How can I set up "system alert" email to communicate when a reservation is booked?

You can create something called a "System Alert" to notify certain people when there are new reservations, changes or pickup for an event.

Under the "Communication" tab when building an event, you'll see a sub-heading labelled "System Alerts". From here, if you select "Reservation Alert" from the "Alert Type" drop down, you can click "Create Alert" to show a pop-up screen with information fields, shown in the image below.

The following is a description of each field:

Name: Used simply to give the alert a memorable name.

Email Me Daily At: Used to specify a time, using the 24 Hr clock format, at which the system will send you the corresponding alert email.

Older Than: Used to specify how long a reservation needs to be sitting in the system in the "New" state before the system will notify you of its status.

Room Type: Used to decide between either all room types associated with an event, or one specific room type at one specific hotel.

Sub-Block: Used to decide if the reservation must belong to a specific sub-block, or if you want alerts about new reservations in all sub-blocks.

From here, you can decide which email addresses get sent the alert. You can have the alert get sent to the System Notification Email Address, the email address associated on each hotel profile, or completely new email addresses, which you can add line by line in the text box next to the "Email To" label.

One thing to note is that there is still a "Hotel notification" checkbox in Event Hotel profiles that you can utilize.

Keep in mind that if you enable this and set up a custom System Alert for the hotel profile, the two will be enabled at the same time and will both be sending emails to the hotel.

The System Alert will have different parameters, however, and you'll likely have it set up to send different information under different circumstances, such as that there are outstanding "New" reservations that haven't been acknowledged in three days, compared to the standard notification that only says there are new reservations. You can use the System Alert to communicate that the outstanding reservations need to be attended to.