Booker reviews

The sofware helped our business in a great way, it has helped us expand our business that are great for small studios.

Booker is a robust solution for online scheduling and taking payments too. In theory, Booker will save you loads of time since customers schedule and manage their own appointments. In reality, we spend too much time on the phone with Booker trying to work out quirks.

I hated them and will never go back. Absolutely negligent business practices by their vendor companies.

disappointed

I have used Booker for the past 19 months. I haven't once wanted to look at any other software, as they have helped me fulfill my needs for my clients. I recommend them highly to any salon or spa looking to take care of the clients whole process from booking, to reminding, to following up!

I found it an average platform for providing a decent appointment scheduling service to our customers.

I have been a client with Spa Booker for 5 years. In that time Spa Booker and their incredibly knowledgeable team have helped me build and retain my clientele. The feature of this software are user friendly for both the account holder and the client. With features such as online booking, promote, and a slew of reports, this is the only software I would rely on to manage the back end of business! The online feature acts as a 24 hour receptionist that my clients depend upon for their booking needs, not everyone runs on the same schedule or may not want to make phone calls to the business for discreet waxing appts, this adds comfort to our clients when scheduling. The newly added promote feature has brought back clients and regained an opportunity for those who we haven't seen over a long term period of time. The segments add different discounts based on your last service. Within one month of using this new tool my business had generated thousands of dollars from clients we would have otherwise considered a "lost" client. Spa Booker is always finding innovative ways to remain on the cutting edge with features that are consistent and easy to use! The have their clients in mind when adding features that will ultimately help grow, retain and maintain business and revenue. I know many businesses alike that would benefit from this software as it has been instrumental to the success of my company!

We have been using Booker for two and a half years now and we are extremely satisfied with the product. This is a full featured system that supports managing appointments, point of sale, gift card sales and the use of series or memberships. The system tracks employee pay reasonably well. It also provides a fair number of reports to help manage the business. This is so much better than having to track appointments in one place and handling payment in another system. One customer database supports the entire business.

Nothing that I needed support with and is standard expectations were attended to nor problems resolved.

Poor experience. Sure, extra stuff was neat, but that's not what I got Booker for. We need a R E L I A B L E system. Not one that I have to always complain about. Oh, on that note, customer service wasn't helpful, but rather sarcastic and unprofessional. Extremely unhappy. The only time I actually had a decent experience was when I was cancelling. That was the most painless experience I had. The irony there.

Absolutely terrible. I am So disappointed in MINDBODY for doing this to me!!

So after 4 years of being loyal Booker customers/users and thousands of dollars paid for their lackluster service, we have decided to jump ship and started looking for a more reliable & less restrictive online booking software.

We have had our complaints about Booker since day one because of how it is very restrictive on what our spa system administrators are allowed to do. We have always gotten the usual "oh you can not do that because we want to advice our clients on best business practices." Then we will counter by asking the Booker rep if they realized that the actual management team on site at the spa would know what's best for our day to day operations? Which we they always point us to their make recommendations page or they would claim to submit it to their development team, which neither ever received any follow up. So after many attempts to get them to make their system more intuituve and flexible for our day to day operations, we quite frankly gave up and just dealt with the system. And now we have their system performance take a rapid decline, which started well over a year ago. We even purchased new computer systems and increase our internet speeds in hopes of speeding up the system but nope, that didn't help what so ever. Their customer service has also gone to poop, the reps use to be somewhat knowledgeable on how to use Booker and nice. Now they don't seem to care about your issues and pretty much do not accept any responsibility or accountability on behalf of Booker on how the system performance has gone to poop, right along their customer service. Just last night when I inform a rep that we our fed up with the system performance and the numerous temporary "work arounds", that we have no choice but to start looking for another service. They replied with "sorry to hear that, let us know what we can do to help with the transition." Really!?! That was the cherry on top.

Booker has failed to realize that we are their loyal paying customers and their poor performance is being transferred on to our loyal paying customers which we will not accept because we do value our loyal customers. So some words of advice to Booker on best business practices, don't screw your customers.

I love using Booker because it truly does everything I need it to. Not only is all your customer tracking in one place, I can easily override a schedule, track inventory, check my estheticians clock-in and out times, but all the merchant services and marketing with Frederick is also build in to make it a complete system. If I ever have a question, there are so many way to easily get it answered. Usually if I'm wondering, someone else has been too- so I can find it in the community boards, but if its truly technical, the chat is a quick and convenient way that I can still answer the phone as it rings, because the help line isn't tying up the phones or my hands. Frederick tracks emails, so if a client says they never got a reminder, I can double check that the system did indeed send one and with texts working better, more clients are loving the frequent reminders. Having the app option allows me to track the schedule from home also. Truly, I've looked at other software programs, but they just can't stand up to what Booker is able to do. Booker is just faster, easier, sleeker, and more intelligent.

The survey section is really helpful to hear from clients on what we can add or change to make their experience the best it can be. The flexibility of having booker app on our phone lets us have everything we need at all times.

Booker has features that real you in but the functionality is antiquated, the "exceptional" customer service is non-existant once you have signed a contract and the features promised in the demo are not all delivered. I consistently get the answer that they are sorry but that feature is not part of the package you purchased - even though my sales rep assured me that it was when I asked him about it many times. There has never been an attempt to make it right or even console me for my trouble. The conversion cost me hundreds of dollars in changes needed to my website and credit card purchasing - many of which turned out to be inaccurate information provided by Booker that still did not fix my problems.
Moreover, the software has so many layers and steps to basic operations - it is a way to labor intensive to use. As a small business, your resources can not be tied up in having to change your schedule in three different places just to schedule a client after hours or to have to manually look up each gift certificate number - it doesn't stick with the client when purchased. Come on Booker - these features have been available for years!
Booker was a really bad decision on my part and I am looking for something else to replace it with that won't cost me as much to convert. They really did me wrong- whatever you do, don't take the Clover package as this is the software I am working with. They don't tell you ahead of time that it is a different program you than what they demo to you.

It works, but I need decent customer service.

Easy on line booking, easy pos, easy scheduling,

In general I already covered the benefits....but one thing I forgot to complain about is the difficulty in moving a client with multiple treatments!!! I may have a client booked for 3-4 treatments lasting 2-3 hours, and say the opportunity comes up for them to come in an hour earlier. I can't just move the whole appt up! I have to edit each item one by one, updating the appt after each adjustment!!! or just cancel the whole damned-able thing and reenter it?!

I purchased this product under the guidance of one representative who basically went MIA the moment my card was charged. He set up a training appt at the wrong time from a previously agreed upon time. He also told me my "sign up fee" was a "set up fee" which made me think I was going to at least be assisted in setting up my acct. I tried several times (email and calls to his direct line) to reach him the moment I received the confirmation email for my training time, never received a response back. At that point I attempted the main number but couldn't get through for days. Your wait time is 2 minutes is what I heard for several calls totaling in over 30 min +. I finally reached someone (6 days after initial purchase) and I had decided to cancel my acct. due to my experience with poor customer service. I was told then that my investment, in what I thought was a set up fee, cannot be refunded as sign up fees are nonrefundable. On top of it all they charged my acct a prorated amount for 8 days of service (assuming 8 bc they were slow in canceling). So now after not receiving any training or set up assistance with many hours sitting on hold they are still keeping my money.
I do not recommend this product to anyone at all! Stay away!

We are able to schedule, complete orders, keep up with client profiles, and take inventory with ease. It gets the job done for our spa and we rely on it completely! It was a great software choice for us. We would not use anything else.

So there is no perfect product BUT... We've run our beauty business for 8 years now using a variety of non-integrated systems including AppointmentQues and Intuit POS. About 2 years ago, we became very frustrated with the total lack of customer support from our current solutions'they literally did not have a phone number to reach a real person in any circumstance. The role Booker would play for us was mission critical so I did some serious due diligence before selecting Booker. I created a massive feature spreadsheet that compared the 4 top contenders. Booker and one other option appeared to be the best on paper. So I called Booker and grilled that sales person for literally 3 hours about all the nuances of Booker. She was cheerful and knowledgable (I think her name was Erica) and answered pretty much all of my questions. We have over 60 employees, so training and switching our software backbone is a huge hassle'you really want to choose the right long term partner so you don't have to deal with all that work again.

I'd say Booker gets 98 out of 100 issues and features. It is very elegant and thoughtfully designed and a pleasure to work with on a day to day basis. So much more robust and clean that our previous patched together solutions. Yes, on the rare occasions when the Booker servers go down for an hour at 3pm, you will curse their name, but you will also quickly forgive, because no cloud based solutions has perfect uptime, and this cloud based solution is soooooooo much better than our previous desktop apps.

Yes, we push the limits of the features. Yes, we wish they would fix some of the "glitches" more quickly'it seems that adding new customers might be getting more CEO focus than improving the user/customer experience. But so far, Booker appears to still be the best available option.

Side note: Robert Schmidt in support is a rockstar and really gave us a lot of good advice and strategic insights related to Booker.

PROS:
Smart, friendly people in customer support that live in NYC or SoCal. They really know their stuff and try hard to help you. And they don't speak English as a 3rd language or live in Bangladesh!

Well thought out, elegant interface.

CONS:
Booker needs to hire more/task more programmers to fix glitches in the system'fixes trickle in, but far more slowly than other SaaS providers in other industries.
Feels like they are resting on their laurels with features'slow to fix or add features

Booker for Salons is not as horrible as some make it out to be, but it is also not the best software. It has some features others may not be able to look over.It has helped me this far and I've been in the industry 10 years now. I will say this is on the lower end budget wise, but I don't believe it's worth the amount I pay monthly. The only reason I still have the software is because I'm comfortable with it, and I've kind of just gotten use to it! If you can afford to pay a little more monthly, there is definitely other software on the market worth the money!