7 Challenges of Online Booking System

The online booking Industry constantly exploring new opportunities to evolve. With the evolution of online booking engines, it becomes crucial to standardize the online booking process.

So, if you want to start an online booking business, you need to understand what challenges you can face in building a stable yet powerful online booking system.

Through this article, let’s walk through the challenges of an online booking system. Moreover, we will see how to overcome the challenges, establish a profitable booking system & get the sales rolling.

1. Single Platform Multiple Booking Types

If you are willing to sell multiple types of products or services on your store then, you definitely require an option to select the booking type as per your business requirement. Let’s understand it with an instance.

Suppose you offer Salon appointment booking service online and Make-up kits on rent. So, you may get stuck in creating a single system that offers appointment bookings & rental bookings at the same time.

Now, it seems to be a challenge to develop an online booking system that offers multiple types of bookings on a single platform.

One benefit for the Shopify Users: Using Booking App, you can achieve the same i.e. create a system to sell different types of products (rental products, appointment bookings, single day booking & concert bookings). Explore!

In case you want a separate platform for your booking business then, the same can be achieved using Booking Commerce as well.

2. Slot Management: Close Bookings

What if you are planning a vacation & want to prevent bookings on specific days? If this is the case, you definitely require a system that lets you close certain dates to avoid bookings on those dates.

Let’s understand this with a live example:- Suppose you run an online hotel booking business. You want to close bookings for some of your rooms as the rooms need to be redesigned. So, this can only be achieved if your online booking system will have this feature to restrict bookings on specific days.

Other Examples:-

• You are going for a vacation & unable to provide salon service to your customers for 1 week. So, you can close bookings for 1 week.
• There seems to be a defect in your booking product & it will take time to get recovered in good condition. You can close bookings in this case as well.

One Solution:- As the Close Booking seems to be a must-have feature for your online booking system, Booking App is the one to help you provide an option to overwrite slots of some specific days when your service is unavailable.

3. Booking Cancellation Option for Customers

It’s always been challenging to manage online booking cancellations.

If you provide the booking cancellation option to customers, you will frequently receive tons of booking cancellation requests from the customers that are too complex to manage. On the other hand, if you will not provide the cancel booking option to your customers, you will be flooded with bookings or probably start receiving spams.

This may also result in a large number of no-shows if the customers find no option to cancel bookings.

Don’t you think it’s better to receive cancel or reschedule requests from customers rather than no-shows!

So, it’s beneficial to have a booking system in such a way that customers can request the merchant to cancel their bookings rather than offering them a direct cancel option. One thing you can do is just restrict bookings for the customer based on their emails.

4. Price Per Booking: Time Slot Management

It’s quite complex to manually set up a different price for each booking slot. In order to have a flexible price for each booking, your online booking system should be capable enough to show a different slot price of the same booking product on different dates. Let’s understand it with a simple example.

One Live example you might have observed:– You see a little variation in the price of the movie tickets if you book the tickets on week-days and if you book them on weekends. This means that the booking service provided to you is the same but the slot price varies based on the slot you select.

How is it profitable?
People mainly prefer to watch movies on weekends. So, you can keep up the movie ticket price high for the weekend & earn more from each booking.

It’s been quite clear that your booking system must provide the option to create price rules based on which you can set a different slot price for the same product or services.

5. Manage Bookings via Calendar

Once your online booking business glows at a higher pace, it’s become quite complex to manage tons of bookings. There, you need a booking calendar using which you can keep track of each booking in one place.

If your system is integrated with Google calendar, the customer will receive the Google calendar link on the confirmation of each booking. Thus, both you and your customers can manage bookings accordingly.

Check Out the Google Calendar Feature in Booking App!

6. Streamline Online Booking Process

Don’t let your buyers confused once they visit your website to schedule appointments online.

This is ultimately a real-time interaction between you & your buyers who visit your website to book the products or services. So, it’s always been challenging to identify the bottlenecks that eventually leads to an obstacle for the online booking system. Just pick them out & build up your system in such a way that users find it a cakewalk to book products or services on your website.

Thus, streamline your booking process and provide a better booking experience for your customers.

7. Handle Customer Complaints

If you are in an eCommerce business, you have to deal with customer complaints. Your customer may have a bad experience with your service but the main challenge is to handle such situations with grace.

“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”

– Bill Gates

Sometimes, you may come across such situations when your customer is having an incorrect assumption regarding your product or service. So, it’s important to know their concerns, acknowledge their problems and provide them a satisfactory solution for their problems. And for this, you need to provide the option on your booking website from where customers can raise their issues.

Wrapping Up

Despite all the above challenges, the online booking industry is booming at a very higher pace. People rely more on online bookings whether it’s a flight booking, movie ticket booking, hotel booking or booking products on rent. So, if you are willing to establish a stable, powerful and profitable online booking system, you need to find out a profitable way to overcome these challenges and get a boost to your online sales & revenue growth.

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