It’s easy to call a restaurant at 6 p.m. on a Saturday and ask if they’ll have any tables available later that evening. It’s a bit more complicated to make the same request of an escape room, yoga studio, helicopter tour company or winery. That’s because there are so many more moving parts that owners and operators must account for. If your maximum occupancy is three people aboard a helicopter, for example, how can you keep a deluge of inquiries straight while still getting a constant number of tours off the ground? Simple: you do it with an online booking system. This software, which was designed with the forward-thinking business in mind, can keep things straight. By “things,” we mean everything from appointment calendars and online payments to organization of a client database and advanced scheduling. In this article, we’ll outline some real-world examples of how an online booking system has been put use to good use.

We’ll start with the aforementioned example of a helicopter tour company. One Alabama-based company has turned to a popular online booking system vendor to keep things running smoothly — and the plethora of five-star customer reviews proves that it’s working. A coastal tour of Alabama’s Orange Beach region near the Florida state line is one to remember. By simply clicking “book” on this company’s website, guests will be able to pick their date, time and number of guests then fill out the necessary information about the participants. This is the streamlined solution that an online booking system can offer businesses who decided to adopt it. This software, which seamlessly integrates with existing websites, expands options and offerings so businesses looking to increase revenue would do well to consider making this move for 2019.

Another industry that an online booking system lends itself to is the ever-popular “escape room” operations. These businesses, which plunge participants into a real-world puzzle, require a group to sign up at the same time. Successfully navigating an escape room alone would likely be difficult and not much fun; getting through the “Zombie Outbreak” with some of your closest friends, on the other hand, would be a blast. One Wisconsin-based operation that has adopted an online booking system allows customers to select their desired escape room event, the available timeslot then book the event and know if a certain time is already full.

Consider the alternative: Using pen and paper to keep track of names, ages, contact information, payment received and other unique personal circumstances that can’t be overlooked. With an online booking system in place, such inconveniences are immediately eliminated.