How to Automate Bookeo

Bookeo turns a website visitor into a seat on Thursday

Bookeo is an online booking and reservation system for businesses that sell a scheduled experience: escape rooms, cooking schools, guided tours, boat charters, yoga and language classes, salons and spas.

Those businesses have almost nothing in common except the shape of the problem. There is a room, a boat or a kitchen with a fixed number of places in it. There is a session that starts at a stated time. And there is a customer who found you on a phone at eleven at night and wants to book without speaking to anybody.

So Bookeo sits between the website and the diary. It holds the calendar of sessions, the seats left in each one, the customer records, the payments, the waivers and the vouchers, and it publishes a booking page or a widget that goes on your own site.

For a two-room escape venue or a cooking school with one kitchen, it is the front door and the diary at the same time.

Each booking arrives with a small job attached

A booking is not finished when it is paid for. It arrives carrying a small pile of things a person has to do with it.

The cooking school reads the dietary and allergy notes on every booking for Saturday, then works out what to buy for the number of people actually coming. The escape room checks which sessions on Tuesday hold one group of two and which are full. Somebody looks at the class that needs six students to be worth running and has four, with four days to go. Somebody counts yesterday's takings against what the card processor actually paid out.

After the session there is the other half. Asking the group that clearly enjoyed themselves to leave a review. Matching a new review to the host who worked that slot. Noticing that a gift voucher sold last January expires next month.

None of it takes long on its own. All of it happens every single day, before the doors open.

Bookeo

The session sheet, prepared Tomorrow's dietary notes, group sizes and special requests pulled out of every booking onto one page before the day starts.

Under-booked sessions flagged early Classes below the head count they need to run, found with days to spare rather than on the morning itself.

Reviews matched to the session New reviews connected to the slot and the host they came from, so praise and complaints reach the right person.

The booking flow is already the polished part

Bookeo automates the taking of a booking well, and it is worth setting all of this up before adding anything on top.

Automatic email and text reminders go out ahead of a session on your own timings, which is the single largest thing anyone can do about no-shows. Branded booking confirmations are sent by Bookeo rather than typed. Waiting lists take the overflow when a session sells out and notify the people on them automatically when a seat frees up. Customers reschedule or cancel online instead of phoning. Digital waivers are signed before arrival rather than on a clipboard in the doorway. Prepaid packages and gift vouchers are sold and then tracked as they are used. The calendar syncs with Google Calendar, iCal, Outlook and Office 365, staff can be rostered to specific services with their own working hours, and payments run through Stripe, Square or PayPal.

Every one of those is triggered by something happening inside Bookeo: a booking made, a seat freed, a session approaching.

None of it looks outward. Bookeo does not read the review that appeared on Google overnight, does not open the marketplace you also list on, and has no idea what the processor deposited.

The day arrives ready rather than built

The day still gets assembled by hand at seven in the morning. It could be waiting instead.

Tomorrow's sessions summarised with the dietary notes, group sizes and special requests already lifted out of each booking, so the kitchen or the host has one sheet instead of forty booking screens. Sessions running under the head count they need, flagged four days out rather than on the day, while a promotion could still fill them.

Yesterday's bookings, revenue and room occupancy totalled and waiting when you pick up your phone. Takings compared with what the processor actually paid into the bank. Gift vouchers approaching expiry, listed with the balance still sitting on each one.

Reviews that appeared overnight, matched to the session they came from and the person who ran it, so a complaint reaches you the same day. Listings on the marketplaces you also sell through, checked against your own calendar so the same slot is never sold twice.

Keep the customer messages supervised. A review request or a voucher reminder should be prepared and then sent by a person, because these are small venues where one clumsy message is remembered by an entire local Facebook group.

Filling the room is the work worth keeping

Deciding how to fill a quiet Tuesday is the interesting part of running a venue. Finding out that Tuesday is quiet is not, and it is the part that means opening four screens before breakfast.

WebRun is an agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens Bookeo, the payment processor, the review pages and the marketplaces, reads them, and gives you the morning's picture with anything that disagrees named.

It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, and you can watch a run and stop it. Anything going to a customer is drafted and left for you.

The workflows below are already built, and each one names what it opens.