Your visitor didn't receive the pre-arrival message

Your visitor says they never got the pre-arrival message with the address and arrival instructions. There are a handful of reasons this happens, and most of them you can check yourself in a couple of minutes.

First: did you get a confirmation yourself?

When a visit is created successfully, you get a confirmation message — "Visit added to the visitor management service". That message is the most useful clue you have.

• You got the confirmation. The visit exists, so the pre-arrival message is either still waiting to be sent or didn't reach the visitor. Carry on to the next two sections.
• You didn't get any confirmation. The visit most likely was never created, which means no message would go out either. Jump to When no visit was created at all below.

The message may not have been sent yet

The pre-arrival message doesn't go out the moment you send the invitation. The timing is set for your organisation, and typically the message goes out roughly a day before the visit.

So if you invited someone for tomorrow and they say nothing has arrived, that's usually normal — the message is still on its way. Your admin can check or change the timing, see Set pre-arrival notifications for visitors.

The message was sent but didn't arrive

• Ask them to check the spam folder. This is the most common single reason. Some organisations have strict filters that quietly hold messages from outside senders.
• Check the address you used. A typo is easy to make. Note that correcting it in the invitation afterwards doesn't always update an already created visit — creating a new invitation is the reliable way.
• Check that the visitor has an email address or phone number in the system. If neither is there, the message has nowhere to go. This happens especially with visits imported or created in bulk.

When no visit was created at all

Three things stop a visit from being created in the first place.

1. The invitation went out as a normal email instead of a calendar invitation. The integration reads calendar invitations only. A plain email — even with the right address in the recipients — doesn't create a visit.
2. The invitation address was missing from the recipients. Your organisation has its own invitation address that has to be among the recipients of the calendar invitation. If you're not sure what yours is, your admin knows — see Create a custom calendar invitation address.
3. The invitation had no external guests on it. If everyone on the invitation is a colleague, no visit is created — there's no visitor to create it for.

If all three look right and there's still no visit, it's worth getting in touch with us.

If it stopped working for everyone at once

If several people notice the same thing on the same day, it's usually not about any single invitation. Two things look identical from your side:

• the mail forwarding to the invitation address has changed or been removed at your organisation — your IT can check this
• a disruption at our end

Either way, send us a message. One thing worth knowing: invitations sent during a disruption don't arrive afterwards on their own, so those visits need to be invited again once things are working.

Getting in touch

Write to us at support@systam.io. These details let us find the visit in our logs, which is where the answer usually is:

• who invited whom, and the visitor's email address
• when you sent the invitation and when the visit was supposed to take place
• the invitation address you used
• whether you got the confirmation message yourself

If it's easy to do, a test invitation to support@systam.io helps a lot — then we see exactly how the invitation arrives to us and can pinpoint where it goes wrong.

Related articles

• Inviting visitor beforehand
• Plan a visit in Systam Studio
• Inviting guests using the Invites by Systam Outlook add-in
• Create a custom calendar invitation address

Most of these turn out to be a spam filter or a message still on its way — and if it's neither, we'll dig into the logs with you.