Maintaining a clean and accurate guest list is crucial for effective marketing, accurate reporting, and delivering personalized guest experiences. Over time, duplicate guest files can accumulate due to variations in names, contact information, or booking methods. Our Guest Merge feature provides robust tools—both manual and automatic—to consolidate these duplicate records, ensuring a single, comprehensive profile for every customer.
By merging duplicates, you guarantee better data quality, leading to more successful marketing campaigns and a clearer understanding of your customer base.
This guide will walk you through the criteria used to identify duplicates and the steps for both manual and automatic merging.
Key Benefits of Merging Duplicates
Accurate Analytics: Consolidating files ensures that spend history, visit counts, and no-show rates are attributed to the correct, single guest profile, providing reliable data for business decisions.
Effective Marketing: Avoid sending duplicate communications (emails/SMS) to the same person, improving customer experience and campaign cost-efficiency.
Personalized Service: Staff can quickly view a complete history (bookings, orders, notes) on the correct file, allowing for better, personalized service during a guest's visit.
Data Organization: Eliminates clutter in your guest list, making it easier for your team to find and manage customer files.
How Duplicates Are Identified
The system identifies potential duplicate guest files based on two primary criteria:
Phone Number: A customer file is flagged as a duplicate if the phone number is also used for another guest profile.
Email Address: A customer file is flagged as a duplicate if the email address is also used for another guest profile.
When a guest is flagged as a duplicate, a visual indicator (duplicate tag) will appear next to their name in the guest list.
Manual Merging
Manual merging is ideal when you need to hand-select exactly which data points (like name, email, or language) should be retained from the various duplicate files.
Step 1: Access and Select Duplicate Guests
Log in to the Dashboard.
Access the Main Menu and click on Guest List.
Use the filter "Only Show Duplicates" to simplify your search.
Select the client files you wish to merge together. You can either:
Select a Single Guest: The system will display the duplicates it has found for that client.
Select Multiple Guests: Choose all the files you want to merge.
Click on the Merge Duplicates button at the top right.
Note: A guest file will not be available to merge if it has an upcoming reservation. This is to avoid communication issues for these bookings. An orange icon will appear on the guest card if a reservation is pending. You can merge the guest once the reservation has passed.
Step 2: Select Information to Retain
On the selection screen, you will choose which information to keep for the final, merged profile.
Select the preferred Name, Phone Number, Email Address, and Language from the options presented.
Consolidated Data: The following data from all merged profiles will be automatically carried over and combined into the new guest file:
Guest Tags and Notes
Number of Visits, Cancellations, and No-Shows
Past Reservations and Order History
Consent Status: The communication preference and consent status retained will be those from the most recent guest reservation.
Step 3: Confirm and Merge
Review your selections and click "Confirm" to finalize the merge process.
Automatic Merging
The automatic feature eliminates manual work by having the system identify and merge duplicates across your entire account daily. This ensures your guest list is always clean for marketing campaigns.
Enabling Automatic Merging
This feature is typically available only to Supervisor user accounts and is managed in the Back-Office.
Step 1: Access Guest Management Settings
Log in to the Libro Back-Office.
Click on Guest Management in the main navigation menu.
Step 2: Enable the Feature
Locate the section titled "Automatic Duplicate Guest Merging."
Toggle the switch to "Enable automatic merge of duplicate guests."
Click "Save" at the top right of the screen.
Tracking Merge Activity: The Guest Management Settings screen displays the status of the last merge, including the date/time and the number of duplicate files that were consolidated.
Detailed Merging Logic
Schedule: The system runs the automatic merge once per day at 2:00 AM (server time) to minimize disruption during peak hours.
Exclusion for Upcoming Reservations: To avoid communication disruptions, any Guest with an upcoming Reservation will not be merged. The merge will only occur once the Reservation has passed.
Data Retention: The most current information for each Guest will be preserved. If data is missing from the primary record, it will be copied from duplicate records. Any conflicting contact information is discarded in favor of the most recent details.
Combined Data points: When records are merged, the following are combined and recalculated into the main profile:
Activity: All past Reservations, total number of fulfillments, Cancellations, and No-Shows.
Financials: Total and Average Spent, all Deposits, Tickets (vouchers), and Transaction History.
Feedback: Average Review Ratings across all merged records.
Context: All unique Tags, Notes, and Order History.