A school field trip almost never has just one person on the other end. The teacher who booked it, the front office that pays the invoice, and the chaperone who shows up with forty fourth-graders are often three different people. A group sales reservation in Altru, though, is built around one main contact. Everyone else ends up in a note, a sticky, or somebody’s inbox.
You can’t really add a second or third contact directly to the reservation. What you can do is keep the extra people in places Altru already supports, so your group sales staff can find them, and so they come up in queries when you need to send a confirmation or chase a payment.
What the reservation itself holds
A group reservation in Altru is tied to a group (usually an organization constituent, like a school or a tour company) and a contact person. That contact is the person Altru treats as the reservation’s point of contact on itineraries, confirmations, and invoices.
We don’t know of a native way to attach several contacts to one reservation with each one playing a different role. Behavior can vary by version and configuration, so if you need to be sure, test it in a sandbox or ask Blackbaud support before you build a process around it. Either way, plan on one contact per reservation and track everyone else through the organization’s record.
Put the other people on the organization record
The most durable fix is to make the group’s constituent record the home for all of its people. For a school, that means the organization record has relationships to:
- The teacher or coordinator who books trips
- The bookkeeper or front office who pays invoices
- A principal or department head, if they sign off on visits
- Regular chaperones or bus coordinators, if you call them on the day of the visit
Use relationship types that say what each person does (“Billing contact,” “Trip coordinator,” and so on) instead of a generic “Employee.” Clear labels are what make this useful later, both for the person reading the record and for a query that has to pull out “the billing contact for every school with a reservation next month.”
Then keep the reservation’s own contact field for the person who actually owns this trip. A school that visits every year may have a different teacher each time. The organization’s relationships carry over from year to year, and the reservation shows who’s in charge this time.
Record trip-specific contacts on the reservation
Some people only matter for one visit: a parent volunteer, a substitute teacher, a tour leader whose company will never book again. Adding a full constituent record and relationship for each of them is usually overkill.
For those people, use the reservation’s notes or comments and keep the format consistent, for example:
- Day-of contact: name, cell phone
- Billing: name, email
Consistency matters more than which field you choose. If every coordinator writes it differently, nobody can scan it at check-in. Agree on one spot and one format, and put it in your group sales procedures.
If you want this information to be searchable instead of free text, look at whether your Altru setup lets you add attributes to reservations. An attribute for “Billing email” or “Day-of phone” can be pulled into a query. A note generally can’t be filtered in a useful way.
Getting messages to more than one person
This is where having just one contact causes the most trouble. Confirmations and invoices go to the reservation contact by default, and the person who pays the bill may never see them.
Some practical options:
- Query on relationships. Build a query of upcoming reservations, join to the group’s organization record, and return the constituents with your billing relationship type. Export that list for payment reminders.
- CC by hand for high-stakes groups. For large or first-time groups, have the coordinator forward the confirmation to the billing and day-of contacts and note that it was sent.
- Ask the booker to name everyone up front. Add “Who should receive the invoice?” and “Who is your contact on the day?” to your booking intake, whether it’s a phone script or a request form. It costs a minute and saves a lot of follow-up.
Keep it clean over time
School staff change jobs every year, so relationships go stale fast. A few habits help:
- When a new teacher books, check the organization record before creating a new constituent. Duplicates of the same person under two schools are common.
- Add an end date to a relationship when someone leaves instead of deleting it, so past reservations still make sense.
- Once a year, before your school booking season opens, run a query of organizations with group reservations in the last two years and review their contacts.
Quick answers
Can I add a second contact field to the reservation?
Not that we’re aware of as a standard option. Attributes on the reservation are the closest thing to a structured extra field, if your configuration supports them. Confirm in a sandbox first.
Should the payer be the reservation contact instead?
Usually not. The reservation contact should be the person who answers questions about the visit itself. Keep the payer as a relationship on the organization and pull them by query when you need them.
