Notifications & reminders

You choose your own reminders when you book: 10 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, or 1 day before the session, and you can pick several at once. They arrive as push notifications, emails, and in-app notifications, depending on which channels you have enabled. The professional gets reminded too, so both sides show up prepared.

The reminder options appear right on the booking screen, before you send the request. Combining a long one with a short one works well: 1 day before to plan around the session, 10 or 30 minutes before to actually get moving.

A few things happen without you lifting a finger:

• Reschedules update your reminders. If either side moves the session to a new time, every reminder resets to count down from that new time. Nothing to redo.
• Recurring series are covered per session. In a weekly series, each individual session gets its own reminders.
• Reminders speak your language. Like all notifications, they render in the interface language you have set, emails included.

You stay in control of the channels. Settings has per-type toggles for each channel, so reminders can reach you by push only, email only, in-app only, or any mix. Push needs to be allowed both on your device and in Surrounders Settings to come through.

Yes. Surrounders gives you 4 reminder times to choose from at booking: 10 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, and 1 day before the session. Pick any combination, several at once is fine, and each selected reminder fires on every channel you have enabled: in-app, push, and email.

The four options cover different jobs:

• 1 day before is for planning: rearrange your evening, prep materials, confirm the address.
• 1 hour before suits sessions you travel to.
• 30 minutes works for services close to home.
• 10 minutes is the last nudge, useful for online lessons where "getting there" means opening a laptop.

Reminder choices are made per booking, so a one-off handyman visit can have different reminders than your weekly tutoring session. In a recurring series, every session gets its own reminders following the choice you made.

Two more details worth knowing. First, if the booking gets rescheduled, all reminders reset to the new time automatically. Second, the professional receives reminders for the same booking independently, so you are only ever choosing for yourself.

If reminders arrive on more channels than you want, Settings has per-type toggles: you can keep reminder pushes but drop reminder emails, or the other way around.

Push notifications need permission in 2 places: your device or browser, and your Surrounders Settings. Allow notifications when the browser or app asks, then open Settings in Surrounders and switch on push for the types you want, such as bookings, messages, and reminders. Both switches must be on, or nothing arrives.

Step by step:

1. Allow at the device level. In a browser, accept the notification permission prompt, or find the site's notification setting in the browser's site settings if you dismissed it earlier. On a phone, make sure notifications are enabled for the browser or the installed app in your phone's settings.
2. Enable in Surrounders. Go to Settings, find notifications, and turn on the push toggle for each notification type you care about. Push, email, and in-app are controlled separately per type.
3. Wait for something to happen. Push fires on real events: a booking confirmed, a message received, a reminder due.

On a phone, installing Surrounders as an app makes push feel native. On iPhone, open Surrounders in Safari, tap Share, then "Add to Home Screen". On Android, Chrome offers an install option in its menu.

If push still does not arrive, recheck both places: one switch off at either level silences everything. And remember push is one of three channels; email and the in-app feed keep working regardless.

Check 3 things: your spam folder, your email toggles, and whether your address is verified. Most missing Surrounders emails are sitting in spam or promotions, so look there first and mark them "not spam". Then confirm in Settings that email is switched on for the notification types you expect, since each type has its own email toggle.

Going through the causes one at a time:

1. Spam or promotions folder. Mail providers sometimes file notification emails away. Marking one as "not spam" usually teaches your inbox to deliver the rest normally.
2. Email toggles in Settings. Notification emails are per type: booking, messages, reviews, reminders, social, and system. If reminder emails stopped but booking emails arrive, the reminder email toggle is the likely reason.
3. Unverified email address. Booking, messaging, and reviewing all require a verified email, and notifications go to that address. If you never clicked the verification link, find it in your inbox or spam, or request a new one.

Waiting on a password reset or verification email specifically? Give it a few minutes and check spam before retrying. If an account exists for that address, an email is on its way; a wrong or mistyped address is the other common explanation.

If emails still do not arrive after all three checks, write to [email protected] from the mailbox in question and describe which emails are missing.

No. Surrounders has 3 notification channels: the in-app feed, push notifications, and email. SMS and Telegram are not among them. Push fills the SMS role well: enable it and booking updates, messages, and reminders land on your phone's lock screen the way a text would, at no cost and with no extra app.

To get push working, allow notifications in your browser or on your device, then switch push on in Surrounders Settings for the types you want. Both permissions are needed. On a phone, installing Surrounders to your home screen (Share, then "Add to Home Screen" on iPhone; Chrome's install option on Android) makes the experience closest to a native messaging app.

If push is not an option on your device, email carries everything too: confirmations, declines, reschedules, and reminders all go out by email when you have those toggles on. Between push for immediacy and email as the paper trail, the practical need SMS usually serves is covered.

Worth knowing alongside this: your phone number is never shown to other users on Surrounders, so nobody can text you through the platform either. All coordination happens in the built-in chat, which keeps a shared history both sides can refer back to.

Yes, automatically. When a booking is rescheduled, its reminders reset to the new time on their own. Whether you picked 10 minutes, 1 hour, or 1 day before, each reminder now counts down from the new session start. Both sides get the updated reminders, and neither of you has to change anything.

The reschedule itself works like this: either side can propose a new time, at least 2 hours ahead and within the pro's availability. The other side must re-approve it, so the booking returns to "requested" until they accept. Once the new time is confirmed, your reminder choices simply carry over to it.

You will also know about the reschedule itself well before any reminder fires. Proposing a new time notifies the other person immediately, and the booking timeline shows what changed. The reminders are a follow-up safety net, not your first warning.

The same logic protects recurring bookings. If a single session in a weekly series moves, its reminders move with it. If the pro blocks a date, that session is cancelled rather than moved, and you are notified, so no reminder will fire for a session that no longer exists.

In short: reminders always follow the booking's current confirmed time. Stale reminders pointing at an old slot are not a thing you need to worry about.

Yes. Both sides of every booking get reminders, not just the customer. When you book a session, the professional receives reminders for it too, through the same 3 channels: in-app notifications, push, and email. You each control your own reminder settings, so what you choose affects only what you receive.

The reason is simple: a session only happens if two people remember it. A customer who forgets wastes the pro's slot; a pro who forgets wastes the customer's afternoon. Reminding both sides is the cheapest possible protection against either kind of no-show, and it costs neither of you anything to have it on.

For you as a customer, this means you do not need to send a "just confirming we're still on" message the night before. The pro has the session in their calendar and gets nudged about it, same as you. If you want that reassurance anyway, chat is always open.

Reminders stay accurate through changes. When a booking is rescheduled and re-accepted, reminders for both sides reset to the new time. In a recurring series, every session carries its own reminders for both of you.

One honest caveat: reminders reduce forgetting, they do not eliminate it. If a customer still fails to appear, the pro can mark the booking as a no-show after a short grace period, and it is recorded on the booking.

Open Settings and use the per-type notification toggles. Surrounders groups notifications into 6 types - booking, messages, reviews, reminders, social, and system - and each type has its own switch for each channel: in-app, push, and email. You can silence exactly what you want without going quiet entirely.

Because type and channel are controlled independently, you can shape notifications around how you actually live:

• Keep push for messages, drop the emails. Chat is time-sensitive; a duplicate email about it often is not.
• Keep everything for bookings. Confirmations, declines, and reschedules are the notifications you least want to miss.
• Mute social completely. If friend activity is not your thing, switch it off on all three channels.
• Trim reminders to one channel. A push 30 minutes before the session may be all you need.

Changes take effect from that point on; there is no need to save anything separately per booking.

One suggestion before you switch things off broadly: leave booking notifications on at least one channel. A pro declining or proposing a new time is something you want to hear about, since unanswered situations resolve themselves in ways you might not want, like a request expiring after 48 hours.

Whatever you disable, nothing is lost forever: the types you keep enabled for in-app still collect on the notifications page behind the bell icon.

The notifications page is your in-app feed: tap the bell icon and everything the platform has told you, from booking updates to new reviews, sits in one list. An unread badge on the bell shows how much is waiting, and a single "mark all as read" clears it when you have caught up.

The feed can carry all 6 notification types: booking events, messages, reviews, reminders, social activity, and system notices. Which of them actually appear is up to you, since Settings has a separate in-app toggle per type, just as it does for push and email.

What makes the feed useful compared to the other channels:

• Nothing scrolls away. A push you swiped off your lock screen is gone; the feed entry is still there when you open the app.
• One place to catch up. After a day offline, the feed replays what happened in order.
• Everything is in your language. Feed entries render in your interface language, like all notifications.

The feed is a log, not an inbox: you read and clear, you do not reply from it. A notification about a message takes you to the conversation, a booking update takes you to the booking. Think of the bell as the front door and the feed as the hallway to wherever the news actually lives.

Notifications arrive in your interface language, and that includes emails. Surrounders currently supports 2 languages, English and Russian, with Greek coming after a native-speaker review. Set your language in Settings and everything the platform sends you, from booking confirmations to reminder emails, renders in that language.

The same applies inside chat. System messages, the automatic lines that appear when a booking is requested, confirmed, or rescheduled, show up in your language. Each person reads them in their own: a Russian-speaking customer and an English-speaking pro see the same booking events, each in the language they chose. Only the actual messages you type to each other stay in whatever language you wrote them.

One practical tip: change your language in Settings while logged in. That saves the choice to your account rather than the device, so notifications, emails, and the interface all follow it everywhere you sign in. If the language seems to flip back, this is almost always why.

There is no separate language setting for notifications. Interface language and notification language are one choice, which keeps things predictable: what you read in the app is what lands in your inbox.