⏱ Estimated time: 10 minutes

👤 Role: Reservation Managers, Spa Managers, Reception Teams, E-commerce Administrators

What you'll learn:

• How to identify and define ‘In Progress’ orders across different departments.

• The steps required to manually integrate failed bookings into external systems.

• How to reconcile order statuses to ensure your reporting remains accurate.

• Understanding common technical reasons for integration failures.

When should I use this?

You should follow this process whenever an order fails to automatically sync from the Ecommerce platform to your property management system (PMS) or booking software.

Key Logic:

An In Progress status typically indicates a "handshake" failure. While the payment has been successfully captured via your payment gateway (e.g., Stripe), the digital instruction to create that reservation in your external system (like Premier, SynXis, or ResDiary) was interrupted. Manual intervention is required to ensure the guest has a physical reservation waiting for them upon arrival.

Before you start:

• Ensure you have administrative access to the Ecommerce platform.

• Have your external booking system (Premier, SynXis, ResDiary, etc.) open and logged in.

• Confirm payment success by checking the Payments and Refunds tab within the specific order.

Step-by-step:

1. Identify the 'In Progress' Order

Keep a proactive eye on order flow to catch integration issues before the guest arrives.

• Email Alerts: Watch for automated notifications with the subject line "External Booking Failed."

• Manual Filter: Navigate to the Orders page in the Ecommerce platform. Set the Status filter to In Progress to view all pending integrations.

• Retail Context: For retail, this status simply means the order is placed and is awaiting your team to begin the picking or dispatch process.

2. Manually Process the Booking or Order

Because the automated link failed, you must act as the bridge between the Ecommerce platform and your on-site software.

• Spa Bookings (EMS Premier):

1. Manually create the booking in Premier as an "offline" reservation.

2. Use the guest details provided in the Ecommerce order view.

3. Assign the deposit amount to the specific Ecommerce payment method (e.g., onejourney / ecommerce / revspa) to ensure your end-of-day accounts balance.

• Room & Table Bookings:

1. Manually add the booking into your PMS or ResDiary.

2. Important: For SynXis, check the system first; the reservation may occasionally exist there even if the status didn't update in the Ecommerce platform.

• Retail Orders:

1. Prepare the items for collection or dispatch the goods via your chosen courier.

3. Update the Ecommerce Platform Status

Once the physical booking or retail task is secured, you must update the digital record to stop it from appearing as an "action required" item.

1. Open the specific order in the Ecommerce platform.

2. Update the Item Status to Confirmed.

3. Update the Order Status to Complete.

4. This ensures the guest receives any relevant confirmation emails and your sales reporting is accurate.

4. Determine if Support Intervention is Required

While the manual steps fix the immediate guest experience, you may want to investigate the "why."

• Daily Monitoring: Our Support team monitors these failures daily and investigates recurring themes.

• Contacting Us: If you notice a high volume of these errors in a short window, reach out via live chat or email.

• Note: Even if you contact Support, you must still perform the manual booking steps above to protect the guest's reservation.

Best practice:

Check the Logs: You can often find the specific reason for a failure (like a timeout or "No Availability" error) by checking the error logs within the order details. This helps you explain the situation clearly if you need to contact the guest.

Why does this happen?

System	Common Reason	Logic
Premier	Bill Errors / Server Timeouts	If your local server is down or the PMS connection times out during payment posting, the integration breaks.
SynXis	Update Failures	Occasional API communication gaps prevent the "Success" message from returning to the Ecommerce platform.
ResDiary	Race Conditions	If a guest snags the last table on the ResDiary site at the exact millisecond your Ecommerce guest hits "Pay," the table is lost.
All	API Downtime	General maintenance or outages at the third-party provider side.

Important Notice:

Payment is usually safe: An In Progress status does not mean the payment failed. It almost always means the payment was successful, but the booking was not created. Always verify the funds in the Payments and Refunds tab or your Stripe dashboard before declining a guest's request.