Oyster Diving and Travel Centre | Customer Stories OLD

I get an email every time someone makes a booking. So even when I’m out of the country I can see I’m still making money.

MARK MURPHY Oyster Diving and Travel Centre

Swimming with the barracudas in Polynesia is one thing. Doing it on High Street is quite another. With Bookeo, however, Mark Murphy’s Oyster Diving and Travel Centre is up to the task in any location.

While Murphy’s unplanned visit to the inside of a whale shark’s mouth might impress some, his biggest victory has been transforming his love for PADI scuba diving and exotic travel into both a smart career and a thriving UK-based business.

Bookeo has helped make it possible by letting Mark cater to thrill-seeking upper income customers who can book whenever they want. While powerful enough to keep Oyster Diving’s multiple locations and classes organized and accessible, Bookeo is remarkably easy to use for Mark and his staff. That means Oyster Diving’s customers get the professional service they expect from this premier recreational diving service.

Best of all, Bookeo lets Mark watch his bookings come in no matter what he’s doing or where on earth he’s diving.

Mark's story

Working at a marketing agency in Central London can offer gratification, but it wasn’t exactly what Mark Murphy called a thrilling career. He found himself adding excitement to his life by taking diving holidays around the world.

In time, says Mark, “I got the bug for diving”. He realized that he could be working in sunnier climates, diving all day, and getting paid for it. It wasn’t long before he handed in his notice and headed for the Virgin Islands.
Over the next two years, Mark earned his Master Scuba Diver Instructor certification and taught diving in the Caribbean, Thailand, and the Red Sea.

Eventually, however he returned to the UK to start his own PADI Scuba dive school: Oyster Diving and Travel Centre.

We’ve kind of grown since we’ve had Bookeo. And part of that growth is down to having an online booking system.

MARK MURPHY Oyster Diving and Travel Centre

Bookeo save us time and it's convenient. It gives us a calendar with exactly how many people are in each course.

MARK MURPHY Oyster Diving and Travel Centre

The Challenges

When Mark took the plunge into entrepreneurship, he faced several challenges. His goal was to provide multiple levels of highly professional diving instruction as well as bespoke diving holidays at exotic locales around the world.

He also wanted to offer a variety of prestigious locations convenient in London and South East UK to attract an affluent clientele.

As his company grew, he faced yet another challenge: the constraints of a 24 hour day and the need to check emails and phone messages all day.

By now, Mark had been named Sport Diver magazine’s “Best Diving Instructor” and Oyster Diving had been named “UK Diving Centre of the Year.” With all this attention, Mark needed an easy-to-use booking platform which would free him from the phone and help increase Oyster Diving’s revenues. And Bookeo was the perfect fit.

The Solutions

Bookeo is simple, straightforward, and does what we need it to.

At first, Mark tried out three or four different booking systems, but “They were either overcomplicated or they just didn’t do what we needed,” he says. One platform stood out, however: Bookeo was enough robust to handle Oyster Diving’s multiple age and class levels, instructors, and locations.

Bookeo makes us more professional.

With Bookeo, Mark’s clients can book and check their bookings wherever they are. Mark believes that Bookeo’s customer reminder feature adds to his company’s professionalism. “One of the really big bonuses is that Bookeo sends reminders to customers either by SMS or email,” he says. “That means we get fewer no-shows, saving us from having to reschedule people.”

What’s more, Bookeo lets Mark require full payment at the time of booking. That’s great for any business that’s scheduling high-ticket products, and Mark says “it’s good for our cash flow.”

Having a good online booking system definitely sets us apart from our competitors.

With about ten other diving companies competing for customers in the London and South East UK areas, Mark has to offer more in order to stand out. Since opening ten years ago, he selected fantastic locations, offered small class sizes, and used only top quality Aqua Lung equipment.

Five years in, he chose Bookeo as his online booking system. He says that it’s hard to say exactly, but “I would estimate that about 25% of our customers came to us because they can book online with Bookeo. “

Bookeo makes sense for us because it lets people book in their own time.

Soho. Surrey. Brighton. Oxford. Mark selected his Oyster Diving’s locations both for their appeal to an upscale customer base as well as their geographic convenience for high-powered, busy business people.

But while his clients are predominantly high income, they’re also “time-poor.” Bookeo is the perfect fit for their schedules. “They don’t have time to do a lot of research,” he continues, “When they find something they like, they just want to book it there and then.” Overall, Mark says “Bookeo frees up our time – and theirs.”