Tips & Tricks

Setting up an online booking system for your experience business

by Callum Hemsley

As an activity centre, it’s pretty likely that the vast majority of your customers come by email, or phone, or Facebook, or Whatsapp, or drop-ins, or even post!

These channels are a royal nightmare to manage, and every centre we have spoken to in the past 8 months has talked about the challenges of managing that and other admin. Managing your schedule with a notebook, or excel, or some dated piece of software, every year you are thinking - I’ll find a better way, but every year, other things pile up, and it never happens.

So, we decided to see if we could change that. Check it out now if you want to go and have a look!

Our entire set up flow is this

  1. Sign up to eola, either with email, or your facebook account, and create your centre (2 minutes)
  2. Create your activities and their schedules (5 minutes to 30 minutes) depending on just how complex or long your list of activities is
  3. Add our widget to your site (<10 minutes). It’s a single java snippet that can be added anywhere on your own site
  4. Sit back, and watch the bookings come rolling in! 🤙🤙🤙

But there are many platforms out there. Which one is the best?

Each platform has its own unique identity, and there are lots of reasons each might be good for you. If you want one that is simple, fast, and cutting edge, we are probably right for you.

Our platform launched with the singular goal of making it possible for an activity centre to start taking online bookings within one hour using cutting edge technology, while keeping everything as simple as humanly possible.

A beautiful online booking platform
The dashboard is your home and shows the most important information you need there and then

Pretty lofty goal, right? Well, as a team, we have a serious background in building out cutting edge eCommerce platforms that simply work. I’ll talk more about some of our features below and why you should use us for our tech, but that isn’t the important thing to us.

What we think is important is that we want to listen and build our online booking system for you. Every single business that joins us in our journey has the ability and the right to talk to the founders at any time; to tell us when you think we are doing the right thing - or the wrong!

Some features and capabilities will take longer than others, but you can be sure that we are making this platform work for you, while keeping it dead simple.

eola wins an award
We are a small team that genuinely cares

Some of our features

1 hour setup - From signing up to having a booking button on your site with your entire activity offering available should take you less than an hour, without any guidance from us. For some of you, with highly complex calendars too, it should take you almost no time at all.

Super easy set-up
Your availability for each activity can be made as simple or as complex as you need it, with our powerful availability creator

Seamless real-time bookings and payments - With eola, you can take real-time bookings and payments, for any activities you put on offer! Better still, the customer never has to leave your site. eola’s booking button blends in directly with your own website, so your customers can trust that they are booking with you without ever needing to click away.

seamless integration of our booking widget
Our booking widget connects seamlessly to your own site, so no leaving the page to book!

True mobile optimisation - These days, that is almost a buzzword. If you really want to see the power of our mobile optimisation, switch to your phone, and check out our site versus every single other booking platform out there. Go ahead, we’ll wait.

Our entire system has been built from the ground up specifically for mobile optimisation. Google ranks out page speed and optimisation at 99%, and our site is faster, cleaner, and more optimised than any other booking platform around today. If you find one you think is better, let us know; we like a bit of competition, and our goal is to make sure we are always the best!

Liability Waivers - Any time a customer books, whether on their own, with their kids, or in a group, they will immediately receive waivers to sign after they book, so you can be sure that without even a single word from you, all your customers are fully paid up, know when to go and what they’re doing, and have signed all the necessary documentation to take part!

Instructor Management - With our platform, you can super easily manage your entire team, assigning instructors to different lessons, ensuring they know exactly what they’re doing and when. You can sit back as each day, they have a complete agenda of everything they are doing!

Instructor assignment
Managing lessons is incredibly easy, and adding and removing instructors takes just one or two clicks!

Extras / Group pricing - With just two clicks, you can add an infinite variety of pricing options for customers, from lunch at the pub, to a discount for groups of ten. We make it unbelievably simple.

Pricing is super simple
However you want to price an activity, do it easily with our crazily simple with eola

Multi-channel management - It doesn’t matter where your bookings come from, all of them can be managed with eola. To add a new booking manually can be done in as little as 4 clicks. Whether you receive a customer over the phone, by email, or in person, all of them can be added super easily.

Not just that, but we even have a marketplace where we can bring you even more customers. Everything is automatically synced together.

Offline booking functionality
Manually adding a booking takes no time at all

Easy editing - With just a few clicks, you can edit everything about your centre, from how far in advance you take bookings, to the age you consider a child becomes an adult, to the availability dates of different lessons, even to the colour of the booking button.

Everything on eola is changeable with the touch of a button, and takes no time at all.

Settings page
Don't judge us for our test waiver... It was the first block of text I could think of when testing it...

There are many great things about our platform, and our customers think so too. Below is some of the feedback from our early adopters.

Reviews of eola
Our users are pretty happy, and we are super happy to be working with them!

If you think any of this sounds at all interesting, go and take a look. The only cost on eola is a transaction fee on online payments, so you could sign up today and play around as much as you want for literally years, and never incur a penny cost! 🤙🤙

If you want to know more, just ask. My email is callum@eola.co

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