Last updated September 24, 2026
Most advisors already have the emails. You send the same welcome note after every booking, the same nudge before final payment, the same welcome-home message. What you want is for JourneyFuse to send them for you, in order, whenever someone books a particular supplier.
This article walks the whole build for one supplier, start to finish. The example uses Virgin Voyages, but every step is identical for Royal Caribbean, Sandals, Viking, or anything else you sell.
Budget about 30 minutes for the first one. The second takes ten.
An automation is two separate things, and it only works when both are in place:
Building beautiful steps and skipping the enrollment rule is the single most common way an automation ends up sending nothing. We cover it in Step 5, and it takes about fifteen seconds.
Go to Automations → Presets.
JourneyFuse ships supplier presets for most major cruise lines and parks. Click a preset's card to read every email in send order before you add anything. If there's one for your supplier, press Add. You get six or so professionally written emails (booking confirmation, onboard-credit and add-on deals, excursion planning, check-in, embark-day guide, welcome home), already on steps timed to the right point in the trip. It arrives switched off, so nothing sends until you're ready.
Two good reasons to add it even if you plan to write your own:
If there's no preset for your supplier, no problem. Skip to Step 2.
Go to Automations → Emails → New email → Write a new email.
For each email in your series, set:
VV - Booking Confirmed, VV - 90 Days Out, VV - Welcome Home.{{client_first_name}}, {{departure_date}}, and {{portal_url}} so each send is personalized. Click Merge Fields to insert them.Write all of them before you build the automation. It's much faster than bouncing back and forth.
An email holds wording only. When it sends and who it goes to (the client, everyone travelling, or you) are set on the automation step in Step 4.
Go to Automations → Add.
Either way you land on the automation's settings page, on the Steps tab.
This is the part that matters most. Each step is one email plus one trigger.
Click Add step, choose Send email, pick the email, then pick the trigger and who it goes to. A typical booking-to-return sequence looks like this:
| # | When | Trigger to pick | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The moment it's booked | Trip Booked | Booking confirmed, what happens next |
| 2 | A few days later | Trip Booked, days = 3 | Welcome aboard, what to expect from this line |
| 3 | 90 days before sailing | X Days Before Departure, days = 90 | Add-ons and onboard credit worth buying early |
| 4 | Final payment time | Final Payment Due | Balance reminder |
| 5 | 60 days out | X Days Before Departure, days = 60 | Excursions and dining |
| 6 | 30 days out | X Days Before Departure, days = 30 | Online check-in is open |
| 7 | 3 days out | X Days Before Departure, days = 3 | Embark day guide, what to pack |
| 8 | 3 days after they're home | X Days After Return, days = 3 | Welcome home, review request, book again |
Reorder with the ↑/↓ arrows that appear when you hover a step. Delete anything you don't want.
The one trap to avoid. It's natural to build the whole sequence off Trip Booked with increasing day counts (+0, +30, +90). Don't. Trip Booked counts from the day the trip was booked, not from the sail date, so a booking made 11 months out and one made three weeks out get completely different timing, and the "30 days out" email can land after they've already sailed. Use Trip Booked for the first couple of booking emails only, then switch to the departure and return triggers.
Add a skip condition to payment steps. On the final-payment step, tick Skip if paid in full. Payment emails that come from a preset already stop once the trip is paid in full; an email you wrote yourself may not, so without the tick the reminder can send on schedule even to clients who already paid.
Give late bookings their own path. A cruise booked two years out and one booked three months out rarely need the same emails. Under More options → Booking window, set a step to Booked at least … days out or Booked fewer than … days out. For example, mark the long-lead steps "at least 180" and add a short catch-up path marked "fewer than 180": each trip gets only the steps that fit when it was booked, all in one automation. JourneyFuse measures from the earliest booking date on the trip (or the day the trip was added, if no booking has a date). A trip with no departure date runs every step.
Mind Every trip's payment emails. Every trip already sends a Final Payment Due and a Payment Reminder, both counted from the final payment date. A supplier step with the final-payment milestone replaces both on that supplier's trips. Check the combined timeline under Automations before you switch it on.
You can also create tasks. Change a step's action to Create task and it makes an internal to-do for you on the trip instead of emailing anyone. Useful for "call them to confirm dining preferences."
At the top of the automation is a sentence that starts Trips.
Click the + next to it and pick your supplier, for example Virgin Voyages. The sentence becomes "Trips involving Virgin Voyages" and a live count appears underneath, for example 8 upcoming trips right now.
If you don't do this, the sentence reads "— only the ones you add by hand on the Trips tab" and the automation enrolls nobody on its own, no matter how good the steps are. That count line is your proof it's wired up.
JourneyFuse doesn't read the supplier name you typed on a booking. It reads the Supplier workflow field on the trip itself (shown as e.g. Virgin Voyages (Custom)). So for auto-enrollment to fire, both must be true:
You usually don't set that field by hand. Saving a booking fills it in when the trip has none yet: from the cruise line on a cruise, from the resort on an all-inclusive stay, and from the supplier itself for a few suppliers that have their own workflow but no booking type of their own. Charter Smarter yacht charters are one: book it as Other or Package and the trip gets the Charter Smarter workflow. A workflow someone already picked is never replaced.
If the count says 0 and you know you have trips with that line, open one of those trips and check its Supplier workflow first. That's almost always the cause. To fix many at once, see Automations (the Trips page's Supplier workflow bulk action).
Flip the automation to Active.
New trips with that supplier now enroll on their own. Switching it on does not add trips already on your books: open the automation's Trips tab and press Enroll all to add the matching ones. Setting a trip's Supplier workflow also enrolls it.
Nothing gets blasted out retroactively. When an existing trip enrolls, any email whose date has already passed lands under Needs you on that trip's Messages → Emails, where you choose Send now or Skip this email for each one. Only future steps queue up on their own.
Open one enrolled trip and go to its Messages tab. You should see:
Each scheduled email can be previewed, rescheduled, sent early, or cancelled for that one trip without touching the automation. This is the fastest sanity check that your timing came out the way you pictured it.
Some trips need a different date than the automation's rule gives them, such as a cruise line whose larger ships have their own deadlines. Open the email's ⋯ menu, choose Reschedule, and pick a date and time (in your own timezone).
A date you pick this way stays put. The row shows Moved by you, stays put if the trip's dates change, and changing the trip's dates or the step's timing later will not move it. The other emails on the trip still follow their rules. To hand it back to the automation, open the same menu and choose Reset to schedule.
Repeat Steps 3 to 6 with a different supplier. A few things worth knowing once you have several:
This is part of JourneyFuse’s travel advisor CRM: client email, automations and follow-ups on every trip.
View and manage all client communications — emails, portal messages, and trip conversations — in one place.
What your clients get from you automatically, and when — payment reminders, documents, cruise check-in windows and welcome-home notes, sent for you.
Find and file automation emails in Automations → Emails: Family and When filters, folders, and categories you name yourself.