Customer site of the week

Q: Describe your business. Our company offers low cost, low carbon same day and overnight courier services for documents and light packages within the UK.

Q: How do you use planyo? We use Planyo through our website for all our online bookings. We were looking for a booking system which could be adapted to the needs of the courier market. In choosing Planyo we have a booking system which fulfils all of our requirements and with the help of the development team we have been able to integrate bespoke features as well as automating the customer notification, payment and invoicing procedures.

Q: Describe your experience so far. Planyo was the clear winner for flexibility and ease of setup when choosing our booking system. Our requirement was different to others using Planyo but with a small amount of extra development by the Planyo team we have a booking system which rivals even our largest multi-national competitors. I would happily recommend Planyo to any company which has a requirement for an online booking or reservation system.

John Dolman, Managing Director

Q: Describe your business. WaveTime is an exclusive club which enables its members to enjoy flexible and frequent use of a new Personal Watercraft (jetski), without the hassle, cost and time typically associated with owning and running your own jetski. WaveTime offers a viable alternative to jetski ownership and provides affordable jetskiing to both new and experienced jetskiers. As a WaveTime member you don’t need to finance the cost of a new Personal Watercraft (jetski), or worry about mooring and marina fees, depreciation, insurance, servicing, maintenance and repairs.

Q: How do you use planyo? WaveTime members simply click on the dedicated url and make their bookings. We pre-approve our members so Planyo knows who they are when they make a reservation. Our members pay us a subscription payment each month so they dont need to use online payments.

Q: Describe your experience so far. Planyo is a fundamental part of our business, and enables our members to easily and conveniently reserve their jetskiing sessions and manage bookings. The support we have received from Planyo has been first class. The Planyo team have make some custom integrations for us, so the product feels like it has been built specifically for our business. The standard reporting features are very useful. In summary, Planyo is the best technology investment we have made so far – and the most cost effective.

Q: Describe your business. Shuttle service in Nicaragua providing ground transportation for the area between the Managua airport and locations to the south, including San Juan del Sur, Granada, and the border with Costa Rica.

Q: How do you use planyo? Planyo is embedded in our existing html pages, allowing customers to easily make their own reservations. All team members have separate administrator accounts so that we can track who enters and updates reservations. Online payment is planned for the future.

Q: Describe your experience so far. The system has proved reliable in meeting most of our needs. No downtime has been experienced since going live in February of this year (2011). And Planyo has been extremely responsive in making requested customizations, helping us understand the technology, responding to bug reports, and considering our suggestions as they continue upgrading the system.

John Morley, president and founder

Q: Describe your business. Triplemoto is a business formed from a desire to promote motorbike hire & touring. Triplemoto's hire service is available to both UK riders & international bikers looking to tour the UK, utilising world class machines from BMW & Triumph.

Q: How do you use planyo? Planyo is integrated into our online system as an admin provider & motorbike hire reservation platform. Planyo takes care of the booking process & confirms reservations to client. Further developments will include other features being integrated into our website.

Q: Describe your experience so far. We have found Planyo a viable system to meet our booking system needs, very pleased with the way the system has integrated.

Terry Drew, Managing Director

Q: Describe your business. The Haven, Self catering holiday apartment in El Cotillo, Fuerteventura, Spain. Is situated in the centre of the Old Harbour area of El Cotillo, Fuerteventura, this twin / king bedded ground floor apartment is a little gem offering the best possible location; 50 metres walk from the bars and restaurants in this harbour area of El Cotillo, Fuerteventura. The fully equipped kitchen in the apartment means it is also perfect for those planning a self-catering holiday. from €275.00 to €300.00 per week.

Q: How do you use planyo? I use all of the things listed (multiple admins, online payments, advanced integration, SMS notifications, reports, invoices).

Q: Describe your experience so far. The system is nice and easy to use and integrates well into my website, the calender is a useful tool to use as it give booking ref numbers.

Jacqui Lockwood, owner of The Haven In El Cotillo, Fuerteventura

Q: Describe your business. Cater-Ring AG puts together catering, boat rental and event management, creating a whole new recreational activity. The offer is directed towards all who want to do something unforgettable in company of friends.

Q: How do you use planyo? Planyo was fully integrated into our online platform. The administration is carried out through different roles, from the administrator to rental stations. The entire reservation process all the way till invoicing is performed by Planyo. Because of the open architecture and interface, Planyo was very well integrated into our IT solution. Through the SMS notifications we can enhance the user service and bring down the complexity of administration.

Q: Describe your experience so far. Planyo is an open and extremely scalable platform which can map complex proceses. Comparing to other solutions, full integration is actually possible with few compromises. Professionality, flexibility and dedication of the Planyo team convinced us to also develop additional functionalities together with Planyo.

Ben Klein, CEO, Cater-Ring AG

Q: Describe your business. Verzasca.net is a site promoting tourism in the Verzasca Valley in Ticino, Switzerland and offering vacation homes from various owners and a local holiday home rental agency. You can also book places in almost all of the mountain huts.

Q: How do you use planyo? Verzasca.net uses a META Site administered by lots of individual owners and Planyo API to display information about the houses throughout the verzasca.net site (including photos, location on the map etc.) and advanced integration for the search feature and the integrated reservation system.

Q: Describe your business. Charity – santas grotto

Q: How do you use planyo? Online payments and reservations for appointments to see Santa Claus

Q: Describe your experience so far. Great system, easy to install, easy to use and understand and fantastic technical support

Q: Describe your business. Ani Villas Anguilla is the first is a collection of international luxury villas aimed at delivering remarkable vacation experiences. This 10 bedroom estate with 2 fully outfitted villas leverages Planyo to provide online reservation services.

Q: Describe your experience so far. Our web designer/developer worked closely with the Planyo’s staff over several weeks to achieve a seamless integration. Their support was outstanding and responsive, even going so far as to update their Drupal module with features to allow block level integration and greater CSS control. As future Ani Villas locations are developed in the Dominican Republic, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Mauritius and Zanzibar we look forward to expanding our use of the Planyo reservation system.

John Gavula, Designer/Developer, Gavula Design Associates

Q: Describe your business. We are a small company offering selected holiday apartments in Fuengirola, Spain, and services for home owners on the Costa del Sol.

Q: How do you use planyo? We have integrated Planyo with our own home page. We use the PayPal online payment solution for all reservations and we have created various customized messages which Planyo sends out at various times, one of them also has the invoice attached in the customer's own language.

Q: Describe your experience so far. We are very happy to have come across Planyo and it has made our reservation procedure so much easier to handle and more secure in the respect that double bookings can't occur. The staff is great and we always get quick help should we need it.

Q: Describe your business. Hamann-Softwareentwicklung is a software development firm which specialises on creating individually designed software. No matter do you need an offline or web based application, we can find a solution. It can be developed either based on a commercially used application or we can design a customised software product for you. One of our key projects we are currently working on is MedSurv-Portal. It is an online portal which has been designed to collect and evaluate clinical surveys data from all over the world. Our firm has also recently worked on Ferienresidenz-Roseneck webpage development project. This holiday homes webpage was successfully implemented using Planyo automatic hotel booking and payment system.

Q: Describe your experience so far. We decided in favour of Planyo automatic hotel booking and payment system because it had satisfied most of our requests. The key one was that the system is very flexible and it could be fully integrated into our existing CMS. We also had an opportunity to design a customised booking schedule and configure emails and invoices design to the customer’s needs. Another core strength of Planyo programme is that the system can process payments in addition to booking requests. That was a crucial point for our customer and us. It gives you a possibility to process payments received by using PayPal and credit cards. We liked that Planyo offers an attractive invoice management tool as a part of the system which was a great benefit for our customer. We cann’t also but mentioned that now, when the system is up and running, the administration of the system is very easy and can be done after a brief orientation. It is an user friendly programme in general and all functions offered can be easily used. It was also a great pleasure to work in close collaboration with Planyo on that project. We were getting a constant support when needed. All our requests and questions regarding the system were answered in a prompt manner. In addition, Planyo did some good suggestions coming from their great knowledge of the product and big experience working with other customers. We have implemented most of them and we are very happy with the final product we achieved using Planyo tool.

Alexander Melgui, Hamann-Softwareentwicklung

Q: Describe your business. We are a "brick and mortar" traditional business located in Indianapolis, Indiana. Our service is Massage Therapy. We offer walk-in availability as well as text-message requests and of course the online booking system made available by planyo.

Q: How do you use planyo? We use planyo to provide each therapist as a resource whereby the client can book appointments online. Because of the almost endless parameters available for managing each resource, we are able to restrict availability for each therapist to only their allowed working schedules. We allow up to the minute self-booking because we utilize Planyo as our ONLY scheduling system. Because Planyo does not charge PER appointment, we add our "walk-ins" manually into the system so as to keep our Planyo system accurate at all time. About one-third of our of appointments are self-booked through our websites integration with Planyo ensuring the client never leaves our website. That speaks for itself.

Q: Describe your experience so far. Planyo is without question the best reservation/booking system available. In the massage industry there are MANY options available. But all require so much info of each client and redirecting to third party sites. I have planyo customized to not require an email address to book the appointment and that has increased bookings dramatically. The custom parameters is the KEY to our success. love it! Thank you planyo!

Shonn Piersol, Massage Indy

Q: Describe your business. We are a non-profit organization founded in 1983 by a group of people passionate about the mountains. Today we have more than 700 members. We are located in the Verzasca Valley, in Ticino, Switzerland. We organize activities in the valley (hiking, climbing for kids, families and adults), we take care of the hiking trails and of the mountain huts in Verzasca.

Q: How do you use planyo? We use planyo for reservations of sleeping places in our mountain huts. Before we started using planyo, people had to call or send an email to book. This wasn't efficient because the guardians couldn't always respond immediately. Now this is fully automated with planyo, the number of sleeping places still available for booking is known by the system at all times. The guardians receive an email or SMS (if being in the mountains they have no access to the internet) whenever a new reservation is made. We still leave a part of the places for those who come without reservation.

Q: Describe your experience so far. We are very pleased so far. We had no complaints whatsoever last year and the guardians now spend less time managing the reservations. We hope that with time more people will start reserving because now the booking process is very easy and only takes a minute or so.

SEV - Società Escursionistica Verzaschese

Q: Describe your business. We are a holiday rentals website for people with properties to rent in Edinburgh. Our website is beautiful as well as being pretty complex so landlords can upload their own property details directly to the site and customers can make instant bookings online: This is the bit where we have had to spend lots of time and braincells being creative and where we put lots of demands on Planyo to alter the booking system as well as having them integrate the it to be as bespoke to the site as possible but it looks fantastic so it was worth all the hard work.

Q: How do you use planyo? We use the online payments and each landlord has his own admin for their own property. We also use the Reports utility are also considering using their SMS in the future.

Q: Describe your experience so far. Leanne (Programmer) from the Elastic Creative design team has done most of the direct dealing with Planyo and she can't sing their praises enough. The planyo team has been incredibly efficient and has made the many, many changes we asked for as they were put to him over a period of months and we were only invoiced a small fee for any chargeable work. Planyo seemed keen to take on this complex project as it was different (more demanding maybe!) from any they had previously seen and their enthusiasm for a challenge was refreshing. I did have a couple of queries recently and I have to agree that my questions were answered very promptly and the team was extremely efficient and open, so top marks for customer service.

Kate Lockhart, managing Director of The PadPod Ltd

Q: How do you use planyo? [planyo admin note: used on a login-protected site]

Q: Describe your experience so far. Planyo’s online booking system proved the ideal system for us to simplify and increase the efficiency of our Ship Visit booking process. In a survey we conducted of our booking system users, 98% of those asked rated the system either 'Very Easy' or 'Easy' to use. Planyo were extremely helpful and attentive during the set up process ad resolved issues quickly. We would certainly use this system again and recommend it to others.

Jill Dossor, Trade Marketing Executive, Norwegian Cruise Lines

Q: Describe your business. DentFix Pro is a private dental practice business started in 2007 in Bucharest, Romania. Currently in Romania this kind of business is ran on a paper documents basis, some few just use a simple contact form on their web sites to submit reservation requests with telephone follow-up. We believe that Planyo is a great addition to any kind of practice working with the public that needs to keep a unique and transparent agenda for its resources.

Q: How do you use planyo? Currently we have one resource (medic) but we plan to expand the business in short time and hire more medics. We also have medical assistant on staff. There is a business administrator that can also access the Planyo admin area but the medical assistant is the main admin user in charge with the receptionist duties. As the business expands this role would be taken by a full time receptionist job. We also use Moneybookers integration to get a small fee in order to confirm the reservation but the payment is not mandatory since we need our patients to learn the new web tools first. We are using advanced integration is Wordpress and we prefill the reservation form with data from the wordpress user profile if the user is authenticated. If the user chooses so, he or she can receive a SMS reminder before the actual appointment time.

Q: Describe your experience so far. We selected Planyo for several reasons:
- Easy to integrate in our Wordpress based platform
- Availability in all languages we plan to expand our website (as dentistry in Romania is of good quality but less expensive than in other EU countries so patients might just choose to fix their teeth and have a nice vacation trip at the same time and within the same budget)
- Existing integration with Moneybookers that can process our fees in local currency (RON)
- Outstanding support we received even before starting to pay for the service

Richard Vencu, Marketing Consultant at Dentfix Pro

Q: Describe your business. As an agent we provide budget and luxury apartment rentals in Cannes, France for holidays and conventions

Q: How do you use planyo? For now we use planyo for our online reservations but we intend to use online payments in the near future

Q: Describe your experience so far. We've been looking for a simple to use, yet flexible and adjustable solution that integrates with an easy to update cms based website. Nothing trivial, specially when you offer different products and have a quite complex pricing scheme. Planyo meets all our requirements so far, it's free to test and to see whether it works for you and last but not least, they have an excellent support.

Michael Spohn, Cannes Do Apartments

Q: Describe your business. Tamarindo Hostel is the first hostel in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. We accommodate backpackers and low-budget-travellers. We provide private room accommodations as well as dormbeds.

Q: How do you use planyo? I use planyo to make accurate reservations, right now I only use one admin (me) and I don´t use online payments yet. I do use the advanced integration with google calendar, it´s very useful, as well as the email notifications (they arrive to our mobile so it´s easy to get ready for a coming customer).

Q: Describe your experience so far. I speciffically like Planyo reservation system because I like the organized way to book every single reservation, it gives a number to the reservations as well as the customer, and I can asign a color to reservations with different requests (ex, those requesting airport pick ups are in green) and another thing that I like is that every message between customer and me gets registered under the reservation in question. I also LOVE the integration to google calendar (Planyo is improving this integration) so my staff can check all the reservations booked for the day with all the information they need to recieve the customers. I can even customize different sort of reports to have a better look at your bussiness.

My name is Angela Bendeck and I am the owner of Tamarindo Hostel

Q: Describe your business. Tours and Accommodations in Bohol, Philippines, soon to integrate planyo in my own customized design front-end and backend site and resell it to hotelier in PRO-COMM package.

Q: Describe your experience so far. Technical support is excellent, everything is customizable which is advantage to a reseller/developer like me. Many useful features.

Leonilo Tutor - owner

Q: Describe your business. We are are small ski chalet business, running both catered and self catered chalets.

Q: How do you use planyo? We have only just gone live with Planyo - the system is already proving highly successful and we calculate that the system will save us a tremendous amount of time and also enable us to manage the business much more effectively.
We use Planyo for running and managing the end to end bookings process, this includes:
a) taking the initial enquiries from customers on the planyo reservations form and holding the reservation for a day or two until they pay
b) on line deposit and final balance payment (with options to pay by card over the phone if clients prefer this - planyo keeps a record )
c) Planyo will send out automated e-mails: at time of initial reservation with booking information attached, when final balance payment is due and before the client arrives - to ensure we have their time of arrival, if they want to book additional products for example: skis/boots fitted at the chalet, transfers, or meals cooked at the chalet.
d) automated e-mails after the client has left to ask for feedback.
We are using advanced integration, we will be producing weekly reports of clients who will be arriving and their individual needs - this is so we can prepare for each clients specific requirements (we used to spend hours pulling this information together and Planyo will do this automatically - based on data which the customer enters - all we do is have the automated e-mails ask the clients to complete the forms!)

Q: Describe your experience so far. Planyo is a very flexible system and Rafael [from the planyo team] is absolutely brilliant in supporting his customers and carrying out changes to meet needs. We approached this project with a good understanding of the business requirements - which are quite complex - and I am delighted we have been able to work with Rafael in implementing this.

Mark Nathan

Q: Describe your business. We're a holiday home rental agency located in the Verzasca Valley in Ticino, Switzerland.

Q: How do you use planyo? We work together with Planyo on our entire IT solution, including the website. All content (photos etc.) is managed by Planyo and API is used to present it on our website. This solution makes all modifications easy to handle and also allows us to keep our clients on verzascarustici.ch at all times.

Q: Describe your experience so far. We are very satisfied, we now have a website that is easy to use, it gives our clients a possibility to reserve in different languages and automates many tasks done until now by hand.

Verzasca Rustici Sagl

Q: Describe your business. As estate managers we rent out event halls. We use the electronic reservation system to improve efficiency in our everyday tasks.
Als Immobilienbewirtschafter vermieten wir Eventlokale. Dabei nutzen wir das elektronische Reservationssystem zur Effizienzschaffung im administrativen Arbeitsalltag.

Q: How do you use planyo? An administrator manages the software. Planyo is integrated with our website using a TYPO3 plugin. The communication with prospective customers is done via email. We also use reports and invoices in a customized form.
Ein Administrator pflegt die Software. Planyo ist über ein TYPO3-Plugin in unserem Webauftritt integriert. Die Kommunikation mit den Interessenten geschieht über E-Mails. Ebenfalls nutzen wir Reports und Rechnungen in angepasster Form.

Q: Describe your experience so far. The experiences are positive. The customers immediately accepted the possibility of making reservations electronically. The customer is guided through the application in a simple aund understandable way.
Die Erfahrungen sind positiv. Der Kunde akzeptierte die elektronische Reservationsmöglichkeit auf Anhieb. Auf einfache und verständliche Art wird der Kunde durch die Applikation geführt.

The city of Winterthur, Real Estate
Stadt Winterthur, Immobilien

Q: Describe your business. Our company provides just about everything someone could want when it comes to on-the-water activities in San Diego, California: power and sailboat rentals, luxury yacht charters, adventure tours, boating and sailing classes, wakeboarding lessons, and more.

Q: How do you use planyo? We use Planyo for all boat and yacht reservations as well as for tour bookings and just about everything else that is recurring - that's nearly 100 resources to date and growing. The integration with our site has been incredible, and the automation and customization of it all for searching, invoicing, and reporting has nearly eliminated all human error from our high volume reservations business. Plus, with multiple admins/moderators, I can track bookings and pay commissions with ease.

Q: Describe your experience so far. We tried everything for online reservations. Nothing else even came close to the customization options of Planyo. Our business model is so unique that we have had to overcome many hurdles. And the impeccable customer service has made this system the perfect fit! I highly recommend this to anyone looking for a system that can meet even the most unique booking needs.

Tim Spinks - Information Architect