Marking a customer as VIP or Blacklisted

Status markers let you flag a customer as VIP or Blacklisted, so your team recognises who they are dealing with before they get too far into a booking.

Markers are staff-only. They are never shown to the customer, and never appear on an invoice, a booking confirmation, an email, or anywhere in the online booking pages.

Markers do not block anything

This is the important part. A marker is a label, not a rule.

Marking someone as Blacklisted does not:

• cancel their existing bookings
• stop them making a new booking, online or in store
• stop a payment, a deposit or a pre-authorisation
• stop a waiver being signed

Everything continues to work exactly as it does for any other customer. The marker tells your team something; what to do about it is your decision. If you want to stop a booking going ahead, you still need to cancel it or phone the customer yourself.

We built it this way deliberately. A marker that silently blocked things would cause bookings to fail with no explanation, at the counter, in front of the customer.

Setting a marker

1. Open the customer, from Customers or from a booking.
2. Find the Status markers section.
3. Click Add marker, or Edit markers if the customer already has one.
4. Tick VIP, Blacklisted, or both.
5. Click Apply markers.

Nothing is saved until you click Apply, so you can change your mind in the dialog. Unticking a marker and applying removes it.

A customer can hold both at once. That is a real situation — a regular who has become a problem — and the record keeps both rather than making you choose.

Who set it, and when

Each marker records who set it and on what date, shown next to the marker on the customer's record and in the tooltip elsewhere.

Re-applying a marker that is already set leaves that untouched, so it keeps showing whoever really made the decision rather than the last person to open the dialog.

Saying why

Markers do not have a reason field. If you want to record why someone is blacklisted, put it in the customer's internal note — that is where your team already looks for context about a customer, and a second box competing with it would only split that information across two screens.

Where markers appear

Once set, a marker follows the customer:

• On the customer's own record, with the full detail
• At the top of the customer panel, next to the customer's name
• In the Status column of the customer list
• On the reservation detail panel, next to the customer's name
• In the Planner list view, and on the hover card when you point at a booking

In lists and other tight spaces the markers show as icons only, to save room. Point at one to see who set it and when.

Where a customer is both VIP and Blacklisted, lists show only the Blacklisted marker. When you are scanning a screen full of bookings, the warning is the one that changes what you do next; the VIP is still there on the customer's own record and in the tooltip.

Guest bookings may not show a marker

A booking made through guest checkout — without signing in — creates a new customer record rather than matching the existing one. A marker set on the earlier record will not appear on that booking, because as far as the system is concerned they are two different customers.

Bookings from customers who signed in, and bookings you create in the back office against an existing customer, do carry the marker.

If markers will not load

If markers cannot be loaded you will see an Unknown marker, or a message with a Try again button, rather than the customer simply appearing unmarked.

This is deliberate. "This customer is not blacklisted" and "we could not check whether this customer is blacklisted" are very different things, and you should never have to guess which one you are looking at. If you see Unknown, treat it as unknown — try again before relying on it.

Removing a marker

Open Edit markers, untick it, and click Apply. The marker is removed along with who set it and when.