Limited review (/questions) for Bookings 2.0

Limited review (/questions) for Bookings 2.0

Hi all, I'm writing this review of Bookings 2.0 for two reasons: 1) it may be of interest to others, and 2) I'd like to be corrected if I'm wrong on any points.

It's a very limited review, i.e. the things that have stood out as relevant, and particularly the problematic things, for my own use case. I'm a sole trader in health, and I make/manage most bookings myself, i.e. clients rarely book directly via the software. Majority of my clients are recurring weekly/fortnightly, usually on the same day/time.

RECURRING BOOKINGS: I'd been hanging out for this, as I've been booking ~20-30 individual appointments every week. As far as I can tell, nothing's improved.
1-on-1 can't be recurring, only group bookings. Group bookings are treated as a "class", meaning that you can make the timeslot recur, but individuals still need to be booked into each week separately.
There's also still no copy/paste function to replicate an appointment, so every single appointment needs to be booked out in full.

CALENDAR VIEW: The calendar view is worse. Week/Month view is gone ("under development"),

APPOINTMENTS: Not much change. Once past their time, they still can't be cancelled or deleted (e.g. if you'd communicated with a client but hadn't been at your computer); you have to hack it by rescheduling to the future, then cancelling (in a different timeslot) or deleting.

INTEGRATIONS: The Bigin integration is meant to be able to differentiate first/last name from the existing single "customer name" field, but it's just mucked up my Bigin setup, with the full name now being pushed into the Last Name field.
The Bookings browser extension is kind of a nice start, except that for any actual interaction, it just loads the website anyway, so not as convenient as it looks.
The integration with Calendar still doesn't properly handle rescheduled appointments, leaving a copy in the calendar at the old time.

CUSTOMERS: A bug has been introduced where apostrophes aren't allowed, so good luck if you've got an O'Leary or a D'Artagnan.

WORKFLOWS: I believe these are new? They seem like a good addition, from limited testing.

BOOKING PAGES: Seem fine in my very limited view.

--
In summary, I would suggest that:

- If your use case is that you want an externally-facing booking solution, where other people are booking into your calendar, and you have minimal need to manage your bookings directly, this system could well be useful - it handles a number of those elements nicely.

- If your use case is like mine, where you're heavily managing your own calendar and the bookings in it, Zoho Bookings is frankly terrible. Extremely clunky, time and labour intensive, lacking features, and buggy at times.

The inclusion in Zoho One and the potential for smooth integration with other Zoho products has kept me here so far, but this major update has actually made things worse if anything for my situation. Given how long it's taken to see changes, and how under-resourced Bookings seems to be, I'm looking elsewhere and will check back in 12 months.

(As above, if I'm wrong on any points, very happy to be corrected here - I want this to be accurate)


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