Booking Confirmation Use Case for Journeys

People change their minds all the time! Whether it's adding an item to cart and later removing it or changing the time of a dinner reservation, you know that users sometimes update or cancel after they've requested something from your brand. So how do you handle this in a journey?

To make sure users receive relevant messages based on the most up-to-date event data, you can set up checks in a journey to determine if an event has been updated after the user was added to the journey. Then, you can send users to the appropriate tile or journey depending on whether or not anything has changed.

# In this article

# Identifying events to track

Let's say you work for a travel company called Fantastic Flights that helps users find and book flight deals. When a user books a flight, you probably want to send a few messages related to their itinerary:

• Booking confirmation (immediately after the user makes their reservation)
• Seat selection/upgrade nudge (one week before the departure date)
• Check-in reminder (24 hours before the departure date)

A journey is a great way to automate sending these messages to users who have active flight bookings. However, you don't want to message users incorrect information after they update or cancel a reservation! To prevent this, you can set up a filter before each message tile to ensure that the original booking is still active before users receive the message.

Let's assume that Fantastic Flights uses three custom events to track flight bookings, cancellations, and updates:

• flightBooking
• bookingUpdate
• bookingCancellation

Since a user could change or cancel their booking before their departure date, it's important to check throughout the journey that nothing has changed since the booking was originally received. For this example, let's say the flightBooking custom event adds users to a journey called "Flight Booking Confirmation Sequence." Here's what that journey might look like:

# Removing users from the journey if they cancel a reservation

Since flightBooking is the triggering event for this journey, you can reference data from the flightBooking event that added the user to the journey using Handlebars expressions. In this example, let's assume every flightBooking, bookingUpdate, and bookingCancellation event includes a data field called bookingId.

In each filter tile, you'll need to set up a check to determine if any bookingUpdate or bookingCancellation events with the same bookingId as the original flightBooking event have occurred since the user was added to the journey. Here's what those filtering criteria might look like:

Note that you'll need to check the option Filter by: All events and user profile fields, since you're comparing multiple events in these filtering criteria.

When the user arrives at the filter tile, if there are no bookingUpdated or bookingCancelled events with the same bookingId as the original reservation, the user will go down the No path (meaning nothing has changed with the original reservation). This path connects to the message tile that sends the check-in reminder message. If there is a bookingUpdated or bookingCancelled event with the same bookingId as the original reservation, the user will go down the Yes path (meaning the original reservation was updated or cancelled). Leaving this path unconnected means users will exit the journey.

It's generally best to remove users from the journey at this point, since the original triggering event data is no longer relevant.

# What about exit rules and Hold Until tiles?

# Adding users to a different journey if they update a reservation

The filters we set up in the "Flight Booking Confirmation Sequence" journey remove users from the journey if a bookingUpdate event with a matching bookingId occurs (meaning the user's original flight itinerary was updated or cancelled). If the itinerary is cancelled, you no longer need to send reminders for the user to select seats or check in. But if the itinerary was updated, you still need to send those messages — just for different dates or a different destination.

One way to do this is to set up a second journey (for example, "Updated Flight Itinerary Sequence") that is triggered by the bookingUpdate custom event. The journey setup is almost identical to the "Flight Booking Confirmation Sequence" journey, but it uses a different triggering event — which refreshes the event data you can reference in the journey with the most up-to-date information.

# Checking for the most recent instance of an event

Sometimes, it's helpful to know if the occurrence of an event is the most recent instance of its kind. For example, consider a traveler who's updated their flight reservation more than once. You may want to check if a given update to the flight reservation is the most recent one the user has made.