Paloma Workflow Guide

This guide covers how event inquiries move through Paloma, from the moment a guest submits the widget to the day you close the event out. It’s written for the people on your team who handle inquiries day to day: events leads, GMs, hosts covering a shift.

If you read one page on this site, make it this one. Every other workflow on the dashboard hangs off the ideas here.

How event inquiries work

Paloma sits in the email loop between you and your guests. A guest submits an inquiry via the booking widget on your site, and Paloma does three things at once:

1. Sends the guest a confirmation that looks like it came from your venue.
2. Sends your team a notification email with concierge@palomaparties.com on the CC line.
3. Lists the inquiry on your dashboard, so anyone on the team can pick it up.

From that point forward, every reply on the email thread runs through Paloma. We process each message, update the inquiry’s fields (date, party size, occasion, and so on), write a plain-English comment on each field explaining what changed, and move the status when the conversation calls for it. Your team works the inquiry like any other email thread, and the dashboard stays current without anyone clicking a button.

The dashboard is your at-a-glance view: who hasn’t been replied to yet, what’s pending, what’s on the calendar, what closed. Email is where the conversation actually happens.

The inquiry statuses

Every inquiry in Paloma carries one of ten statuses, grouped into four buckets.

Discussion statuses. The inquiry is being discussed and is tentative:

Event statuses. The inquiry is on its way to becoming an event, or already there:

Non-event statuses. The inquiry won’t become a booked event:

Archived. The inquiry is hidden from your default views. Use this for spam, test submissions, or accidental duplicates. The email thread, timeline, and history are preserved; the inquiry just stops appearing in your active lists.

A couple of notes:

• On Hold and Waitlisted are optional. If you don’t see them in your status menu, switch them on from your venue’s Event Management settings.
• Statuses are not one-way streets. You can walk a Lost or Cancelled inquiry back to Discussion if the guest comes back to the table. Both transitions stay in the history.

Responding to an inquiry

The first reply is the moment Paloma moves an inquiry from Inquiry to Discussion. Two ways to send it:

Reply-All to the email thread

When a new inquiry email comes in, Reply-All. Your response goes to the guest and back to Paloma in the same send, which keeps the thread alive and lets us pick up the conversation. Even a short message (“Yes, we have you booked for the 15th”) is enough to move the status, update the event fields, and land on the inquiry’s timeline.

Two things to know about Reply-All:

• The concierge address sits in the CC line on every Paloma email. As long as you Reply-All, it stays in the thread and we stay in the loop.
• Some email clients quietly drop CC recipients on Reply-All. If you notice an inquiry not updating after you’ve replied, check the CC line before you send. If concierge@palomaparties.com isn’t there, add it back manually.

We recommend setting up your inquiry email as a distribution list (events lead and GM at minimum), so coverage doesn’t depend on one person being at their desk.

Replying from the dashboard

You can also reply from the inquiry detail page in the dashboard. Replies sent from the dashboard automatically include your venue email, so the team stays looped in if the guest writes back. This works well when:

• You handled the conversation by phone and just need a written reply on the record.
• You’re catching up on multiple inquiries in one sitting.
• A teammate is covering for someone who’s out.

Let Paloma draft your reply

From the dashboard’s compose box, you can ask Paloma to draft a reply for you. Paloma scans the thread, picks up on the guest’s open questions and your team’s prior responses, and writes a first pass you can edit before sending. Useful when you want a head-start without typing from a blank box, or when you’re working through a stretch of inquiries in one sitting.

The draft lands in the same compose box as a manual reply, so editing, CC’ing, and sending all work the same way. Nothing goes out until you hit send.

What happens after you reply

Every email Paloma sees, in either direction, runs through the same pass:

• Event fields update. A new headcount, a moved time, a different occasion. Paloma extracts the change and updates the inquiry. Each field tracks who set it (Paloma, a person, or both), and you can override any value from the dashboard. We respect manual edits.
• Field comments explain each change. When a field updates, a short field comment lands on it in plain English (“Guest agreed to 7pm instead of 6:30pm in their email of August 14”). The comments roll up into the inquiry’s timeline, which is your audit trail and your context when an inquiry has been quiet for weeks.
• Per-email signals roll up. Direction, sentiment, urgency, and whether a reply is required get summarized on the inquiry, which feeds the follow-up digest and the “needs attention” cues in your dashboard.

Moving toward booked

There are two statuses between Discussion and a completed event, and the gap between them is intentional.

The split exists because guest intent and your team’s confirmation are two different facts. A guest can say “yes” hours or days before your team has had a chance to check the calendar, line up the room, or square things off with another system you keep in sync. Confirmed is the flag that says “still needs your team’s check.” Booked is the real conversion event.

For some venues, Paloma is the booking system: you don’t keep a separate calendar of record, so Booked is purely “we’ve said yes back.” For venues that run a separate system (OpenTable, SevenRooms, an in-house tool), Booked is the moment the event lands there too. Either way, the meaning is the same from the inquiry’s side: your team has committed.

You can move the status by hand from the status pill on the inquiry detail page, or you can let Paloma move it for you when an email carries a clear signal. Ambiguous emails leave the status where it is. We’d rather wait for a human than guess wrong.

If a “booked” event goes back into negotiation, you can walk the status from Booked to Discussion without losing any history. Both transitions stay in the audit trail.

When the calendar starts showing the event

The dashboard calendar populates as soon as Paloma knows the event date, no matter what status the inquiry is in. Inquiries in Discussion, Confirmed, Booked, and Completed all appear, so the team can spot date conflicts early in the conversation. The calendar color matches the status pill, so a glance is enough to see what’s tentative and what’s locked in. Multi-day events show one entry per date, all tied back to the same inquiry.

Staying on top of open inquiries

The follow-up digest is your safety net. It’s an email Paloma sends to your team on a cadence we set up with you (typically weekly or every few days), summarising the guests who might be waiting on you so nothing falls through the cracks. Use it to budget your time for the day or delegate work depending on what’s on your plate.

The digest has three sections:

A few things worth knowing:

• Your own follow-up to a guest does not put an inquiry into Awaiting reply. The section only fires when the latest message in the thread is from the guest, so you don’t get nagged about your own pending courtesy follow-ups.
• Each section is capped at ten inquiries, with a “+N more” tail when there’s a longer list.
• Inquiries that have been quiet for more than 30 days drop off the digest entirely. If you want them back in view, open them from the dashboard.

Quieting an inquiry without changing its status

Sometimes an inquiry doesn’t need a nudge right now, but you don’t want to change its status either. Maybe the guest asked for a callback next week. Maybe you’re holding the date pending a co-host’s check-in. From the inquiry detail page, you can snooze the follow-up to a date you choose, or dismiss it entirely. Either action takes the inquiry out of the digest without touching its status pill. Once the snooze date passes, or new activity lands on the thread, Paloma starts surfacing it again.

To change the cadence or the recipient list, or to switch on the leaner digest format, reach out to Paloma support and we’ll set it up. If you manage more than one venue under the same Paloma organization, we can also roll all your venues into a single digest, so you get one email instead of one per site.

Closing an inquiry

Every inquiry resolves into one of four terminal statuses. All four are set by hand today.

Marking an event Complete

Once the event has happened, change the status to Completed. You can do this from the status pill on the inquiry detail page, or from the Event Recap form at the top of the same page.

We recommend the recap form. It captures the final guest count, the realized sales (if Sales Tracking is on for your org), success and guest-experience scoring, quick tags, and any post-event notes, all in one save. The recap also marks the event Complete in the same action, so you don’t have to do it twice. Recap data is optional; the inquiry can sit in Completed without any of it filled in.

For information on enabling and configuring the recap form, see the Event Recap guide.

Marking an inquiry Lost

If the guest declines, goes silent, or you can’t accommodate them, change the status to Lost and pick a reason from the menu. The reason is captured alongside the transition and feeds your reporting over time.

The menu covers nine reasons, written from the inquiry’s point of view:

Each reason also records which side drove it (guest, venue, or system), so your reporting can tell you which losses are about your team’s process and which are about the guest.

Paloma will also move an inquiry to Lost automatically when a guest email carries a clear decline or “thanks but no thanks” signal. Anything ambiguous stays where it is and waits for a person.

Cancelling a booked event

If an already-booked event is called off, change the status from Booked to Cancelled and add a reason. Cancellation reasons live in the audit trail the same way Lost reasons do.

Archiving

Archived is for inquiries that were never real: spam, test submissions, duplicates. You can archive a single inquiry from the detail page, or use list-view bulk archive to sweep multiple rows at once. Archiving doesn’t delete anything (the email thread, timeline, and history stay intact), it just hides the inquiry from your default views.

Don’t use Archived as a catch-all for old inquiries that fizzled. Use Lost for those, with a reason. Your reporting depends on the distinction.

Common scenarios

A guest emails you outside of Paloma

If an inquiry lands in your inbox directly, forward it to concierge@palomaparties.com. Include any context you have (“Please add this as Discussion, I’ll reply from the dashboard”). Paloma creates a new inquiry from the forward and you’ll see it on the dashboard within a minute or two. Reply from the dashboard to bring the guest into the thread.

A guest calls in

If a guest reaches out by phone, you have four options:

1. Point them to your widget. Take the high-level details on the call, then send them to your /events page (or wherever your widget lives) to submit the inquiry. The widget captures everything cleanly and the inquiry flows into Paloma automatically.
2. Email Paloma the details. Take the details on the call, then send them to concierge@palomaparties.com. We’ll create the inquiry from your email.
3. Fill out the widget on their behalf. If you have a tablet or phone handy, walk through the widget live during the call.
4. Create the inquiry yourself in the dashboard. From the inquiries page, start a brand new inquiry from an empty form. Type in what you have so far (the guest’s name, the event date, party size, any notes from the call), save, and Paloma takes it from there. Useful when you want to capture the request on the spot, mid-call.

After any phone conversation about an existing inquiry, close the loop with a written record: Reply-All to the inquiry email, or change the status from the dashboard. Otherwise the inquiry will look unanswered to your team and to Paloma.

Covering for a teammate

If a teammate is out, open the dashboard, find the inquiry, and skim the timeline to catch up on what’s been said. Reply from the dashboard (or Reply-All from email), letting the guest know you’re stepping in. The conversation history travels with the inquiry, so no one is starting from scratch.

Troubleshooting

“I replied, but the inquiry status didn’t update”

The most common cause is replying directly to the guest without Reply-All, which leaves Paloma off the thread. Fix: Reply-All to the email, or change the status from the dashboard.

“I’m using Reply-All but Paloma still isn’t picking it up”

Some email clients (especially certain Outlook and mobile mail configurations) silently drop the CC recipients on Reply-All. How to check: Look at the CC field before you send. If concierge@palomaparties.com isn’t there, add it back. If this keeps happening, let us know and we can usually sort it out on our side.

“I’m getting follow-up nudges for an inquiry I already handled”

The follow-up digest watches inquiries by status. If the status hasn’t moved, Paloma still thinks it’s open. The fix depends on what happened:

• Replied by phone and never wrote it down? Change the status from the dashboard (to Discussion, Confirmed, or Lost, whichever fits) or Reply-All to the email thread with a short note.
• Inquiry is dead but still sitting in Inquiry or Discussion? Mark it Lost with a reason. The digest stops nudging immediately.

“My email isn’t being recognized”

Paloma matches incoming email by the addresses on file for your venue. If you reply from a personal email, a second work address, or an alias we haven’t registered, we can’t link your response to the inquiry. The message gets flagged for manual review (it’s not lost), but the inquiry won’t update automatically. Let us know the address you’re sending from and we can usually add it as an alias.

“Old inquiries are cluttering my dashboard”

If you’ve got inquiries sitting in Inquiry or Discussion from weeks ago, they’re almost certainly resolved but never updated. Take a few minutes to sweep them:

• Mark the ones that didn’t convert as Lost.
• Mark the ones that did as Confirmed or Booked.
• Archive only the ones that were spam or test submissions.

A clean active list makes the dashboard, the digest, and your stats all more useful.

“I’m not receiving Paloma emails”

Paloma emails come from @palomaparties.com addresses (concierge@, hello@, and a few others). If your spam filter or email security software is catching them, allowlist the domain. In most clients, marking one as Not Spam is enough to keep the rest out of junk.

Accessing the dashboard

The Paloma team adds your account before your first login. Once you’re set up:

1. Go to app.palomaparties.com.
2. Enter your work email.
3. Check your inbox for the login code.
4. Enter the code, and you’re in.

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