Last Saturday at 5 AM we got up to head to St Pancras for a Eurostar to Paris. Half-dressed, kettle on, opening the app to check the platform — and the booking said Friday, 07:00. Twenty-two hours earlier. We had booked the wrong day, filed the confirmation, and never looked at it again until the morning we were supposed to leave. Two non-refundable tickets, £207 a head, gone before the kettle had finished boiling.
That's a stupid error. It's also the kind of error nobody bothers to design against, because most travel apps assume you got the date right the first time. We didn't. The email was filed, the calendar invite was set, the inbox had moved on. The booking sat there for weeks with Friday on it while we kept on writing "Saturday" on every plan around it.
So we shipped check-in reminders this week. Three days before your trip and one day before, StayHawk sends you a push notification and/or an email that tells you what you're about to do, when, and where. If we'd had this last week, we'd have looked at our phones on Tuesday morning and gone "...that says Friday. We thought it was Saturday." £414 saved.
It's live now. You just have to switch it on first — we don't want to add new notifications to your existing setup without you asking. Two clicks in Settings does it.
What you get
Two reminders per booking:
- Three days out. "Your Eurostar from London to Paris leaves in 3 days, on Tuesday at 07:13. Departing from London St Pancras."
- One day out. Same booking, refreshed for the morning before. "Eurostar to Paris leaves tomorrow at 07:13."
You pick how you want them delivered: push on your phone (if you have the iOS app), email to your inbox, or both. We'll get to where to set that in a moment.
Both channels respect your quiet hours. Both link straight back to the booking, so if something looks off, one tap takes you to the source. Train number, station, ticket reference, your name on the ticket.
It works for every kind of booking we track. The reminders anchor to whatever moment matters for that booking — hotel check-in, flight or train departure, car rental pickup:
Hotel & Spa Le Germain
The Hoxton, Portland
Switch tabs to see how flights, trains, car rentals, and hotels appear in the same dashboard
How the timing works
The reminders run on the booking date, not on calendar days. The 3-day reminder lands roughly 72 hours before the trip starts. The 1-day reminder lands roughly 24 hours before. Both at a sensible time of day, never overnight.
If you ever change the booking date — you spot a mistake and edit it, or the airline reschedules — the reminders re-anchor to the new date. The old one clears, the new one queues up. No duplicate buzz.
Why three days and one day
Three days is far enough out to do something useful. Most platforms allow free changes up to 24 or 48 hours before departure, so a wrong-date booking caught three days out is usually recoverable. One day is the last sane moment to look. Anything closer than that and the message starts to feel like cruelty.
We don't ping you at the hour before, or three hours before. The point isn't to nag you up to the boarding gate. It's to make sure you actually see the booking in the calm 72 hours before a trip, while there's still time to fix something. The lock screen and the inbox do the rest.
Catching the wrong-day error specifically
The Eurostar mistake is the case we tested the design against. The shape of it goes:
- You book weeks in advance, confident about the date.
- The confirmation lands, you skim it, you file it.
- Your mental calendar settles on a day. "We leave Saturday."
- The actual ticket says Friday.
- Time passes. You don't look at the booking again.
- The reminder is the moment those two things — your mental calendar and the actual ticket — get put next to each other.
The 3-day reminder is the one that catches this. It puts the trip date in front of you while there's still time to call the train company, swap the ticket, or buy a new one without writing off the old one in full. The 1-day reminder is the safety net for the times you missed the 3-day one because you were on a plane or at a wedding.
Turn it on: email, push, or both
Check-in reminders are off until you turn them on. We didn't want to start buzzing existing accounts with a new kind of notification nobody had opted into.
Head to Settings → Notifications → Immediate Alerts. There's a row for the 3-day reminder and a row for the 1-day reminder. Each row has two toggles, one for push and one for email. Tick whichever combination you want — both reminders by push, both by email, both by both, or just the 1-day one if the 3-day feels like too much. Whatever fits.
The same panel controls cancellation deadline alerts and price drop alerts. Quiet hours apply across all of them.
What's on which plan
Check-in reminders are on every plan, including Free:
| Free | Pro | Agency | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Check-in reminders (3D + 1D) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Cancellation deadline alerts | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Daily price monitoring | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Bookings tracked | 5 | 30 | 500 |
We don't gate reminders behind a subscription. The whole point of the watchdog is that it watches whether you've paid or not. The free tier covers five bookings, which for most people is a single trip, and the reminders are exactly what you want on it.
Try it on your next trip
Flip the toggles in Settings → Notifications → Immediate Alerts, and the next booking you've got coming up inside the 3-day window will trigger a reminder. If you don't have a booking in there yet, forward a hotel confirmation, a train ticket, or a flight booking to your StayHawk inbox and the reminder schedule starts from there.