Last updated July 24, 2026
Automations in JourneyFuse are powered by Journeys — step-by-step email workflows that fire automatically based on trip events and timelines. Instead of managing individual email triggers, you build a Journey once and it handles everything from booking confirmation to post-trip follow-up.
This is the single most common question we get, so it is worth 30 seconds up front. Three separate things share the work, and they are joined by one thing: the supplier category.
| Piece | Where it lives | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Supplier pack | Templates → Template Packs | The pre-written emails for one supplier. Content only. A pack never decides when anything sends. |
| Automation | Automations | The schedule. It takes those emails and attaches each one to a trigger and a delay. |
| Supplier workflow | Settings → Supplier Workflows | The router. You put a trip on a workflow, and the workflow's categories decide which pack and which automation that trip gets. |
The short version: the pack is the pantry, the automation is the recipe, and the supplier workflow is what decides which recipe this trip is cooking.
So when you assign the MSC workflow to a cruise, JourneyFuse installs the MSC pack (if you don't already have it) and enrolls the trip in your MSC automation. Both happened because of that one dropdown on the trip.
Two consequences worth knowing:
An automation is an ordered sequence of steps. Each step sends an email (or creates a task) at a specific point in the trip lifecycle:
When a trip is enrolled in a journey, JourneyFuse works through each step automatically — you never have to remember to send these emails manually.
Go to Automations in the sidebar. Click Add automation to open the preset picker, where you choose a scope at the top:
Pick a preset to generate an automation with matching email templates, or choose Start from blank to build your own. The trip-automation presets are grouped in the picker exactly as follows:
If you choose Client automation, the picker offers one preset (Client Birthday) plus Start from blank. A blank client automation has two triggers under Client Events: Client Birthday (an annual birthday email to every client in your workspace) or Passport Expiring (a reminder based on the client's own passport expiry date on file, with quick presets for 6, 9, or 12 months before expiration). Unlike the trip-scoped Passport Expiring trigger, this one fires for any client regardless of whether they have an active trip booked.
A preset you have already generated shows a Created badge in the picker and opens the existing automation instead of making a duplicate.
Building an all-inclusive resort or other destination-specific flow? There isn't a dedicated preset for it — start from the General Journey or Start from blank, then customize the steps. To have it auto-enroll only the right trips, tag those trips and use the automation's enrollment rules to require that tag (see Auto-Enrollment).
Inside an automation there are two tabs:
Above the tabs sits the enrollment rule ("Automatically enroll trips…"), the Active toggle, and a Needs attention panel if any step failed to send.
Every workspace is seeded with a pre-built General Journey (plus a set of supplier-specific automations), each containing steps built from your email templates. The General Journey ships active and is marked Default, so it auto-enrolls new trips right away. Before relying on it, review it:
Because the General Journey ships active and default, review and customize its email templates early — new trips will start receiving its automated emails as soon as they're enrolled.
Every step has a trigger (when it fires) and an action (what it does). There are a few action types, and they behave differently:
Sends the chosen email template at the trigger time. Who receives it is set by the template's recipient, not by who set up the automation:
A template only goes to the people listed as its recipients. An "Agent" email is never also sent to the client unless the template explicitly lists both.
Creates an in-app task on the trip, assigned to the trip's assigned agent, with a due date matching the step's trigger date. It shows up under Tasks (and on the trip). It is an internal to-do for you, the agent. It does not send an email and the client is not notified or involved in any way. There is no separate email reminder beyond your normal task and notification surfaces in the app.
Some automations can also add a tag (useful for form-triggered client automations) or call a webhook to notify an outside system. These are advanced and optional.
When you add or edit a step, the trigger dropdown is grouped by phase. This is the complete list for a trip automation:
| Group | Triggers |
|---|---|
| Booking | Trip Created, Booking Created |
| Payments | Deposit Due, Final Payment Due, Payment Due |
| Before Departure | X Days Before Departure, 60 / 30 / 14 / 7 / 1 Days Before, Day of Trip, Departure |
| After Departure | X Days After Departure |
| Before Return | X Days Before Return |
| After Return | X Days After Return, 1 Day After Return, 3 Days After Return, Return |
| Documents | Passport Expiring |
| Disney Cruise — Tier-Aware | Port Adventures Window, Palo / Remy Window, Online Check-In Opens |
| Disney Cruise — Fixed Window | Navigator App Setup, Pirate Night Prep |
| Form | When a form is submitted |
Client automations use Client Birthday and Passport Expiring instead; lead automations use When a new lead is created.
About Trip Created vs Booking Created. Both belong to the moment a trip starts, and both are set up when the trip is created — but they wait for different things:
Any booking counts, at any status. There is no separate "Booked" status to switch a booking into: the statuses are Not booked → Pending → Confirmed, and simply having a booking on the trip is what releases the email. If you add a booking and then cancel or delete it, the confirmation is cancelled too.
About the day number. The four "X Days…" triggers (before/after departure, before/after return) treat the number you enter as the actual day count. Every other trigger treats it as an extra nudge on top of a fixed point, so leave it at 0 unless you want to shift the send.
Don't stack a whole sequence on "Trip Created." It is tempting to build booking → pre-trip → post-trip as Trip Created +0, +30, +90 days. That schedules off the day you made the trip, not off the sail date, so a booking made 11 months out and one made 3 weeks out get the same calendar. Use Trip Created only for the immediate booking emails, then switch to the departure and return triggers for everything after.
Automations can be assigned to trips automatically when trips are created. There are two types:
Mark an automation as Default and it will apply to all new trips. This is perfect for your General Journey — every trip gets booking confirmations, payment reminders, and follow-ups without any manual work.
Create specialized automations that auto-enroll trips involving a specific supplier category. Categories are per-supplier — for example Royal Caribbean, Carnival, Celebrity, Norwegian, Princess, MSC, Virgin Voyages, Disney Cruise Line, Walt Disney World, Disneyland, Universal Orlando, International, and Group. When a trip matches a supplier category, only the supplier-specific automation is enrolled — the default general automation is skipped to avoid duplicate emails.
Priority logic: Supplier-specific automations always override the default. If a Disney Cruise Line trip is created and you have both a General Journey (default) and a Disney Cruise Line automation, only the Disney Cruise Line automation is enrolled.
The enrollment rule sits at the top of the automation, written as a sentence: "Automatically enroll trips involving …".
Under the sentence, JourneyFuse shows a live count: "Currently matches 12 upcoming trips", with a View link into the Trips tab.
An automation with no supplier and no tags enrolls nothing. This is the most common reason a brand-new automation "doesn't do anything." Unless it is marked Default, an empty rule reads "(only runs for trips you add on the Trips tab)" — the steps are fine, but no trip ever enters. Add the supplier category and the count starts filling in.
Supplier matching does not read the supplier name you typed on a booking. It reads the supplier timeline template set on the trip (the "Supplier" field on the trip, shown as e.g. Virgin Voyages (Custom)). Each of those templates carries the email categories that feed enrollment.
So a trip auto-enrolls in a supplier automation only when both are true:
If a trip has no supplier set, it matches no supplier automation — it will only pick up the Default automation. (Disney Cruise is the one exception: it is also detected from a booking's ship or supplier name.)
Auto-enrollment isn't limited to the moment a trip is created. A trip is also re-checked against your automations' enrollment rules whenever you:
So if you set up a tag-based or supplier-specific automation after some trips already exist, just add the tag (or set the supplier) and those trips enroll automatically — no need to manually add the automation one by one.
This is safe to do at any time:
Don't want to build a journey from scratch? When you click Add automation and pick a preset, JourneyFuse generates the journey by pulling in the email templates from your Automation Templates that match that preset's category. A few examples of what each preset assembles:
| Preset | What It Includes |
|---|---|
| General Journey | Welcome emails, payment reminders, pre-trip prep, post-trip follow-ups |
| Disney Cruise Line | Castaway Club port-adventures window, online check-in, Palo/Remy reminders, Pirate Night prep, welcome home |
| Royal Caribbean | Cruise Planner deals, Set Sail Pass check-in, shore excursions, embarkation guide, welcome home |
| International Travel | Passport reminders, visa guidance, travel insurance, pre-departure checklist |
| Group Travel | Group coordination, rooming list collection, payment tracking, pre-trip meeting |
The exact steps depend on which matching templates exist in your workspace. If you haven't created category-specific templates yet, a preset may generate fewer steps.
Disney Cruise automations schedule key milestones around each guest's Castaway Club tier automatically — you don't pick a fixed "days before sail" for these. When a trip's Castaway Club level is set (it's auto-derived from the highest tier across the household), the booking-window steps shift to that guest's real window.
Tier-aware triggers (auto-shift by Castaway Club level — days before sail):
| Trigger | What it schedules | First-Time | Silver | Gold | Platinum | Pearl |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Port Adventures Window | Excursion booking opens | 75 | 90 | 105 | 120 | 123 |
| Palo / Remy Window | Adult dining opens (same window) | 75 | 90 | 105 | 120 | 123 |
| Online Check-In Opens | Port arrival time + youth clubs | 30 | 33 | 35 | 38 | 40 |
Concierge staterooms get a wider Port Adventures booking window.
Fixed-window triggers (same for every tier):
| Trigger | When it fires |
|---|---|
| Navigator App Setup | ~150 days before sail |
| Pirate Night Prep | ~14 days before sail |
Both kinds are picked from the trigger dropdown when you add or edit a step in the automation builder, under the "Disney Cruise" groups. Leave the day offset at its default and the trigger handles the timing; set a small offset (e.g. -2) only to nudge the send a day or two earlier than the window.
The Port Adventures, Palo / Remy, and Online Check-In emails speak to the guest's actual tier using merge fields, so each client sees their own window — not a generic table:
{{castaway_tier}} — e.g. Gold{{port_adventures_window_days}} / {{port_adventures_window_date}} — the Port Adventures window in days, and the exact date it opens{{online_checkin_window_days}} / {{online_checkin_window_date}} — same, for online check-inSo the Port Adventures email reads: "As a Gold Castaway Club member, your Port Adventures booking window opens 105 days before you sail, which is …" Guests with no recorded tier fall back to First-Time (75 days for Port Adventures, 30 for check-in).
For a full worked example of building one from scratch, see Building a Supplier Automation Step by Step.
Open a step and click Edit email to edit the template right inside the step modal. Edit the subject, body, and merge fields, then use the Back button to return to the step's trigger and action settings without leaving the automation.
Editing an email edits the shared template everywhere it's used. Templates are not copied per trip. When you click Edit email (here, on a trip, or in the Templates area), you are editing the one shared template, so the change applies to every trip and automation that uses it going forward. To change the wording for a single trip only, send a one-off email from that trip's Communications tab instead.
Hover over any step to reveal reorder arrows (↑/↓). Steps are ordered by trip lifecycle — booking events first, then payment-related, then pre-trip, then post-trip.
The automation builder shows steps in a clean row layout:
The individual emails that automations point at live on the Templates page in the sidebar, which has these tabs:
Template packs are how emails group together. They are install-only: you install (or remove) a pack, but you can't create your own pack or drag your own emails into one. Your hand-written emails live in Automation Templates and are organized by the Category field you choose when you save (General, Cruise, Disney, International, Group Travel, Booking Confirmation, Payment Reminder, Welcome Packet, Custom).
That means a set of, say, six emails you wrote for one cruise line won't collect themselves into a supplier folder. The automation itself is the folder. Once those six emails are steps in your Virgin Voyages automation, the Builder tab is the single place you open to see the whole sequence in order.
Give your own emails a name prefix (e.g.
VV - Booking Confirmed) so they sort together in the template list and are easy to find in the step picker.
On each trip's Communications tab, you'll see an Email Automation card showing:
Click Add Automation on the Communications tab to manually enroll a trip in any active automation. This is useful for trips created before you set up auto-enrollment, or for adding a supplier-specific automation alongside the default.
Hover over an enrolled automation and click the trash icon to unenroll. This stops future automated emails for that automation but doesn't recall emails already sent.
The scheduled emails shown on a trip are the upcoming sends queued for that trip. Each one is a real, queued send with its own date. From there you can preview it, reschedule it, send it now, or cancel it for that trip without changing the underlying automation. Email steps appear here as scheduled emails. Create-task steps appear under Tasks instead, not as scheduled emails.
Most of these come from the trip's automation steps. A few may not: emails carrying their own built-in trigger can be queued directly from a pack without an automation behind them, and those still appear on the trip even though they are not a step in any automation. If you see a scheduled email on a trip that you cannot find in the automation's Builder tab, that is why. Cancel it on the trip, or turn the email off in Templates, and it stops.
A step can be told to stand down when it no longer applies. Open the step and set one or more conditions:
The classic use is a payment reminder: add Skip if paid in full and clients who have already sent the balance stop getting chased.
Skip conditions are opt-in, not automatic. Steps generated from a preset or template pack ship with no conditions set, so a payment reminder will send on schedule regardless of whether the trip is paid until you add the condition yourself. If you're building a payment step, add it.
Email templates use merge fields that are automatically filled when the email sends. Over 30 merge fields are available:
| Category | Example Fields |
|---|---|
| Client | {{client_name}}, {{client_first_name}}, {{client_email}} |
| Trip | {{trip_name}}, {{destination}}, {{start_date}}, {{end_date}}, {{trip_duration}} |
| Payment | {{due_date}}, {{amount_due}}, {{total_cost}}, {{amount_paid}} |
| Booking | {{booking_supplier}}, {{booking_confirmation}}, {{booking_type}} |
| Agent | {{agent_name}}, {{agent_email}}, {{agent_phone}} |
| Links | {{portal_link}}, {{documents_list}} |
When editing a template, click the Merge Fields button to browse and insert fields with one click.
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