Skip to content
Start free trial
Browse docs

WhatsApp & the inbox

WhatsApp and email arrive in one shared inbox, attached to the trip they belong to, so anyone on your team can pick up a conversation. It's under Communications → Messages.

Connect your WhatsApp number

You use your own WhatsApp Business number, not a shared one.

  1. Go to Settings → Marketing & analytics and find the WhatsApp Business card.
  2. Press Connect WhatsApp. A guided setup walks you through Meta Business, where you pick or create a business account and a phone number.
  3. Come back, and the card shows your display name, number and connection date.

Do this in a desktop browser; the setup needs a real browser window, so the apps offer a link to open one. Reconnect WhatsApp starts over; Disconnect stops inbound messages.

The inbox

The conversation list is on the left, the thread on the right.

  • Filter by channel with the All, WhatsApp and email pills, and narrow further with Mine and Unread.
  • Sort by Recent, or by Waiting to put the person who's been waiting longest at the top.
  • Outbound messages show delivery ticks — sent, delivered, read — or a red mark if something failed.

Most conversations attach themselves to the right booking or inquiry automatically, matching the phone number or email address and falling back to reading the message. When it can't tell, use Link to booking or inquiry in the thread header; the chips there then take you straight to the record.

Mine follows the inquiry, not the chat: a conversation is yours when its linked inquiry is assigned to you, under Sales → Inquiries. See Sending a proposal.

The 24-hour rule

WhatsApp lets you reply freely for 24 hours after a customer messages you. After that, you can only send a message you've had approved in advance. This isn't a Taplany rule — it's how WhatsApp works for every business — but it's the reason templates exist. Answer while the window is open; use a template when you're the one starting the conversation.

Templates

Communications → Message templates holds everything you can send: Email, which needs no approval; WhatsApp Text, a saved reply for inside the 24-hour window; and WhatsApp Template, approved in advance for reaching out cold or after the window closes.

A template holds all its languages together, one tab each, and carries named fields — the customer's name, the trip, a date, an amount — filled in from the booking when you send.

WhatsApp templates have to be approved by Meta: one moves from draft, to pending once submitted, to approved or rejected. If a single language is rejected the whole template is flagged, so check the tabs. You're notified when a status changes, because a rejected template can quietly block messages you rely on.

Taplany's built-in templates — its standard emails, the footer at the bottom of every email you send, and the out-of-hours reply text — open read-only. Press Customize to get your own copy in every language and edit it; from then on your copy is what goes out, marked Customized in the list. If Taplany later updates the original, your copy keeps your wording and the language tab tells you. Restore original deletes your copy in every language and goes back to Taplany's version; your changes can't be recovered. Email changes can take up to five minutes to reach outgoing mail. Approved WhatsApp templates can't be customized this way; create your own instead.

Out of hours

Settings → Working hours sets your timezone and your open and close times for each day. A WhatsApp message arriving outside those hours gets one automatic reply, in the customer's language — and it won't repeat itself at the same person all evening.

AI drafts, sent by a person

When a message comes in, a draft reply is prepared under AI suggests — in the customer's language, in the tone of your own recent replies, with up to three versions and the record behind every date and figure it quotes. The notes beside each draft — why it was written and what to check — are written in your team's language, set in AI → Reply drafts → Settings (Team language); the reply itself stays in the customer's language.

Use this reply puts a draft in the composer. It is never sent for you. You read it, edit it, and press send.

Before it writes, the assistant can look up the customer's own proposal, booking and payments, so a draft uses their real dates, hotels and amounts. Under each draft, Based on shows the records it cites and what it looked up. An amount that is not in the customer's records shows in red, and Use this reply then asks for a second click (Use anyway) before the draft goes into the composer.

The record look-ups are switched on in Automations → AI agents → Reply drafts, when they are available for your account, and you can turn them off there at any time. Nothing is ever sent for you.

Control the spend in Settings → AI & budget: a Monthly cap, a warning threshold, and how many automatic suggestions per hour you want — zero turns them off.

Follow-ups and alerts

Communications → Message sequences holds drips and follow-ups across email and WhatsApp, each showing its trigger and whether it's Active or Paused. Communications → Notifications is your team's activity feed — new inquiries, bookings, payments, signed contracts — and it reaches the staff apps too. Customers never receive these.

What's next

Still stuck? Contact us.