SimplyBook.me

Comments: Without SimplyBook.me, we wouldn't be able to offer "same day book & play" along side our counter "walk-in" ticketing system. Based on customer support feedback: I believe (and am very optimistic) about a future update addressing the "default value of 1" setting which can potentially lead to user booking errors as noted above. Nothing is perfect, but honestly: SimplyBook.me comes close. It's "the best of the best."

Pros: SimplyBook.me is the ONLY "booking engine" which had the capability to integrate "same day book & play" online booking with our in-house "walk-in's" ticketing system. Not only does it "work", but it's a "near perfect fit!" (Largely due to the custom feature "add-ins.") I had done extensive research & tried them all.... Simplybook.me is in a class of it's own. Surprisingly, customer support is also truly "world-class!" Having a fair amount of coding & web design experience, I dug in a lot deeper than the average user. In doing so I uncovered several bugs. Not only was the support phenomenal, but most of the fixes came FAST! Booking is fast, easy & designed to work well with smart phones. (Really well for the most part with proper setup, selecting the right "timeline" & adding the CSS custom feature add-in.)

Cons: "Power comes at a price": Monthly fees are based on "custom feature add-ins." IMO, their tiered pricing needs more flexibility. Pricing model is also based on # of bookings & # of SMS messages (if you use them.) This is not a big deal and actually favors "low volume users." (There is even a 100% free plan that comes with 1 custom feature of your choice.) BUT: If you need more than 3 custom features, monthly fees triple to get to the next tier which is 8 features. (So for a business that only does a few bookings a month but need more than 3 features, SimplyBook.me may be too expensive to use.) ~ However: If you do enough volume", your bringing in enough sales to "more than justify" using the best booking system on the planet! "Custom CSS" custom feature: Had to use the "Weekly Classes" timeline ALONG with this custom feature ("CSS custom feature) to avoid/minimize potential user mistakes in booking. The combination of these two work OK. With a few "simple" modifications to the other timelines, those should work well too. Hopefully the engineers will make two (2) very slight "navigational" & "display" modifications to correct these issues when using the other timelines. "Group Bookings" custom feature: When using "group billing custom feature" (one booking for a group of participants): A default quantity of 1 always displays. (Making it too easy for user to forget to select the correct quantity. And on the review screen, this quantity does not appear.)

Comments: Overall, Simplybookit has helped us streamline our appointment booking and monitoring systems. Despite it being a little difficult to set up initially, if you can afford the standard package (or can make do with the basic package) it's worth the time and the customer service is great.

Pros: It has some really great features that we needed - multiple locations, the ability to take appointment deposits, customise notification emails and having a questionnaire for clients to fill in at the point of booking. The ability to download our daily appointments as a CSV file is really useful - generally speaking, the amount of data we're able to extract from it for our monitoring is fantastic. The customer service is fast and helpful.

Cons: The interface took a bit of getting used to (but once you're used to it, it's fine! We have some single appointments for one person and some workshops with multiple spaces, but they have to be set up in the same way so the workshop booking interface is quite clunky from the customer's perspective. Some of the info (for example the service description) isn't viewable on mobile devices which is a shame. The recent price rises were a bit of a shock when it came to renew our subscription and unfortunately it has now become unaffordable for us to keep using.

Comments: Extremely useful to my business haven't had the need to contact customer services yet although I believe we did at the beginning to help with set up and they were helpful.

Pros: For me this software has done away with the endless backwards and forwards negotiating diaries for clients sessions depending on either parties availability. It has allowed my class attendees and clients the freedom of booking themselves on as and when they see fit. The ease of cancellation and blocking time out is extremely helpful as clients don't need to contact me but I still get a notification that they have had to cancel for whatever reason.

Cons: I'm not very savvy when it comes to software and always require guidance from another to help make any changes necessary on the software. I personally don't think it's idiot proof but then maybe that says something about me! I also get a moment of panic when you get the notification the you need to subscribe when you know you're on a rolling monthly payment and for a few hours you don't see any new bookings unless to look at the calendar page.

Comments: Exceptional Addition to our service offerings at Limerick City College. We had always been taking bookings the manual way which was relatively cumbersome and resulted in huge inefficiencies. Then we initially researched which online platforms were available and could easily be integrated with our existing website. This was when we discovered SimplyBook.me Genuinely, SimplyBook has made an immediate impact on our business efficiency and performance. An exceptional amount for a small price.

Pros: The trial was exceptional and allowed us to setup all the services and platform to tailor it to our needs. It was the professional and efficient support SimplyBook provided that also made our decision to purchase a subscription very easy. It is an amazing platform which transformed our booking and office administration within the first week of its implementation and that it can easily be integrated with Paypal made receiving payments hassle-free. Limerick City College would not hesitate in recommending any service providing business to use SimplyBook.me you receive:
- Exceptional Support
- Online Payments
- Website Integration
- Multiple Services
- Calendars
- E-mail notifications

Cons: It was very difficult to find anything to dislike or even comment on as it is a very user friendly and well supported software.

Comments: The service has a powerful API that has documentation that is good enough to get you up and going with an implementation. It has some bugs and has poor technical support. The pricing model is very scalable if you have lots of people that need to have calendars/scheduling that don't necessarily use the scheduling capacity (provided by the API) in your application (they charge per booking not per calendar). The nail in the coffin for us it the lack of HIPAA compliance for the API. Their sales page touts HIPAA compliance but this is not possible if you are using the API and this is not stated anywhere. Your team could spend time and money encrypting all your data yourself before it gets to Simplybook.me's servers but it just makes it painful to use compared to other services out there that offer this out of the box.

Pros: They have a very wide set of features for users that are using their scheduling interface. The API seems to be quite robust as well handling many of the core scheduling features in it. The pricing is based on features and number of bookings which is very scalable for our use case that has lots of people that require a calendar but may never use the booking features that are provided by this integration.

Cons: They claim that their product is HIPAA compliant. However, turning on the HIPAA compliant features shuts down access to their API, which is the only thing we are using them for. Their API support is very poor. Most of the time they just say they cannot help and their answers are very abrupt and unhelpful answers most of the time (you have to keep nagging to get a decent response). There are bugs here and there in the API. The documentation for their API, though large, is incomplete and lacks thorough/clear explanations and neglects things like how call backs work etc. It looks like their feature set is growing but the API capacity is not.