Overview
Creating a contact allows you to store and manage information about travelers, clients, suppliers, and business partners in TripLoft. Contacts can be created manually from the Contacts page or automatically when someone submits a TripLoft form.
đ„ Prefer to watch? See Contacts | TripLoft Academy for a video walkthrough.
Create a Contact Manually
To create a contact manually:
Navigate to Contacts from the sidebar.
Click Create Contact in the top-right corner.
Enter the contact's details:
Basic Info: First Name (required), Last Name (required), Middle Name (optional), Gender (optional), Anniversary Date (optional), and Date of Birth (optional).
Contact Info: Phone Number (optional), Email Address (optional), and Contact Type (required).
Select the appropriate Contact Type to categorize the contact (for example, Client, Supplier, Tour Operator, or DMC).
Click Save.
The contact will be added to your Contacts list immediately.
Create a Contact Through a Form Submission
Contacts can also be created automatically when a traveler submits a TripLoft form.
When a form is submitted, TripLoft checks whether the contact already exists. If a matching contact is found, the existing record is updated. Otherwise, a new contact is created automatically.
Contacts can also be added in bulk using the Import Contacts feature. Bulk imports are covered in a separate article.
How Contact Identification Works
To prevent duplicate records, TripLoft uses the following information to identify contacts:
First Name
Last Name
Email Address
If all three fields match an existing contact, TripLoft updates the existing record. If any of these fields differ, a new contact is created.
Contact Type does not affect contact identification.
Note: This automatic "update instead of duplicate" behavior applies to contacts created through form submissions and imports. Manual creation from the Contacts page works differently - see the troubleshooting section below. |
Troubleshooting: Why Am I Getting "A client with the same data already exists"?
Unlike form submissions and imports, manually creating a contact from the Create Contact button does not silently update a matching record - it blocks the save and shows this error when the First Name, Last Name, and Email Address you entered all match an existing contact.
If you see this error:
Go to Contacts and search for the name or email you just tried to enter - the existing record is almost certainly already there.
Open that existing contact and edit it directly instead of trying to create a new one.
Duplicate matching behaves differently in manual contact creation & via forms. Forms treat a First Name + Last Name + Email match as "update the existing contact," while manual creation treats the same match as a hard stop. Both exist to prevent duplicates - they just handle the match differently depending on how the contact is being created.