Checkfront Erfahrungen

Vorteile

The invoicing and notification system is excellent. It allows for a sequence of events - the initial request and removal of item from inventory, the paying of a deposit and the sending out of a reminder for the balance. It has also allowed us to record bookings that come from another listing site. The notification system is good but , as with with all automatic sequences, you need to think carefully before setting a sequence in train because the same message notification might not be right for everyone. It takes a lot of thought to set up the generic sequence that will most often be used. However, it is very easy to make adjustments to the message before it goes out.

Nachteile

Checkfront may be used more for booking tours rather than holiday homes but it's flexibility allows for many different set-ups. Therein lies the problem with regard to the help pages. They are quite helpful with regard to what any particular feature is but most examples tend to be about booking tours rather than accommodation. I spent a lot of time working out what I could do and how I should do it, more or less by trial and error. In some ways that is a good thing because I learnt so much more about the system by the sheer repetition of trying so many ways to do something. However, it would have saved me a lot of time to have some real examples of how to set up and overcome particular problems.
So far, I have only two irritations with the software. One is the mobile phone app which could be much improved but is not actually a bother because I really do not need to carry my office in my pocket. The other is the Inventory calendar. I wish I could highlight the row that I am working on because it is very easy to start making alterations to the wrong row. I also wish that I could highlight a period of time to add or remove a property from inventory. You can only do that one day at a time which is tedious and non-intuitive. There are other ways round this and perhaps there is a good programming reason for the limitation.

Vorteile

+ All in one place : Booking / customers / invoices
+ You can customize every detail of the Activity you are selling to your customers
+ The support team listens to your needs

Nachteile

- During covid, the hibernation plan means that your website goes offline

Vorteile

The systems are in place to send email reminders and confirmations of items booked. The booking is easy to set up so your customers can go through the form themselves

Nachteile

When checking on a customer name you have to be exact - it doesn't show similar names like it use to, would love that back

Vorteile

Customer service is generally helpful when the software or back end service fails. Unfortunately I need to use this a lot.

Nachteile

The user interface and user experience is entirely nonsensical. The most basic, basic thing a guide needs is to check in guests on a tour. Checkfront doesn't even show the guide how many people are on the tour. It doesn't alphabetize the guests, so the guide has to search through a list of randomly sorted names every time a guest comes in. Many guides in our company have refused to use Checkfront at all, and simply don't check in the guests. Many customers show up on our tour without booking, because they said they couldn't figure out the Checkfront booking system. How many customers and how much money have we lost because of the Checkfront UI? We'll never know.

Vorteile

The reservation management feature is excellent as is the in-built facility to collect waivers from guests.

Nachteile

We have two separate components to our business and whilst Checkfront works seamlessly for the standard rental letting element, it does require some manual manipulation for the other components.

Vorteile

The overall use is great. It takes time to learn and set up but pays itself back ten fold once in play making your small business run professionally.

Nachteile

Limited items unless you upgrade which doesn’t make sense for small seasonal businesses. We don’t run in the winter so let us keep being able to hibernate the account in the winter and not pay full price.

Vorteile

I managed to build an entire booking system from scratch and can maintain it without and army of tech prople.

Nachteile

I was being billed for users i did not require but the team have now resolved that issue.

Vorteile

Easy-to-use. Reports are helpful when reviewing my business

Nachteile

Changing an inventory item when aliased . It takes a long time to set up inventory items. If the parent number is changed, it would be good if aliased would automatically change.

Vorteile

I like the reservation calendar and online booking the most.

Nachteile

I think it would be beneficial to be able to mark rooms as they're cleaned. This would enable me to when to know when the room is clean and ready to be turned over to the next guest.

Vorteile

Booking online featuresCalendar for overall management of resourcesReports but would like the customer reports of be in colourCategorising resources

Nachteile

Small organisation and to add more than 5 admins is a large increase in cost. Would like be able to add extra admin for a minimal fee per admin.Resources cannot be recursively booked in different features if they are more than two levels down..

Vorteile

There is a lot of flexibility in the this product, with many features. Developed by a small Canadian company, that is very responsive to questions and feature requests. Very supportive with assistance for technical issues in my set up.

Nachteile

With all the features and parameters to set up, there is lots of things that can get out of lineament. Sometimes I will spend hours trying to puzzle out why something that I have set up does not work as it should. The team at CheckFront is always great is helping me get it fixed.

Vorteile

Ease of navigation and clear information layout especially on a laptop.

Nachteile

Sometimes find a few features a little tricky to get my head around on my own but that doesnt matter because the customer support is amazing and they always find a solution.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Little Hotelier

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Checkfront

Communication with Checkfront was faster and more clear so I tried it first. Was so satisfied I didnt have to shop around.

Vorteile

That customers can see the calendar of what is booked - we do not have to manage that!
They can't double book

Nachteile

Not much we don't like - maybe could be easier to block off a day . Had to play around a bit to figure it out

Vorteile

The help support online. Chat with somebody to help you with a problem is really really good.

Nachteile

Some issues for dates that we don't want check-in and check-out but finally was fixed lately.

Vorteile

After operating our business for years without an online, pre-paid bookings system we had no idea of the positive impact Checkfront would have, not just for our business but for our lives. Red Star Music is a recording studio and rehearsal spaces and there was initial concern that introducing this type of system would 'scare away', deter or frustrate existing customer but to our surprise, the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. It has been a win/win situation for everyone.

Pros for customers:

* No longer have to rely on getting in touch with us to book and check availability.
* No longer have to request invoices.
* Checkfront with the addition of digital access to the spaces means we are able to be open 24hrs a day, 7 days a week.

Pros for us:

* Protection from financial losses due to people not showing up for bookings, cancelling last minute and refusing to pay. With Checkfront's pre-paid system and our compulsory terms of agreement, the responsibility is placed entirely on the customers to organise themselves.
* Protection from human error during the bookings process (on our part).
* We are now open 24hrs/7 days a week and no longer are required to have onsite staff members collecting payment whenever there are bookings.
* We have more time to focus on other aspects of the business and our lives rather than having to be on call around the clock. Our phones are very quiet these days and we have more bookings than ever.

Nachteile

Understanding that our needs are fairly complicated when it comes to a customised bookings system, there are really only a few very minor things:

It'd be nice to be able to set a rule that a certain time slot booking can only be booked when another before it is in place. For example - we'd like to run a 2hr discount session from 9-11pm as a gap filler on week days but we only want customers to be able to book that session if a 5-9pm session is already booked so that we aren't blocking a potential 4hr 7-11pm, higher value session. Does that make sense? No biggie though!

There are a couple of things with the mobile app however:

1. If I'm away and I want to check tomorrow's bookings on my phone to see whether I need to be there or not, I can open the app and see in the list of customers from earliest to latest (top to bottom), but I have to tap into each individual customer to see what time they are actually booked, making it difficult for me to get and overall visual of how I'm going to organise the day, hire gear etc.
2. I often want to be able to contact customers when I'm away to give them instructions but there doesn't seem to be any way for me to access contact details, phone/email for the bookings in the mobile app. Being able to tap copy their phone numer and send a quick text would make life much easier.

Vorteile

if Checkfront was not available for me, I would be drowning in a sea of paperwork. For example, I started using the documentations app two years ago. It has allowed us to develop a social distancing booking system, that is touchless and COVID approved.

After an initial setup and learning process, our customer response has been very positive because we have eliminated the paperwork "Hassel" at the boarding gate. It has cut our boarding time in half because all the insurance required documentation is now done at their home or office. It has eliminated filing of the paperwork. It has made documentation look up easier.

Nachteile

I have been with Checkfront for almost 10 years. They have eliminate many of my concerns. However, currently my discount codes do not work like they use to. When I use multiple discounts on the same invoice.

For example, I might have 3 or 4 rental booking on the same invoice, representing 3 to 4 days of rental for that week. We offer a 25% discount on weekday rentals and a 10% rental on weekends. I should be able to have different discount rates for each booking by using the "per item" discount code. Unfortunately, it does not work that way. The total is the same but the software prorates the discount on all items on the invoice. This is very confusing to my customer.

Vorteile

The software is easy to use for clients and staff alike. As a result, we spend less time answering emails and the phone as people book themselves in. I also love that the company is based in Canada, and that the team is very responsive and the software is constantly developed. There is an affordable option if you just wanted to get started with booking software that does not break the bank.

Nachteile

A few very specific things would be great to straighten out. For example, we offer 2 different overnight tours - the 2-day Seal Cove Adventure and the 3-day Cape Chignecto Adventure. We cannot run those tours parallel or overlapping - it is either one or the other -, so we set the availability to 0 by hand in the inventory the other tour every time an overnight tour gets booked. This way, however, we also have to block out the day before to ensure no overlapping tour gets booked even though in reality the date is available as the last day of a potential trip that starts earlier. It's not a huge impact, but we might loose a few bookings to this.

Also, we cannot accept single bookings for tours where nobody else is booked on yet as we require a minimum of 2 guests for any tour to run. We have set the booking form (at least for the overnight tours) so that the field 'Adults' is automatically filled with the number 2. We do, however, accept single bookings if other people are booked on already, and we also would accept a pair of Adult/Child as a minimum. I wonder whether there is a way to streamline this.

Vorteile

Seamless integration with our website. Easy to streamline with our credit card processor. Powerful Reports at our fingertips. Customer Service if there is an occasional snafu. Helpful community and tutorial videos when setting up new accounts, items, events, etc.

Nachteile

This was tough, but of course there is a bit of a learning curve when you are first setting up all the parameters that are right for you business. Plenty of customer service and a large community support to post your questions, or search for an answer because someone has already crossed that bridge successfully. Also loved that once I set up my "Item Event" (think: 3 day minimum stay for Labor Day) then I can easily use a copy button to make each subsequent year's Item Event. So I do not have to recreate the wheel.

Vorteile

Very well thought out and feature rich to accommodate the quirks of your business with good booking calendar and discount options. The support is also great and response times are less than a day. We been using Checkfront for 7 years now and have no plans to move away despite some small shortcomings. Highly recommended.

Nachteile

The ability to make integrations to other services like accounting systems are limited. With the rise of functional programming like AWS lambda, I think its trivial to add some capability to integrate to other systems using similar event triggered functions or webhooks. Checkfront does have something like this but its quite limited.
There is no support for multi item discounts as yet so customers are unable to get a discount if they book multiple inventory items. This is a key feature that I hope they will have in future.
The ability to style the embeddable iframe booking page is also a bit limited and I can't get it to match my website style.

Vorteile

There is no way that i could do my business without Checkfront. I was able to learn the software and all its benefits within 1-hour. The support staff provides superior service and is always available to help with any questions or concerns i have. I recommend Checkfront to all my business friends and use it 10 times or more a day. Thank you for providing this incredible software!!!!

Nachteile

I do not like the affiliate program and quite honestly don't understand why i would be required to upgrade my plan in order to allow affiliates to get commission and have there own portal to create booking for the company. I am currently only allowed to have 10 affiliate accounts on my business and with my business working with thousands of travel agents it would be nice if you allowed unlimited affiliate accounts as apart of the service.

Vorteile

The software is very customizable and affordable. It has allowed me to create an online booking system for our camp and retreat center. The biggest advantage is that it provides most of the functionality we need, at half the price, or less, of other camp booking systems. The pictures and video option for our various cabin rentals is great.

Nachteile

There are a few minor function problems that I wish would be fixed. We sometimes have a group of folks who set up a booking together. They then want to pay separately, and there is no place to input the credit card zip code on the payment page. I have to go back and edit the original booking zip code to do this. Again, it’s a minor issue, but would be a nice feature. One other one would be an option to print a payment receipt, rather than just printing an Invoice that lists the payment being made.

Vorteile

First and foremost, Checkfront is affordable for a small business our size, and even though they are much more affordable than the high-cost competition, Checkfront doesn't scrimp on features and functionality. Checkfront takes a day or two to get used to but that's only because it's jam-packed full of useful and necessary features. Checkfront is a fully functional and complete booking system that won't leave you feeling like there's always something missing, as is the case with so many other low-cost providers.

Nachteile

I can't complain about a system that does everything the big high-cost alternatives do for a price that's affordable and cost-effective for small businesses like mine.

Vorteile

Check from the allows me to easily manage my bookings between my website, Booking.com, Airbnb, TripAdvisor and Home Away. Previously when a booking can in I had to manually change the calendars on every holiday website and it was a nightmare.
I have configured Checkfront to link to my accountancy software (Xero) and I have also started offering customers gift cards.
I'm not technically-minded and have found the technical support excellent, especially when the send me custom videos showing me what to do.

Nachteile

It does virtually everything I need, but sometimes I don't find it very intuitive. It's disappointing there isn't a way of getting it to work with new Google Holiday feature. No great loss now, but I expect this will grow in customer popularity.

Vorteile

What we like most about Checkfront is that it is a multi-use tool. We find that there aren't a lot of solutions out there if you offer rooms AND tours.

Nachteile

It seems like they don't update it very often. The overall layout and design has been the same since 2015.

Vorteile

I love how easy this software is to use. Setting up tours, packages, classes and hire options has been a breeze with easy shortcodes to include booking links on my website. Also love that if a class requires certain hire equipment, with each booking the hire equipment also books out - meaning I can't overbook our standard equipment hire. The app is super easy to use and love that it all syncs with my phone's calendar.

Nachteile

Would like a "membership" option for those that frequent our business. I know there's a workaround but it's not really the easiest way. The upgrade to using liability waivers is a pretty big price difference! Would love a smaller pricepoint option for single option upgrades as I don't need all features on the next tier.