A teacher calls: “We’re the fourth grade from Lincoln Elementary, coming sometime in May, and I need to add six chaperones.” She doesn’t have a reservation number. She isn’t sure whose name the booking is under. Somewhere in Altru there’s a group sales reservation that matches, and you need to find it while she waits on the phone.
Finding group reservations in Altru is mostly a matter of knowing which search fits the clue you have, and of entering reservations so they can be found later. Here’s how we’d approach it.
Start with the clue you actually have
Callers rarely give you the one detail that makes a search easy. Match your search to whatever they do give you:
- A reservation number or confirmation email. This is the fastest path. Use the reservation search in group sales and search on the number directly.
- The group or organization name. Search by the reservation’s group name or the organization constituent. Partial names usually work better than full ones: “Lincoln” will catch “Lincoln Elem.” and “Lincoln Elementary School.”
- The contact person’s name. Look up the contact’s constituent record first. Their record can lead you to the reservation, and it also tells you if there are duplicate records for the same person, which is a common reason a search comes up empty.
- Only a rough date. Search or filter by visit date range, then scan the results. For busy school seasons this list can be long, which is where a saved query helps (more on that below).
The exact fields available on the reservation search screen depend on your Altru version and security role. If you can’t see a field you expect, ask your Altru administrator whether your role limits it before assuming it doesn’t exist.
Why the search sometimes comes up empty
When staff are sure a booking exists and can’t find it, the cause is almost always in how it was entered, not in the search itself:
- The group name was typed differently. “St. Mary’s,” “Saint Marys,” and “SMA 3rd grade” are three different strings to a search box.
- The reservation is attached to a person, not the school. A booking made under the teacher’s own constituent record won’t show up when you search for the school’s organization record.
- Duplicate constituent records. The teacher who booked last year and the teacher who booked this year may be two separate records. Search the one you find and you miss the other.
- The status filter is hiding it. If the search defaults to active or upcoming reservations, a tentative, cancelled, or past booking may be filtered out. Widen the status and date filters before giving up.
Build a saved query for the searches you run every day
The reservation search is fine for one-off lookups. For the questions your group sales team asks over and over, an ad-hoc query is usually faster and more flexible. Altru’s query tools let you pull group sales reservation data alongside constituent fields, then save the query so anyone with access can run it.
Queries worth building and sharing:
- Upcoming reservations by visit date, showing group name, contact, contact phone, group size, and status. This becomes the “who’s coming next month” list.
- Reservations with an unpaid balance, filtered to visits in the next few weeks, so you catch deposits and final payments before the bus pulls up.
- Reservations by organization, with a prompt for the organization name, so you can see every booking a school has made across seasons.
- Tentative reservations older than a set number of days, so holds don’t quietly sit on your capacity.
Which fields are available in the query views for reservations varies, so build these in a test query first and confirm the output matches what you see on the reservation itself. If a field you need isn’t exposed, Blackbaud support can tell you whether it’s available in another view.
Make future reservations easier to find
The real fix is a few entry habits your whole team follows:
- Book school and organization groups under the organization record, with the teacher or coordinator as the contact. That keeps a school’s history together year over year.
- Use a naming convention for the reservation or group name. For example: organization, grade or program, then visit month. “Lincoln Elementary – Gr 4 – May” is easy to search and easy to read in a list.
- Search before you create. Before adding a new constituent for a caller, search by email and phone. It takes seconds and prevents the duplicate that hides next year’s booking.
- Record the confirmation number in your outgoing confirmation, and ask callers to have it handy. Many will.
Quick answers
Can I search group reservations by the contact’s email address?
Not always directly from the reservation search. The reliable route is to find the constituent by email, then go to their reservations. A query that joins reservation and constituent email fields can also do it, if those fields are available in your query views.
Why do I see the reservation in a query but not in the search screen?
Usually a default filter on the search, such as status or date range. Clear the filters and search again.
Is there a calendar view of all group visits?
It depends on how your organization uses program scheduling and which views your role can access. If you’re not sure, a date-sorted query of upcoming reservations is a dependable substitute that you can export or share.
