If you want to keep all of your choices in the same location, this is an excellent choice to make.Sabre is an excellent choice for serious travel agents who are prepared to devote a substantial amount of time to learning and becoming proficient with a booking platform. It provides agents with excellent functions such as the ability to find flight availability and pricing in real time, the capacity to hold flights for up to 72 hours, and the capability to book with a secure and well-known system. The primary issue is that it is geared toward the needs of agents; as a result, it is EXTREMELY challenging for a new user to pick up and become proficient with Sabre.
I think any business can benefit from Acuity Scheduling. In my experience, however, and maybe I just haven’t found the correct settings yet, it’s been difficult to manage 4 business schedules with multiple employees and varying hours that change day-to-day and week-to-week. So I definitely would recommend it to more simple business models with set hours, as it seems like it would have all the functions one might need. I still would recommend to more complex businesses like mine as well, but also include discussion of some of the potential drawbacks.
Sabre Red Workspace is constantly evolving to keep up with technology trends. For example, it is now available for agents to download on their iPads so that they can work from anywhere.
Sabre Red Workspace offers a suite called Red Apps which has many categories of useful apps that can customize your experience (some at no extra charge) and help simplify workflows.
Sabre Red Workspace provides a comprehensive library of every format or command that an agent could ever need to do his or her job.
Clicking on the link opens up my calendar, which has an uncluttered look, making it easy for my prospects and clients to review their options and make their choice.
I am able to customize my schedule, the types of appointments I want to offer, and even decide how many appointments I want in a day. There are so many details that I can customize.
I can customize how my calendar and emails look for my prospects and clients so that I come across professional and coordinated. I want the look of my business, website, etc. to have a polished, cohesive, and interesting presence.
I love that there is a workshop/class/series option for my workshops. My attendees reserve their place and pay upfront. I can duplicate these events or add future dates. It's wonderful. This saves us a lot of time and is so convenient.
I haven't had any trouble with my scheduler. It works flawlessly, so I don't have to take time out of my day to fix, troubleshoot or call customer service.
I love that I can add questions for my prospects to answer right away before booking a call. This means 3 fewer steps for me. 1. They answer these questions without an email from me. 2. They make their reservation and get a follow-up email, right away. 3. I customized the follow-up email with more details and actions to take to prepare for our call.
Acuity Scheduling has been very reliable. If you don't believe me, check out their status page here. They do a pretty decent job maintaining their app. To be fair, it's a pretty simple tool so they shouldn't run into too many hiccups given it doesn't feature near as many options as other applications on the market run.
It's just very intuitive once you get the hang of it, which won't take long. They try not to make complex things very complex and they provide explanations for everything with a greyed-out question mark icon next to the function. Also, I love that they encourage people to just get live help when they need it.
In my 14 years of using Sabre Red Workspace, their software support desk has always offered top-notch customer service and professionalism. Their representatives are extremely knowledgeable, and there has never been a time where they weren't able to quickly and accurately resolve our issues or answer our questions when we called, and we have never been charged for their assistance.
Every time I had a question on how to do something or had any issues with Acuity Scheduling, mainly in the very beginning, when I was learning the platform, customer service was excellent. They were prompt to respond, friendly, and very helpful until I had the right solution.
In the case of Schedulicity, the system was awesome (very easy to set up and had some nice features) but did not offer the functionality and flexibility that AcuityScheduling does. In the case of SimplyBook.me, they offer lots of functionality but the interface is extremely complex and you pay a la carte for features so you're going to pay exponentially more for the same set of features as compared to AcuityScheduling. Their customer service was also lacking, in my opinion.
Overall for the business, it allows us to profit on international flights, where outside of Sabre we would not earn anything. We can earn percentages on certain international flights for booking or add commissions to base prices not posted elsewhere.
Sabre creates a barrier to entry for new agents and keeps agents from committing to the business.
Sabre gives base prices for agents that are significantly less than those found to a normal user, searching for a flight. This allows for sometimes very high added commissions (upwards of $500 per ticket) while also providing a lower cost to the customer, keeping them working with you in the future.
