Contacts overview

Contacts is everyone you can reach — hotel guests and other contacts alike. It's your single list of people, with the context Viqal needs to message the right person at the right time.

Where contacts come from

• Mews (your PMS) — guests sync in automatically from your reservation system, with their stay details.

• Manual — people you add by hand who aren't in your PMS (press, partners, prospects).

• CSV — contacts you bulk-import from a spreadsheet.

Each contact's source is shown on their row and profile. Four summary cards at the top give the shape of your audience: total contacts, in-house now, arriving in the next 7 days, and your WhatsApp opt-in rate. To search, filter and tag, see Finding, filtering and bulk actions.

Adding contacts manually or by CSV

Guests flow in from your PMS automatically, so you rarely add those by hand — use manual and CSV adding for everyone else (press, partners, prospects).

• Add a single contact — select Add contact, enter name and phone (required) plus email, language, tags, a note and channel opt-in if you have it, then save. They appear marked as a Manual contact.

• Import from CSV — open the Add contact menu, choose Import from CSV, upload your spreadsheet and map its columns to Viqal fields. Imported contacts are marked as CSV.

Only add people you have a lawful basis to contact, and set their opt-in honestly before any marketing — see Consent and opt-in.

How guests sync from your PMS

Booked guests come in automatically and stay current without manual work.

• Direction: PMS → Viqal, read-only — Viqal reads from your PMS and never writes back.

• Frequency: roughly every few minutes. [RECHECK-AT-FREEZE: confirm the exact sync interval at launch.]

• What's mapped: guest contact details and the stay fields Viqal needs.

The sync chip at the top of Contacts shows the current state (healthy, syncing, delayed, failed or not connected). If sync is delayed or failing, a banner appears — use Retry, or open the sync panel and select Manage integration to check the connection in Settings → Integrations. Because the sync is read-only, a problem never changes data in your PMS — Viqal's copy is just behind until it's restored.

The contact profile

Select any contact to open their profile — a profile card on the left, four tabs on the right.

• Profile card — name, language, status and current/upcoming stay; Send message (opens the conversation in your Inbox), Edit, and more actions (copy phone, export, manage tags, archive, remove); plus quick contact details, lifetime mini-stats (stays, nights, spend, sentiment) and tags.

• Info — internal note, contact details, stay/contact summary, last conversation, channel consent and the danger zone.

• Stays — full reservation history (dates, nights, room, rate, spend, status).

• Activity — a timeline of everything that's happened (messages, tasks, tags, opt-in changes, journey and campaign sends), each labelled with its source.

• Analytics — total stays, nights and spend, average spend per night, booking channels, stay sentiment and a satisfaction score.

Select Edit to change tags, language and the internal note. For PMS-synced guests, name, phone and email are read-only (they come from Mews) — change them in your PMS and they sync across.

Archiving and removing contacts

Two ways to take a contact off your list — very different, so choose carefully.

• Archive (reversible) — hides a contact from your main list but preserves all history. Restore any time from the Archived tab. Archive from the profile, or several at once with bulk actions.

• Remove permanently (irreversible) — erases the contact, all their messages and all their activity; cannot be undone. To prevent mistakes it's a two-step confirmation in the profile's Danger zone. Use it deliberately — for example, to honour a guest's data-erasure request. If you only want them out of your working list, archive instead.

[NEEDS INPUT: confirm whether permanent removal also deletes data held to satisfy legal retention obligations, and how that interacts with the retention period.]