfair contract terms, CMA37", https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7f8b58ed915d74e33f716e/Unfair_Terms_Main_Guidance.pdf, 22 July 2026, read 14 September 2026: the transparency test at 4.33 and 4.34 behind writing the deadline as a date in step 3, and 6.65 on a sanction being easily avoidable, behind the single monitored reply route in step 4.
- ResDiary, "Beyond the Booking: UK & IE Hospitality Industry Report 2024", https://resdiary.com/industry-insights/uk-ie-hospitality-industry-report-2024, no publication date shown on the page, read 14 September 2026: 76% of the 175 surveyed venues affected by no-shows, an 8% average no-show rate and £3,621 average annual loss, which is what a resold cover is worth and why step 1 anchors the first message to the deadline rather than to a round number of days.
- ResDiary, "How UK Restaurants Can Tackle No-Shows and Reduce Revenue Loss", https://resdiary.com/blog/uk-restaurants-lose-out-to-no-shows, published 30 March 2023, read 14 September 2026: the vendor recommendation to send a confirmation plus one reminder the day before, which the skill follows in shape and departs from in timing, anchoring on the cancellation deadline instead.

# Booking reminder schedule builder

## You are given

A UK hospitality venue's bookings, as a CSV, an XLSX export, or a pasted list. Column names will be inconsistent. Expect at minimum a guest name, a contact number or email, a booking date, a booking time and a party size. Plus four settings, in a config file or the prompt: the free-cancellation deadline in hours before the booking, the deposit per head in pounds, the venue name with its street address, and the one reply route.

## Produce

Write all files into an output folder named `reminder-sequence-output`.

1. `reminder-schedule.csv` with exactly these columns, in this order:
   `booking_ref,guest_name,contact,channel,booking_datetime,party_size,cancellation_deadline,message_1_send_at,message_2_send_at,suppressed,suppression_reason`
   Datetimes are `YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM` local time. `channel` is `sms` or `email`, from whether the contact parses as a phone number. `cancellation_deadline` is the booking datetime minus the configured hours. `message_1_send_at` is 4 hours before that deadline. `message_2_send_at` is 4 hours before the booking time on the day. `suppressed` is `yes` or `no`.

2. `message-library.csv`, columns `message_id,channel,subject,body,merge_fields`. Four rows: messages 1 and 2, each in an `sms` and an `email` version. SMS bodies under 300 characters once merge fields hold the longest value in the data. Placeholders are `{guest_name}`, `{booking_datetime}`, `{party_size}`, `{cancellation_deadline}`, `{deposit_total}`, `{venue_name}`, `{venue_address}`, `{reply_route}`.

3. `suppression-rules.csv`, columns `order,rule_name,description,bookings_removed`. One row per rule, in the order applied, with the real count from this data.

4. `host-sheet.md`, one printed page: what each reply means, who handles it, the quiet hours, and the three-step stop procedure.

## Rules

- Compute every send time from that booking's own date, time and deadline. Never apply one fixed offset to all rows.
- Never emit a send time later than that booking's cancellation deadline. If `message_1_send_at` falls after the deadline, or before the booking was made, set `suppressed=yes`, reason `booked_inside_window`.
- Clamp every send time into 08:00 to 21:00 local, moving it to the nearest boundary on the same side of the deadline. If that passes the deadline, suppress the row instead.
- Suppress with a reason from: `already_cancelled`, `already_confirmed`, `duplicate_contact_same_day`, `booked_inside_window`, `opted_out`. Apply in that order and record the count for each.
- No message body may contain an offer, a promotion, a menu, an event, a review request or a social media handle. The venue name and address are required.
- Never invent a deposit amount, a deadline or a venue detail. Leave a missing setting visible as a placeholder and list it at the top of `host-sheet.md`.
- Do not send anything. Produce files only.
- British English. Pounds as `£26`. No em dash characters.

## Return

One paragraph, under 120 words: the four file paths, bookings read, bookings scheduled, bookings suppressed with the count per reason, and any setting left as a placeholder.