Why this exists

When a reservation arrives from your calendar feed (Airbnb, VRBO, Booking.com, etc.), the feed almost never includes the guest's email or phone — just dates, the channel, and sometimes a name. Without an email, your guest checklists have nowhere to deliver. Without context, your host checklists fire prematurely.

The Pending Approval lane gives you a chance to fill in the missing details before any checklist trigger fires.

What lands in Pending Approval

Every iCal-synced reservation that doesn't already have a guest email goes to Pending Approval. From there, no reservation_created, check_in, or check_out triggers fire — the reservation is invisible to your checklists, your guest portal, and your Today dashboard until you approve.

Manual reservations you enter yourself are auto-approved. Only synced reservations need this step.

Approving a reservation

  1. Open Reservations.
  2. Click the Pending Approval filter pill at the top of the list.
  3. Click Complete & Approve on a card.
  4. Add the guest email (required), phone (optional), and any other details that came through incomplete.
  5. Save. The reservation now flows through normally — checklists fire, the guest portal becomes accessible, Today picks it up.

Rejecting a reservation

For test bookings or duplicates that came through the feed:

  1. On the pending card, click Reject.
  2. Confirm. The reservation is marked rejected (no triggers will ever fire) but is kept on file for audit.

You can't reject an already-approved reservation. If you need to undo an approval, soft-delete the reservation through the normal cancel flow.

Auto-approve setting

If your calendar feed does include guest emails (some hosts have this configured on Airbnb's privacy settings, for example), ArrivHQ can auto-approve those reservations and only send incomplete ones to the Pending lane.

Settings → Reservations → Auto-approve synced reservations when guest email is captured

  • On (default): a synced reservation with guest_email skips Pending and goes straight to your normal flow. Reservations without email still need approval.
  • Off: every synced reservation requires approval, regardless of email. Useful if you want a final review on every booking before checklists go out.

Daily digest

If you have any pending reservations at 8 AM your time, ArrivHQ sends one email per day summarizing the count and linking to the queue. No push notifications, no Telegram — these aren't urgent.

What approval triggers

When you approve a reservation:

  1. The reservation_created trigger fires immediately, materializing any host or guest checklists assigned to that property's reservation_created event.
  2. Guest checklists become deliverable since the email is now present.
  3. Date-based triggers (check_in, check_out) fire on their normal schedule when those dates arrive.

If your guest's check-in is already today and you just approved them, all the relevant date-based checklists materialize on the next worker tick (within a couple minutes).

Frequently asked

Can I approve in bulk? Not in v1 — each card needs a guest email which differs per booking. If hosts ask, we'll add bulk approve where the only thing changing is auto-filled fields.

What if I auto-approve and the email turns out wrong? You can always edit the reservation after approval; auto-approve just skips the Pending lane, it doesn't lock anything in.

Do rejected reservations count against my plan limits? No. Soft-rejected reservations are excluded from active counts.

Can my cleaners or maintenance staff approve? No — only owners, admins, and managers with reservation.edit permission can approve. Cleaners and other roles see the Pending lane but can't action it.