Custom fields are designed to help your team collect unique booking considerations and keep track of them all in one place. Most commonly, custom fields are set up as prompts that the customer responds to while booking their trip. However, it can also be beneficial to create private custom fields — that is, fields that are only visible to members of your team.

Our Custom Fields‍ article provides instructions for how to create a new custom field. This article provides context for when it's beneficial to select the Private: Show this field to team members only checkbox when setting up the field.

When should I use a Private Custom Field?

Let's say that for our Hiking activity, we want customers booking the trip to provide their favorite color, mastery level, and preference regarding entry into our raffle. We set up each of these prompts as a standard, public-facing custom field. 

Additionally, our team wants to keep a convenient log of the tour guide assigned to each booking group. Since our team determines which tour guide to assign — and in fact, that is not something we want our customers to be able to select — we set up a tour guide prompt as a private custom field

Why use a private custom field instead of adding a note to the booking?

Custom fields can be set up using a variety of Field Types‍ — several of which allow you to restrict the responses users are allowed to select, which leads to more consistent, streamlined responses. 

As an example, let's say that whenever a member of your team books an experience, you expect them to Add a Note to the Manifest‍ stating which tour guide they recommend be assigned to that booking group. When you go to review the booking details for next week's experiences, all you want to see is the name of each recommended tour guide so you can start arranging your tour guides' schedules. Instead, you find your team's notes, written in an inconsistent manner:

Had you set up this prompt as a private custom field using the dropdown field type, your team would only be able to select from a predefined set of values. The resulting responses would exclude extraneous details and present only the information you wish to see in a consistent, easy-to-view format: 
 

If a custom field is private, doesn't that mean the response will appear blank whenever a customer self-books their trip?

Yes, self-booked trips will show blank responses for any private custom fields associated with the activity. However, you can easily View & Edit Custom Field Responses‍ after a trip has been booked. Referring back to our Tour Guide prompt as an example, this means you could manually assign a tour guide to each booking and review those updates alongside the other custom field responses all in one place.