No. Front has no native, purpose-built integration with Collins, and Collins is not on Zapier, so there is no low-code bridge to attempt. Front is a collaborative shared inbox and customer-operations platform. Collins is the venue-management and booking software behind DesignMyNight, used by bars, late-night venues, competitive-socialising sites and events-led operators to run large-party enquiries, deposits, pre-orders and area bookings. Those are the highest-value enquiries a venue receives, and Front cannot touch a single one of them.
The short answer
Front can receive a Collins enquiry as a conversation. It cannot do anything with it in Collins. Holding an area, building a package, taking a deposit, attaching a pre-order: all of that still happens by hand, in Collins, by a person.
Front + Collins | |
|---|---|
Native integration | None |
Best available workaround | A custom build on Front's API and the Collins API |
What the workaround still can't do | Check space availability, hold an area, build or quote a package, take a deposit, attach a pre-order |
Front is not short of integrations. Its App Store carries more than 160, across channels and messaging, voice, CRM and e-commerce, project management, knowledge, productivity, and dedicated categories for logistics and maritime and for travel. Front does build vertical integrations. It has just never built one for hospitality.
What actually happens to a booking enquiry
Front's strengths make the gap more obvious, not less. Shared visibility, assignment, internal comments beside the message, SLA rules and response-time reporting are genuinely good, and events teams benefit from them more than most, because a private-hire enquiry passes between several people over weeks. Front fixes who owns the thread. It does nothing about what the thread is trying to achieve.
Here is the real journey of one enquiry when Front and Collins do not talk to each other.
A company emails in September about a Christmas party for 60 on a Thursday in mid-December, asking about exclusive use of the mezzanine, food options, a drinks package and whether they can pay by invoice. The message lands in the shared inbox as a Front conversation.
An agent picks it up and reads it.
The agent opens Collins in another tab, because Front cannot see the space diary.
They check which December Thursdays still have the mezzanine, what minimum spend applies in peak season, which packages work for 60, what deposit is required and when the pre-order deadline falls.
They pencil a provisional hold into Collins, re-keying the date, headcount, space, package and payment requirement from the email.
They switch back to Front and write the reply with options, minimum spend and the deposit terms.
They snooze the conversation, because December enquiries take weeks to convert.
Two weeks later: "It is 75 now and the date has moved a week." The mezzanine may not take 75, the minimum spend changes, and the hold has probably lapsed. The agent repeats steps 3 to 7.
Every enquiry is handled twice, in two systems, by a person copying the same fields between screens. Events enquiries are the worst case for this, because the thread runs for a month, the numbers change repeatedly, and each change means rebuilding the quote from a screen the writer cannot see. One operations director described the inbox behind this workflow as "a black hole, no KPIs, no response rate, nothing," because the work happened in tabs and conversations that no report could see.
The sharper cost is the enquiry you never hear about again. A company Christmas party is worth thousands, the organiser has emailed four venues, and December enquiries arrive in a flood between October and November. A roughly 40-venue entertainment group lost a single booking worth £40,000 because the enquiry arrived outside working hours and nobody replied in time. A three-site pizza group put it more bluntly about a 30 to 40 cover enquiry: "It just sat there. No one saw it. They went somewhere else." Front did not cause those losses. Routing bookings through a system that cannot book anything is what makes the delay inevitable.
What Front actually connects to
Front cannot be accused of ignoring verticals, which is what makes the gap here notable. Its App Store has dedicated categories for logistics and maritime and for travel, built for a customer base in freight forwarding, shipping and travel operations. Front will build deep, industry-specific connections when it decides a market matters. It has not made that decision for hospitality. Search the App Store for Collins and you will find nothing.
The fallback is thinner here than in most cells. Front is well supported on Zapier, but Collins is not on Zapier, so there is no zap to build. Collins connects outward through its own API to point-of-sale, payment and marketing systems rather than exposing a general automation connector, so bridging to Front means a custom development project against Front's API and the Collins API. That is a real engineering budget for a venue group, and what it buys is modest.
Even finished, it is a pipe that copies enquiry text into a conversation, one direction, treating a private-hire negotiation as a message. Front AI is a capable suite: Copilot drafts and answers from past conversations, help content and connected systems, Autopilot resolves routine requests, Smart QA and Topics analyse the queue. All of it is grounded in conversation data. Copilot can write a strong reply about your Christmas packages. It cannot see whether the mezzanine is free on the 12th, hold it, or take a deposit against it.
Why this matters for booking enquiries
A support conversation and a booking enquiry look similar and behave nothing alike. A support conversation is resolved by a reply. A private-hire enquiry is only resolved when the space is held, the package is agreed and the deposit has landed. That difference is the whole problem.
The shared inbox can write a polished reply. It cannot book the party in. The transaction, the part that actually earns the revenue, still lands on your team, one enquiry at a time. Front gives you the best-organised version of the old workflow: everyone sees the enquiry, everyone knows who owns it, and the booking still gets typed into another system by hand.
What it looks like when the tool is built for booking enquiries
The gap closes when the enquiry and the function diary are the same surface, so a private-hire question does not become a week of forwarded email. This is what RevVue does, and it is easier to show than to describe.
Every enquiry is tagged to the venue it concerns, which matters for a group whose sites each hold several private rooms. The team stops opening messages just to work out which building is being asked about, and works from one queue, by location, rather than tags standing in for venues.
One queue per venue, so an enquiry about a private room reaches the people who run it.
The AI drafts the reply in the venue's voice, using its own capacities, its minimum spends and what each room can seat. Event enquiries are the longest threads a venue handles, and starting from a drafted answer removes most of the typing.
A drafted reply carrying the venue's own capacities and terms, ready to approve.
Because it connects to the booking system, the AI takes the step Front cannot: it checks the space against the date and prepares the booking in the thread. Simple date questions are answered on arrival, and the enquiries worth thousands are acknowledged within moments and held in a queue a person works through.
The large-event enquiries held, prepared and visible, instead of buried in a shared inbox.
And because every enquiry belongs to a venue, private hire finally has a funnel. Enquiry volume, reply speed and conversion by site: the reporting a function diary cannot produce, because it only ever sees the events that were confirmed. Front reports on conversations and response times, none of which tells you how much function revenue the inbox lost.
Enquiries, response times and conversion by location, including the ones that never got booked.
An honest note on where RevVue is today
RevVue's Collins integration is on the roadmap, and the honest position today is an email-only pilot. That pilot already delivers the inbox value shown above: location-aware routing, instant acknowledgement, AI-drafted replies, high-value bookings surfaced, and reporting by location. The direct booking-system connection will deepen that when it lands, but it does not gate the value you get today. The UK AI is in pilot.
This is the move the Brasilia Group made, off a horizontal helpdesk and onto an inbox built for the job. Their founder, Nikolaos Kiosses, put it plainly: "The transition from Zendesk to RevVue has been a game changer."
The wider category view is in shared inbox software for restaurants. Because private-hire and large-party enquiries are the highest-value threads a venue handles, how to triage high-value group bookings is the most useful read next. To see what the AI would have said to a real enquiry your team received last week, book 20 minutes.
Frequently asked questions
Does Front integrate with Collins?
No. Front has no native integration with Collins, and no venue booking system appears in the Front App Store. Collins is not on Zapier either, so there is no low-code bridge. Connecting them means a custom development project against Front's API and the Collins API, and even then it only copies enquiry text into a conversation. It cannot hold a space, build a package, or take a deposit in Collins.
Can I connect Front and Collins with Zapier?
No. Front is well supported on Zapier, but Collins is not on Zapier, so there is no zap to build. Collins connects outward through its own API to point-of-sale, payment and marketing systems rather than exposing a general automation connector, which leaves custom development as the only route.
Why does Front integrate with logistics and travel tools but not booking systems?
Because Front has picked its verticals and hospitality is not among them. Front's App Store carries dedicated categories for logistics and maritime and for travel, reflecting a strong base of freight, shipping and travel-operations customers. That shows Front will build deep vertical integrations when it decides a market matters. It has not made that decision for venue booking systems.
What do events and private-hire venues use instead?
Most run enquiries through a shared inbox and accept the double-handling, because no horizontal tool solved the booking side. A purpose-built option is RevVue, which is location-aware and whose AI checks availability and prepares the booking inside the conversation, with high-value private-hire enquiries surfaced for a person to nurture. Its Collins integration is on the roadmap, with an email-only pilot available now.
