TravelFlow tells you about bookings, approvals, invoices, quotations, signature requests and chat messages through in-app notifications. There are two places to read them: the bell in the top navigation bar, and the full notifications page at /notifications. This article covers both.
The Notification Bell
The bell sits in the right-hand action group of the top navigation bar, next to the light/dark theme toggle. It is present in every signed-in area — consultant, portal, private traveller, admin and accounting — and on standalone screens such as Profile. It is visible on phones as well as on desktop.
The badge on the bell has three states, and the difference between them is the point:
- A red number — how many unread notifications actually need you, meaning the ones raised at Urgent or High priority. This is not a count of everything unread. Past ninety-nine it reads 99+.
- A small grey dot — you have unread notifications, but none of them is urgent. Most mornings look like this, and a red number here would cry wolf.
- Nothing at all — you have read everything.
The bell reads your most recent 200 notifications. If you have more than that, counts are shown with a trailing + because past the cap the bell genuinely does not know the total.
- Click the bell to open the notification list.
- On a desktop screen the list opens as a dropdown panel below the bell. On a phone it opens as a sheet from the bottom of the screen with a close (×) button in the header.
- The header shows Notifications and, underneath, a summary in words: “6 need action · 28 other” when something is urgent, “28 unread · nothing needs action” when nothing is, or “Nothing unread”.
- Click any notification to open it.
How the List Is Grouped
Notifications are grouped by how soon they need you, not by whether you have read them. There are four groups, and they always appear in this order:
- Act now — raised at Urgent priority.
- Today — raised at High priority.
- This week — raised at Medium priority.
- When you can — raised at Low priority, and anything whose priority cannot be read.
Inside a group the newest notification is at the top. A group with nothing in it is not shown at all, so the first heading you see is the most urgent thing you have.
The bell shows at most eight rows. It is a pointer to work, not the work list itself — eight rows that are certainly the most urgent are more use than two hundred that might contain them. Each group is guaranteed a share of those eight, so a burst of urgent items can never hide the fact that something else exists.
When there is more than fits, a bar at the bottom of the panel says so — for example “Showing 8 of 34 — 3 more need action”. Clicking it opens the full page already filtered to unread Act now items.
Each row shows the title, one line of the message, and a relative time such as “about 2 hours ago”. Hover the time to see the exact date and time in 24 Jul 2026, 14:05 format. Unread rows have a blue left edge, a tinted background and a small blue dot next to the title. The message text itself also begins with a date and time stamp in square brackets, because that stamp is written into the message when the notification is created.
Opening a Notification
Clicking a row in the bell does two things: it marks the notification as read, and — if the notification points at a record — it navigates you there and closes the panel. Marking as read is immediate and cannot be undone from the bell; you can mark it unread again from the full notifications page.
Some notifications are purely informational and have nowhere to send you. Those rows are not clickable and say No action needed underneath, rather than looking like a link that does nothing. Rows that do go somewhere are real buttons, so you can reach them with the keyboard and open them in a new tab.
Merely opening the bell does not mark anything as read — only clicking an individual row does. On the full notifications page, clicking a row's action button navigates you without marking it read; use the tick button on the card if you want it cleared.
Because the same notification type can be raised for different roles, the destination is adjusted to match your role before you are sent there:
- Support ticket links always open at
/support, which every role can reach. - Organisation users are sent to the portal version of a link; private travellers are sent to the private version.
- If the link belongs to an area your role cannot open — an admin, consultant or accounting screen — you are taken to your own dashboard instead. The notification is still marked read.
The Full Notifications Page
Click View All Notifications at the bottom of the bell panel, or go straight to /notifications. This page has its own header rather than the usual navigation bar; the back arrow at the top left returns you to your dashboard. On a phone you can also open the menu (☰) in the top bar and choose Notifications.
Four cards across the top summarise your feed: Total, Unread, Urgent and Archived. These cards are hidden while you are viewing the archive.
Filtering and Searching
A row of category tabs runs across the top of the list, each with a count: All, Bookings, Travel, Approvals, Financial, Signatures, Deals, Messages and System. On a narrow screen the tab strip scrolls sideways.
Under the tabs are three more controls:
- Search notifications... — free-text search across the title and message. Click the small × inside the box to clear it.
- All Status — switch to Unread Only or Read Only.
- Received — a date range, under the filters button. Either end on its own works, so “everything since Monday” is a valid filter.
Below the category tabs is a second row of tabs for the four urgency groups — All, Act now, Today, This week and When you can — each with a count. These are the priority filter; there is no separate priority dropdown, because urgency and priority are one axis and two controls for it would only disagree with each other.
The list loads twenty notifications at a time and fetches the next batch automatically as you scroll. When you reach the end you see “No more notifications”. Search waits until you stop typing before it runs, so the results do not flicker through several wrong answers on the way to the right one.
When there is nothing to show, the page says why rather than just “empty”: Nothing matches those filters with a Clear filters button, Nothing archived yet in the archive view, or You're all caught up when your feed is genuinely empty.
Acting on a Single Notification
Each card carries icon buttons on the right:
- Mark as read (tick) — only shown while the notification is unread.
- Archive (box) — moves it out of the main feed and out of the bell.
- Unarchive (box with arrow) — shown instead of Archive on archived items.
- Delete (bin) — removes the notification permanently.
If the notification links to a record, a blue button appears at the bottom of the card. Its label comes from the notification itself, falling back to View Details. Cards also show the priority and, where the notification carries them, chips for the request number, the booking reference and the amount in rand.
Clearing Several at Once
There are two ways to clear a backlog, and the difference between them matters.
Acting on a selection
- Tick the checkbox on each notification you want, or use Select loaded in the row above the list.
- A blue bar appears showing N selected.
- Choose Mark Read, Mark Unread, Archive or Delete. In the archive view the Archive button is replaced by Unarchive.
- Click the × on the left of the bar, or Deselect loaded, to clear your selection.
Select loaded means what it says: it selects the notifications that have actually been fetched, not every notification you own. If you have scrolled through two pages, it selects those two pages. That is why it is not called “select all”.
Mark all read
The Mark all read button beside the checkbox is the one that clears a real backlog. It marks everything matching your current filters as read, including notifications you have never scrolled to, so it asks you to confirm first and the confirmation tells you which of the two it is about to do. Notifications that are already read are left alone, so the time you first saw something is not rewritten.
It works through up to 2,000 notifications at a time. If you have more than that it says so and asks you to run it again, rather than reporting success while older items are still unread.
The Archive
The Archive button in the page header toggles the archive view; while it is on, the button reads Viewing Archive and the list shows only archived notifications, each tagged with an Archived badge. Archiving never deletes anything — it just takes the notification out of your working feed and out of the bell's unread count.
Choosing Which Notifications You Get
The switches that decide what reaches your bell live on your profile, under Preferences → Notification Preferences → Notification Types. There are four, and each one governs a category:
- Travel alerts — the Travel category.
- Booking confirmations — the Bookings category.
- Approval requests — the Approvals category.
- System updates — the System category.
Switch one off and click Save Preferences, and notifications in that category are no longer created for you at all: they do not reach the bell, the notifications page, the unread badge or the archive. Switching it back on only affects what happens next — nothing that was suppressed while it was off is delivered afterwards.
Three rules stop this from quietly losing anything important:
- Urgent and High priority notifications are always delivered. Payment failures, escalations and cancellations are operational, so they ignore these switches entirely and cannot be muted. Only Medium and Low priority notifications can be turned off.
- A category you have never set stays on. Only an explicit “off” suppresses anything, so a user who has never opened the Preferences tab keeps receiving everything.
- Categories with no switch are always delivered. Financial, Signatures, Deals and Messages are not covered by any of the four types, so they always arrive.
Channels: Email, Push and SMS
Above the type switches, the Channels section lists Email notifications, Push notifications and SMS notifications. All three are shown greyed out with an Unavailable tag and a short reason, and you cannot switch them on. TravelFlow delivers notifications in-app only:
- Email — notification emails are not connected. The platform can email documents and password resets, but nothing sends your notification feed by email.
- Push — browser push needs a registered service worker and a push backend, neither of which is deployed.
- SMS — no SMS provider is configured, so no text message can be sent.
The bell and the notifications page are therefore the only place your notifications appear. Treat them as the authoritative feed.
The Notification Settings Page
The Settings button in the notifications page header opens /settings/notifications, titled Notification Settings. It has four tabs — Channels, Quiet Hours, Do Not Disturb and Digest — plus master Email, Push and SMS toggles and a per-category grid. Save Preferences at the bottom stores your choices.
Troubleshooting
- The red number does not go away. It counts only unread Urgent and High notifications that are not archived. Open the notifications page, choose the Act now or Today tab and set the status filter to Unread Only to see exactly what is left.
- There is a grey dot but no number. That is the normal resting state when you have unread notifications and none of them is urgent. Nothing is wrong and nothing needs you right now.
- A notification I read is still near the top. Reading moves an item down one group, not out of the list. If it was Urgent it is now in Today. Archive it to take it out of the feed and the bell entirely.
- The bell says “Showing 8 of 40”. The bell deliberately shows at most eight rows. Click that bar, or View All Notifications, for the complete list.
- A notification took me to my dashboard. The record it points at is in an area your role cannot open. Ask the person who raised it to send you the reference, or open the record from a screen you do have access to.
- A colleague got a notification and I did not. Notifications are addressed to a specific person, not to a team. If you expected to be included, raise a support ticket with the booking or request number.
- A whole class of notification stopped arriving. Check Profile → Preferences → Notification Types: if travel, booking, approval or system notifications are switched off there, new ones in that category are never created. An urgent or high-priority notification is never affected by those switches, so if one of those is missing it is not a preference problem — raise a support ticket.
- The bell is empty but the page is not. Check whether the archive view is where those notifications ended up.