SimplyBook.me Reviews

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.

Their customer service is fast and polite. Their app is easy and simple to use. Their widget is easy to implement to a website. I can cancel, reschedule and book appointments fast and easily through the app. Its affordable. It syncs to my calendar. Its highly
Customizable without being overwhelming and theyre constantly improving the app.

Clients like the website version better than the mobile version. I dont like that the mobile version is annoying about logging you out so easily.

Best scheduling software for a recording studio out there. I've tested over 40 other booking software's and Simpybook is by far the best for a mult-location, multi-calendar, multi-staff, multi-user, etc option.

Calendar view could be easier to read & sort.

I was spending so much time scheduling and re-scheduling my students. With SimplyBook.me, they do all of that at their leisure.
It's more than worth the $30 monthly fee I pay.
I've had great experiences with their online help chat and in person phone calls.

Sometimes it's difficult to find where things are on the website. When that happens, I have to call/chat with their support team. Sometimes the admin website doesn't feel as intuitive as it could.

It was very easy to set up an embed on our website to allow our customers to book auto detailing appointments with SimplyBook.me, and manage and cancel their appointments themselves. It's far better than customers having to call in and speak to our manager to manually find and schedule times and write down that information, then having to contact the manager again if they need to make changes, reschedule, etc.

It's not as easy as it should be to set up a customized schedule, such as only allowing a certain number of specific services during specific time periods each day (for example, 3 full details OR 2 full details and 2 express services OR 1 full detail and 5 express services).

If you need a simple, no-nonsense booking tool this is it. I love that i can keep it free for now until I have the business to upgrade.

I wish the free version had HIPAA and text reminders, a girl can dream.

Love the ease for our clients to book and it has a built in website. It integrates with square and very affordable. The websites are beautiful not very customizable but you can manage.

Very confusing! Because majority of the major features that anyone would need counts as custom feature, its so difficult to find what you need. There are settings under Welcome, Manage, Custom features, and settings. Honestly, been using this site for 6months or more and still don't know where all settings and features are, so just click click click away til you find it. Sometimes, you would have to look deeper. Example, for time schedules. OMG, ,good luck! Good thing is c\they have the best customer service on chat 24/7 so you would just have to chat with them and they'll give you a link. God bless them! Another con would be the reports! REPORTS is key guys! Reports are our roadmap! Can we get a report for all the deposits? or just add deposit column to the booking details. Lastly, marketing, you're limited if you want to get on Google's 1st page without ads.

Easy to use, almost trouble free (works almost every time). Interface is appealing, and customers can access site very easily.

1. My customers frequently complain that they cannot book an appointment. This is because it is not very clear that a time slot has already been booked and they need to try and search for another one that is not.

I think to overcome this, a pop-up message should appear at the booking site every time someone tries to book a time slot that is taken already. The message could read "This session is already booked or there is insufficient time available to book this time slot. Please try another time slot". The little red sentence that currently appears on your system is rarely seen by my customers nor is the dimmed grey lettering of the time slots evident enough for customers to realize the slot is taken already.

In addition, you can provide a week or month-at-a-glance view of the time days/time slots already booked and those available so customers can easily see which ones to select.

2. It would be great if I could add a link from my Simplebookme webpage so customers can click on to view more information about a service or product than what is allowed from your site.

It's affordable and it's not hard to set up. Open your account then list your services and availability dates and you're ready to go. The admin app is a quick way to manage everything and there's also the client app that does the same thing on their end.Notifications can come in through email or SMS. I like that because I've missed important things coming in through email. On my phone after there are 3 or 4 they don't display individually anymore. On the other hand I always check SMS and they don't group together. Integrate with Facebook, Google, Stripe, PayPal, etc.I would say it's a simple way to do your booking.

It is affordable unless you're wanting the add on packages. Honestly they do get expensive. If you can operate without them it's no big deal though.

Accepts online payments even on a free account
30 days Free Trial which is long enough to try all of the costum features. It actually helped me decide to upgrade when my free trial is over.

Poor customer support. I signed up for the Free account. After logging out, I couldnt log in. Tried "forgert password/forget company login" but no email has been sent to my inbox. Tried chatting with their live chat, but it wasnt so "live" after all. I left a message but I didnt get any message in my inbox from them. Tried sending a message via their Facebook page which says "typically replies within a few hours" but until now there was no response. So I signed up again using a different email. This time, I screen shot my login details. I set up Simplybook according to my company's needs etc. When I tried logging in again after a few hours, I couldn't login using the login details I used (which I have screen shot earlier).Went through the same steps mentioned above to retrieve my login details (just in case I have the password wrong) and to no avail. I didnt get any email to reset password nor to find my company login. How can I use the system if it wont let me log in.