A Broadcast will not publish without an audience. This is the opposite of a Journey, where leaving the audience empty sends to all guests. On a Broadcast, selecting an audience is mandatory, and the guest count does not appear until you ask for it.
Selecting the audience
Go to the Broadcast section and create your Broadcast.
Open the Audience step.
Select the audience you want from your saved lists, or create a new one. You can select more than one.
Click Load preview to calculate how many guests match.
Check the count, then publish.
The guest count only appears after you click Load preview
Bookboost does not calculate the audience automatically. Until you click Load preview, the guest count and the guest list stay empty, even when reservations in your system do match your filters. An audience that looks empty is very often just an audience whose preview has not been loaded yet.
If you have loaded the preview and the audience is genuinely empty, remove your filters one at a time and reload after each one to find which is excluding everyone.
Two different logics are at work here, and mixing them up is the usual cause of an audience that is the wrong size:
Filters inside one audience combine with AND. A guest has to match every filter in that audience to be included, so each filter you add can only make the audience smaller.
Audiences combine with OR. Selecting two audiences reaches guests who are in either one. The step says as much on screen: "Guests belonging to at least one of these audiences will receive the message." So each audience you add can only make the send larger.
The three panels beside the picker
To the right of the audience picker sit three panels. They are the same three on a Journey as on a Broadcast, and read together they tell you whether the audience you have chosen can actually be contacted.
Audience match. How many guests match the audiences you have selected.
All guests reach. How contactable your whole guest database is, as four bars: Emails, Phones, Both and Any. Hover a bar for its figure.
Audience reach. The same four bars, for the guests in this campaign's audience only.
The comparison is the useful part. All guests reach is the ceiling for any campaign you ever send. Audience reach tells you whether the audience you have just picked sits at that ceiling or well below it. An audience that matches plenty of guests but has a low Emails bar will fail for a lot of them, and those failures turn up afterwards on the Schedules tab as Unable to reach guest.
Any is the bar to watch before you send, because it counts the guests reachable by at least one channel, which is the number a multichannel campaign can actually reach. Both matters when you want a fallback: a guest with an email address and a phone number can still be reached if the first channel fails.
If Audience reach reads (Unavailable) across all four bars, the figure has not been worked out for the audiences you have selected. All guests reach is unaffected, so you still have your ceiling, just not the comparison.
Checking the count against your sending limit
Once the preview has loaded, Bookboost shows how many guests will receive the Broadcast and how many of them are reachable by email and by phone. Compare that against your property's Broadcast sending limit.
If the count exceeds your limit, contact support to have it raised. Do this at least 24 hours before you intend to send, so there is time to make the change.
A one-off send fixes its audience at publish
A Broadcast that sends once works out its audience when it is published and sends to that list. Reservations created afterwards are not included, because the list was already fixed.
A repeating Broadcast behaves differently. If you set it to repeat on the Time step, each occurrence works out the audience again, so a weekly send does reach the guests who have booked since the last one. See Schedule a recurring broadcast.
If you need a one-off send to reach bookings that come in afterwards, for example everyone booking up to the date of an event, pair the Broadcast with a Journey Campaign. See Reach current and new bookings for a one-off event.
What this does not do
No automatic count. Nothing is calculated until you click Load preview, on every visit to the step.
No audience means no send. Unlike a Journey, a Broadcast cannot fall back to all guests.
The preview is a snapshot too. It reflects who matches at the moment you load it, not at the moment the Broadcast sends. If you schedule for later, expect the final number to differ slightly.
Reach is not delivery. The reach bars count guests who have contact details, not guests whose messages arrive. A guest with an OTA-supplied email address counts as reachable and may still never see the message.
What to do next
See Scheduling campaigns: Broadcasts vs. Journeys for the timing side of the same decision, and Audiences for how the filters behind an audience are built.
Getting help
Open Talk to Us in the left menu of the platform, or email support@bookboost.io.