Building a Supplier Automation Step by Step

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.

Before you start: the two pieces

An automation is two separate things, and it only works when both are in place:

1. The steps — which email goes out, and when
2. The enrollment rule — which trips enter the automation in the first 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.

Step 1 — Check whether the emails already exist

Go to Templates → Template Packs.

JourneyFuse ships supplier-branded packs for most major cruise lines and parks. If there's a pack for your supplier, install it. 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 timed to the right point in the trip.

Two good reasons to install it even if you plan to write your own:

• It's a working skeleton. Editing beats starting from a blank page.
• The emails land in Templates → Automation Templates, so you can cherry-pick: keep the check-in email, replace the welcome home with yours.

If there's no pack for your supplier, no problem. Skip to Step 2.

Step 2 — Write your own emails

Go to Templates → Automation Templates → New template.

For each email in your series, set:

• Name — what you call it. Prefix them so they sort together: VV - Booking Confirmed, VV - 90 Days Out, VV - Welcome Home.
• Subject — what the client sees.
• Category — the closest fit (Cruise for a cruise line). Categories are broad groupings, not per-supplier folders. See Where your emails live.
• Recipients — Client, Travel party, or Agent. A Travel party email goes to everyone in the household on the trip; an Agent email is an internal heads-up and never reaches the client.
• Body — your content, with merge fields like {{client_first_name}}, {{departure_date}}, and {{portal_link}} 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.

Don't set the timing here. A template's own trigger is only a default suggestion — the timing that actually fires is the one on the automation step, which you'll set in Step 4.

Step 3 — Create the automation

Go to Automations → Add automation.

• Leave the scope on Trip automation.
• If a preset exists for your supplier, click it. JourneyFuse builds the automation and pre-fills the steps from the matching pack emails, which is a big head start.
• If there's no preset, click Start from blank and name it after the supplier.

Either way you land on the automation's Builder tab.

Step 4 — Lay out the sequence

This is the part that matters most. Each step is one email plus one trigger.

Click Add step, choose Send email, pick the template, then pick the trigger. A typical booking-to-return sequence looks like this:

#	When	Trigger to pick	Email
1	The moment it's booked	Trip Created	Booking confirmed, what happens next
2	A few days later	Trip Created, 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 Created with increasing day counts (+0, +30, +90). Don't. Trip Created counts from the day you created the trip, 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 Created 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. Without it the reminder sends on schedule even to clients who already paid. Skip conditions are opt-in, so nothing sets this for you.

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."

Step 5 — Set the enrollment rule (don't skip this)

At the top of the automation is a sentence: "Automatically enroll trips …".

Click the + next to it and pick your supplier, for example Virgin Voyages. The sentence becomes "Automatically enroll trips involving Virgin Voyages" and a live count appears underneath: "Currently matches 8 upcoming trips."

If you don't do this, the sentence reads "(only runs for trips you add on the Trips tab)" and the automation enrolls nobody, no matter how good the steps are. That count line is your proof it's wired up.

What makes a trip count as a Virgin Voyages trip

JourneyFuse doesn't read the supplier name you typed on a booking. It reads the Supplier field on the trip itself, the timeline template (shown as e.g. Virgin Voyages (Custom)). So for auto-enrollment to fire, both must be true:

1. The trip's Supplier is set to that supplier
2. The automation's rule lists that same supplier

If the count says 0 and you know you have trips with that line, open one of those trips and check its Supplier field first. That's almost always the cause.

Step 6 — Turn it on

Flip the automation to Active.

New trips with that supplier now enroll on their own. Existing trips enroll the moment you set their Supplier field, so you can go back through the trips already on your books and switch them over.

Nothing gets blasted out retroactively. When an existing trip enrolls, any step whose date has already passed lands in a Needs attention section on that trip's Communications tab, where you choose Send Now or Skip for each one. Only future steps queue up on their own.

Step 7 — Verify on a real trip

Open one enrolled trip and go to its Communications tab. You should see:

• A Journey Automations card showing the automation and step progress ("Step 2 of 8")
• A list of scheduled emails, each with its real send date

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.

Doing the next supplier

Repeat Steps 3 to 6 with a different supplier. A few things worth knowing once you have several:

• A supplier automation beats the default. If a trip matches a supplier automation, that one enrolls and your General Journey is skipped, so clients never get two booking confirmations.
• You can reuse emails across automations. A generic "final payment reminder" can be a step in every one of them.
• Editing an email edits it everywhere. Templates are shared, not copied per trip. If you want different wording for one line, make a separate template.
• No preset for your supplier? Build it blank and set the enrollment rule to the closest supplier, or use a trip tag under Advanced → Also require tags for things like all-inclusive resorts.

Related

• Automations
• Email Merge Tags
• Template Sharing
• Personalizing Supplier Automations