SimplyBook.me

I love how easy it is to get started setting up and using this platform for my clients.

It could use a few more functions but for the price it's hard to beat.

It has a wide range of (theoretically) great features. App is handy.
It is not as pricey as many others.

As a tourguide I was long looking for a booking tool to make my tours easier to book and generate automated invoices. Simplybook.it does that on a simple level, but after several years in use it really frustrates me, that their (paid) features are not really thought-through in the end (and they don't care to change it).

Examples:
Group booking feature makes it possible, that one person can book a tour for e.g. 4 people, which is great. Invoices then are also correctly generated for the price of 4. But if the customer cancels their group booking, it is not possible to do that for the group of 4 people, instead technically the cancellation is 1 out of 4 bookings of this group, and 3 remains. Oddly the invoice remains unchanged for 4 people, and the calender shows 3 bookings inside the group.

That brings up several inconveniences:

1) I have to confirm the customers, if they wanted to cancel the whole booking or if they only wanted to cancel single people in the booking (100% wanted to cancel the whole group and arent even aware they did not). So I have to cancel the remainig 3 manually.

2) If I have to cancel a group, I need to cancel x-times. So the customer receives x-confirmation emails. That just makes me appear bothering and unprofessional.

3) The amounts of the invoices are not affected from any cancellation, so you really need to be careful not to mess up your accounting

Which brings me to the central flaw (bug in my opinion) of simplybook.me:

Cancelled bookings (group or single) still have a generated invoice in the system and are not flagged as cancelled, but pending (and so have no different status than any other open invoice). So to have a correct invoice journal at the end of the year or quarter, you carefully need to filter the invoices to status "paid". Otherwise your accounting is full of wrong revenues due to invoices from cancelled services.

Another bug in the group booking feature is that it is only available on service selection level (eg. tour 1, 2 and 3). If you set the widget to only show tour 1, there is no possibility anymore to book for a group.

If I reach out to their customer service to improve on all this, I get more or less the same answer over the years: it is like it is and I dont get a sense of ambitions to change or update (sometimes they offer me some kind of workarounds with other paid features - haha).

I find this pretty frustrating, because this tool could be so much better than it is right now if they actually listen to their customers. But they refuse.

it was easy to install and input information

being able to change time slots daily if you are working late

It was easy to setup a service and calendar. It seemed like the integrations were also easy to manage.

It was not clear that each choice of integration was extra cost. Once the trial ended, I was on the ultra plan with only 6 or 7 choices from the basic. Difficult to strip down to basic. Website was challenging to customize.