If you would like to review incoming bookings, in order to decide on an individual basis whether to approve or reject the registered persons as participants of your event, you can use the manual booking approval function. Additionally, you can create an email template you can send out to bookers you would like to approve, but who should provide further information first.

Tip: Since each booking request has to be confirmed individually, a high number of bookings can lead to additional work for you and to delays within the booking process for your attendees. 

Application examples:

• VIP tickets should only be bookable by selected persons
• Creating a waiting list that allows you to manually approve bookings if places should become available, e.g. due to cancellations
• Your participants have to submit an identification that needs to be checked and confirmed by you before allowing them to attend (e.g. press accreditation, employer's permit, student ID).
• You would like to have the option to edit the booking before the approval, for example to add or remove tickets or products or to subsequently apply a promotion code.

1. Booking process for events with booking approval
2. Setting up the booking approval
3. Manage bookings with pending approval

1. Booking process for events with booking approval

Bookings with approval

After your attendee has confirmed a booking, for which an approval has been activated, they will get sent to a confirmation site, which will inform them that their order will need to get approved by you.

The attendee receives an automatic email (email text: booking approval) immediately after the booking, in which he gets notified that the booking will not get finalized until it has been approved by the organizer.

As soon as the approval has taken place, another email gets sent out. If an event is free of charge a booker will immediately receive the regular confirmation email, if an event is fee based he'll get another mail (email text: Approval confirmation and Payment Request) with the request to complete the booking by clicking on a button that leads to the payment page.

Only after payment has been made, the booker will receive a confirmation via email, including their tickets if activated (email text: booking confirmation).

By rejecting the booking, the booker gets notified of the rejection in the form of an automatic e-mail (e-mail text: booking rejection). The corresponding booking will then not get included in the attendee list.

2. Setting up the booking approval

2.1 Activating the manual approval

To activate the manual approval for one of your events, please follow these steps:

1. Select the event
2. Click on "Settings" on the right
3. Choose "Terms & conditions, cancelations & booking approval"
4. Scroll down to the heading "Manual booking approval" and click on "Manual booking approval disabled. Bookings will be approved automatically"
5. Activate the checkbox "Enable manual booking approval".
6. Choose whether you want to activate manual approval for all ticket categories or (available for Enterprise customers only) just for selected ticket categories - the latter can then be chosen from a list. You can then also assign the approval process to further ticket categories by clicking "+ Create new ticket category"
7. Under "Email settings", you can decide whether an automatic message should be sent to the bookers if you flag bookings
8. Now click on "Accept", to save all changes.
9. To see what the different messages that get sent to your bookers look like, you can go to your event's settings and then to "Email contents". Here it's possible to send yourself some test emails or edit the email's contents. Further information on how to do this can be found here.

2.2 Deactivating the manual approval

If you activated booking approval for your event and would like to deactivate it again, you only need to remove the corresponding checkbox in the event settings under "Terms & conditions, cancelations & booking approval". Please note that the deactivation does not only apply to future bookings but also for existing ones: Once the approval function is deactivated all bookings with pending approval are automatically approved and the respective bookers receive the corresponding notification emails. Thus please make sure to review all currently pending bookings, possibly rejecting ones you don't want to get approved, before deactivating the manual approval for your event.

3. Managing bookings with pending approval

Bookings of ticket categories for which manual booking approval has been activated are considered as normal bookings when calculating the available ticket capacity. These reserved tickets can be released by you for other bookers if you reject the booking.

Tip: If you want to, you have the option to receive an email notification every time someone makes a booking that needs to be approved. To activate this function for your organisation's account you'll ned to get in contact with doo's support team.

To approve, flag or reject bookings, please proceed as follows:

1. Go to the "Booking overview"
2. Search for bookings with status "Approval required". You can use the "Additional search options" to filter by booking status "Approval required" so that only the bookings that still need to be reviewed by you are getting displayed. Select the booking you would like to review from the list in order to see booking details.
3. If you click on "Edit data" on the booking details page, you can view the data that was entered by the booker during the registration process in order to decide how you would like to proceed with that booking.

3.1 Changing a booking

As long as a booking has not been approved yet, it is still possible to change it. If you would like to edit the ticket category or product selection, to add or remove an attendee or to apply a promotion code to that booking, please click on "Change booking".

You'll be forwarded to a page where you can make the desired changes and, for example, edit the ticket selection or add and remove attendees. After saving the changes, the booker will automatically be notified about the changes via email. The booking keeps the status "Approval required" and can be approved by you afterwards (see 3.2).

3.2 Approve booking

If you confirm the booking by clicking on "Approve" you accept the registration of all attendees of this booking for your event. The approval triggers an automatic email to the booker. If it's a free booking, the booker will automatically receive the booking confirmation. For bookings that require payment, the booker receives an email with a link to select the method of payment - the booker should initiate the payment process before the start of the event, since after the end of the event, invoicing and payment processing via doo is no longer possible.

If a booker starts the payment process but does not complete it, the booking will be shown in the overview with the status "cancelled" and you have the possibility to resend the request manually via the booking details page. After successful payment, the booking confirmation will be sent to the booker.

Attention: The approval of the booking cannot be undone!

Once a booking has been approved (and a payment method has been selected for paid bookings), attendees are added to the attendee list, which you can download as an Excel file. For more information about downloading booking and attendee lists, please click here. 

3.3 Flag booking

By flagging a booking, you can mark it for yourself as already reviewed in order decide at a later point whether the booking should be confirmed or rejected. Until then, the posting is marked with the status "Flagged" in the booking overview.

If you activated the option "Send automatic email to booker when you flag an unapproved booking" in the approval settings, an automatic message is sent to the booker. This option is useful, for example, to inform the booker that he has been added to the waiting list or that he should send you further information or required proofs so that you can approve his registration. 

3.4 Reject booking

If you reject the booking, none of the attendees can attend your event. An automatic denial email is sent to the booker.

Attention: The rejection of a booking cannot be undone!

Tip: As an alternative for the manual booking approval, which can be time consuming, you could also consider using access codes: That way you can give selected persons exclusive access to your event registration or to certain ticket categories, so that they can directly book themselves. Read more in the article about Access and Promotion Codes.