Customizing Your Inquiry Questions

Every venue runs differently, so the questions your guests see in the booking widget should fit how you actually take inquiries. This guide covers what you can change yourself from the dashboard, where to find it, and when to lean on Paloma for the parts that aren’t self-serve yet.

How the inquiry flow is shaped

When a guest opens your booking widget, Paloma walks them through a short series of questions to capture the details you need: occasion, party size, date, time, contact info. The set of questions, the order, the copy on each one, and the choices a guest can pick from are all configurable per venue.

Two things to know up front:

• You and Paloma share the controls. A solid set of self-service controls lives on the dashboard, and we cover the rest from our side. Either way, you tell us what you want to see and we make it happen.
• Each venue is its own configuration. If you run more than one location, every venue has its own question set. A change you make for one doesn’t carry over to the others unless you make it there too.

Where you do this

Open the dashboard, click Settings, pick the venue, and choose Inquiry Questions from the Operations group. The page is titled Customize your Inquiry Steps, and most of this guide happens here.

You’ll see two parts:

• A Welcome Screen card at the top: the first thing guests see when they land in the widget.
• A Question Flow list below it: every question your guests will answer, in order.

Above the list, an Add Question button. Inside each row, a pencil to edit and a trash icon to remove. Required questions (like date and contact) can be reordered and edited but not removed.

When you change the flow itself (reordering, adding, removing), an Apply Changes button lights up at the bottom. Click it to save. Edits inside an individual question save when you click Save Changes on that question’s editor.

Editing a question

Click any question in the list to open its editor. The editor splits the screen: controls on the left, a live preview of the widget on the right, so you can see exactly what guests will see as you type.

The basics every question has:

Each field shows a small undo arrow when it’s been customized. Click it to reset back to the Paloma default. Save when you’re done.

Changing the answer options

For pick-one and pick-many questions (occasion, time slot, add-ons), the option list lives at the bottom of the editor. From there you can:

• Add a new option. Type the label, hit Add, and it joins the list.
• Edit an existing option. Click the label and type the new wording.
• Reorder. Drag the handle to move an option up or down.
• Remove. Click the X on the right.

This is the place to make the options match how you actually talk about your offerings. If you list rooms or packages, name them the way you name them on your menu and your site. Guests will recognise them faster.

Picking how a question looks

Pick-one questions have a Display Style control:

When you pick Buttons, you can also set the Button Size (default or small) and the Grid Columns (1 through 6, or auto-wrap). For Cards, each option carries its own icon, badge, and description so the card has presence.

Contact form details

The contact-info step at the end of the inquiry has its own controls. You can show or hide each field, and decide whether it’s required or optional:

• Phone number
• Name
• Organization

You can also turn on Contact Method Preference (lets guests say whether they prefer email or phone), and decide whether the contact form includes the inquiry summary on the same step, or sends guests to a separate summary screen first.

Customizing your occasion options

The occasion list is the first question most guests answer, and it sets the tone for the rest. We include the common ones out of the box: birthday, wedding, corporate, holiday, and so on. Most venues edit this list to match the events they actually host.

Open Settings → Inquiry Questions, click the What’s the occasion? question (or whatever you’ve titled it), and edit the options the same way you’d edit any pick-one list. Add the categories you specialise in, remove the ones you don’t take, and reorder so the most common one for your venue sits at the top.

The occasion answer also shapes the rest of the widget for that guest. We adapt later questions to the occasion the guest picked, so a wedding inquiry and a corporate dinner inquiry don’t feel identical. If you want a specific question to only appear for certain occasions, see the next section.

Adapting the flow based on prior answers

Sometimes you want a question to appear only in certain situations. A wedding-specific question shouldn’t bother a guest planning a small birthday. A “private room or main floor?” question only makes sense for parties above a certain size.

These conditional flows are real, and we run them for plenty of venues. The setup happens on our side today. When you open a question in the editor, you’ll see a callout at the top if it already carries conditions, so you know when and why it shows. To add, change, or remove a condition, send us a note describing what you want and we’ll wire it up.

The same goes for advanced copy that changes based on prior answers, like swapping the start-time subtitle when a private room has been picked. Tell us the rule in plain English and we’ll set it.

Adding venue-specific details to your questions

Most questions also support small venue-specific snippets that drop into the copy: a booking link for walk-in reservations, a parking note, a reservations email. Anything that varies by venue can live as a snippet, and we’ll set it up so it substitutes into the question wording at the right moment.

If you’d like a snippet referenced inside your questions or sample answers, send us the wording and we’ll add it.

The email guests get after they submit

The moment a guest finishes the inquiry, we send them a confirmation with their own summary of what they asked for. It’s the first thing your venue says back to them, and you can write both ends of it.

This one lives one page over from your questions: Settings, your venue, then Communications from the Operations group. Two cards near the bottom control the copy:

Both take the same light formatting, and each card previews what the guest will see as you type:

Two things worth knowing before you write:

• The footer takes the place of your response time message. While it’s empty, the email closes with the response time sentence you set in the Response Time Expectations card higher up the same page. Fill the footer in and your copy runs instead. The sentence you’d be replacing shows as grey placeholder text in the empty box. Guests still see your response time on the final screen of the widget either way.
• A short introduction shows in larger type. One line reads as a headline. Add a second paragraph or a list and the whole block settles to normal body size, which reads better than a wall of large text.

Common scenarios

We want to promote our packages in the confirmation email

Open Settings, your venue, then Communications, and write the pitch into Inquiry Email Footer Text. Bullets carry this well: two or three packages, a line each, with the detail that makes one worth asking about. It replaces your response time message, so if you still want guests to know when they’ll hear back, close with that in your own words.

We’ve added a new private dining room

Edit the Spaces question and add the room to the list. Use the name guests would recognise on your website. If the room only applies to certain occasions or party sizes, mention that when you write to us and we’ll add the condition.

Our occasion list is missing something

Open the occasion question, add the missing occasion to the list, and save. The widget picks it up on the next guest visit, so there’s no publish step. If you also want the rest of the flow to adapt to it (a custom follow-up question, different timing options), let us know.

The text on a question doesn’t sound like us

Open the question, edit the Display Title and Subtitle to match your voice, and save. The live preview on the right shows what the guest will see. If you want to test a few phrasings, save, reload the widget in another tab, and compare.

We don’t take phone-only inquiries

Open the contact question, set Phone Number Display to Don’t show phone number field, and save. Guests will only see the email field on the contact step.

A few things worth knowing

• There’s no publish step. When you save a question or apply a flow change, the widget picks it up on the next guest conversation. No deploys, no waiting.
• Required questions stay. Event date and contact info are required for an inquiry to be useful. You can edit and reorder them, but you can’t remove them.
• Each venue is its own configuration. Changes you make on one venue don’t apply to others, even within the same organisation. Multi-location operators usually like this: different rooms, different occasions, different vocabulary.
• Need a hand? The footer of the page has a Let us know what you need button for anything that isn’t self-service. We answer fast and we love this stuff.

Any questions? Email us at contact@palomaparties.com or book a meeting.