5 Reasons you NEED an Automated Booking System

FIVE Reasons You Need an Automated Booking System

You would be surprised in the year 2024 how many small businesses don’t use the technology that’s available to them. Mainly, booking systems in location based entertainment. If you run any type of business that takes reservations and you don’t have an online booking system you’re wasting your time away.

Not only are you wasting your time, but you are probably also wasting your money. Say with your business you’re paying for advertising and you have a radio ad for example going out saying “book now, give us a call at xxx-xxx-xxxx” and you happen to not answer the phone call, congrats you just wasted that ad spend because there’s a good chance they’re going to forget to call back or they’re not feeling as spontaneous at a later date.

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Having an online booking system is key to operations, it makes it so your clients can book 24/7, whether they’re up at 6am trying to figure out what they’re going to do with the kids after work, or they’re night owls looking for some weekend fun, it’s not reliant on you answering the phone. 

Now a controversial take that I have had other people disagree with me about, majority of the people under the age of 40 don’t want to call to book. If I was looking to go out bowling with my friends and I had the option to pick between a bowling alley I had to call, or one with an easy to use online booking system, I can almost guarantee that I would choose the one with the online booking system.

There’s a long list of benefits to having an online booking system, but here’s five that should be the easy selling point. (Keep in mind I have no stake in this game, I’m not going to turn around and try to sell you a booking system. This is from my years in the industry.)

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Reason #1: Available 24/7

Yes I already touched on this earlier, but I wanted to reiterate it because it is so important. If you’re not there and ready to accept a booking when your customer wants to make it, you’re probably going to lose out on that sale. The LBE industry is fuelled by people feeling spontaneous and wanting to do something. If they call and you don’t answer, they’re just going to call the next business with something fun for them to do.

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Reason #2: Saving Staff Costs

You don’t have to pay staff to sit there and answer the phone for every single booking you have. At my arcade we had 6 Virtual Reality chambers, which means we theoretically had 372 bookable time slots in a week based on our open hours. Typically they were booked in groups of 2-4, but for this example say they weren’t. That means in any given week my staff could potentially be forced to answer the phone 372 times in a week. I’ve taken a lot of booking phone calls in my days and I would say they average around 2.5 minutes, so that would be 930 minutes a week, or 15.5 hours per week potentially answering the phone. Do you really want to pay a staff for 15.5 hours per week when you could just have software do it for you for a hell of a lot cheaper?

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Reason #3: Payments/Deposits Up Front

Majority of the businesses that I work with require some sort of payment up front, deposit, or card on file to make a reservation just in case the booking doesn’t show you’re not out the money. With this you have a secure online portal that will follow all your region's cybersecurity laws and regulations to handle this all for you. You don’t have to worry about punching in the cards manually over the phone or worrying about storing their information wrong and putting your customers at risk. That’s completely out of your hands and not your problem, you just get a nice bank deposit to worry about. Now to circle back to the point above on saving staff costs, my average phone call of 2.5 minutes was without taking card information, if you’re also getting peoples card details over the phone you can definitely add at least another minute to that timer.

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Reason #4: Easy Booking Tracking/Inventory Management

This is probably the best part of having an automated booking system. They create your calendar for you. You don’t have to worry about going through pen and paper to make sure that you have everything right, these softwares will do it for you, they’ll manage all your slots and you don’t have to worry about it.

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Reason #5: Tracking Sales and Marketing Efforts

Now obviously I come from a marketing background so I am a little biased here. But with the ability for customers to make online bookings you can easily track where they’re coming from. Running a sick new Facebook ad campaign? You can track how many people are actually going to your website and making a booking. Where when customers have to book over phone or email, you can only see that they made the call or made the email, you aren’t able to see the result.

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There are so many more other positives to having an online booking system and it’s definitely the way to go. There are a couple negatives with stuff like losing the personal selling touch, ability to easily upsell, and potential software issues. But the positives certainly outweigh the negatives.

You’d think after a long post like this I would come to you with a solution and trying to sell you something. Surprise, I’m not going to do that. I will be honest for the location based entertainment industry I haven’t found a perfect solution for a booking system for us. But what I would recommend is if you're looking for one for your business, just go search for what other similar businesses are using and eventually you’ll probably find the one that best fits your niche. For example I know I love playing some simulator golf, and every golf sim business within 150km of me uses the same booking software, so I assume that it’s the best for their industry.

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