Booking operations
Taking reservations by phone feels free. You already have a front desk and a phone. But the real cost shows up in the calls you never answer, the staff hours spent retyping information, and the waivers that pile up at the door. Here's the honest comparison, and what moving online actually changes.
Flat monthly pricing · 0% of bookings · Bring your own Stripe, Square, or Shopify Payments
A phone only takes a booking when someone is standing next to it, free, and able to talk. That's a narrow window. The person deciding to book a birthday party for twelve, a corporate team outing, or a Saturday session is usually deciding at night, on a lunch break, or in the five minutes between two other tasks. Almost never during the exact hour your front desk happens to be quiet.
So the call lands while you're running a session, cashing out a group, or already on the line with someone else. It goes to voicemail, or it just rings out. Most people don't leave a message and try again later. They tap the next venue in their search results, the one whose site let them pick a time and pay on the spot. That booking didn't get lost in a system. It was never recorded anywhere, which is exactly why phone-only operators rarely realize how many they're missing.
Even the calls you do answer aren't free. Walk through one. You greet the caller, pull up the calendar, talk through available times, collect names and a head count, take card details by hand, read the slot back, and remember to mention that everyone has to sign a waiver before they play. Five to ten minutes a call, more for groups.
Now multiply by your weekly call volume. A venue fielding forty booking calls a week at seven minutes each is burning close to five hours of front-desk wages on data entry alone, information the customer would have typed in themselves, accurately, for free. That's staff time pulled off the guests standing right in front of them, and it scales with your success: the busier you get, the more calls you can't answer and the more hours you waste on the ones you can.
Moving online isn't about being less personal. It's about not losing the customers who never reach a person at all. The goal is one place where someone can pick a time, pay, and be fully ready to walk in, at any hour, without anyone on your team touching a keyboard. That's what Simplo does, and it folds in the two things venues usually buy separately.
The phone isn't the enemy. Keep it for the regulars and the complicated group requests. The mistake is making it the only way to book, because that quietly caps your bookings at the hours your desk is staffed and your line is open. Put a real online booking flow next to the phone, fold the waiver into checkout, keep your own payment processor, and you stop losing the after-hours customers and the front-desk hours at the same time, with none of your bookings going to a software vendor.
FAQ
A friendly phone manner counts for something, but most people in 2026 would rather book at 11pm from the couch than wait for you to open. Phone-only booking quietly turns away everyone who calls while you're running a session, closed for the night, or already on the line with somebody else. Online booking doesn't replace good service. It stops you losing the people who never reach a human in the first place.
Add it up honestly. A single booking call (greeting, checking the calendar, collecting names and card details, reading the time back, remembering to mention the waiver) runs five to ten minutes. Multiply by your weekly call volume and you're often paying for hours of front-desk labor a week just to retype information the customer would happily enter themselves. That's wage cost on top of the bookings you miss when nobody can pick up.
With Simplo, yes, in the same step. The customer picks a time slot and signs your legally-binding e-signature waiver before they ever arrive, so there's no clipboard at the door and no half-finished form holding up the group. Every signature is hashed, chained, IP-stamped, and archived as a PDF, which gives you a tamper-evident record that a paper waiver scribbled at check-in can't match.
Not with Simplo. We charge a flat monthly subscription and take 0% of your bookings. No per-ticket cut, no per-attendee fee. You connect your own Stripe, Square, or Shopify Payments account, so revenue settles straight to you at the card rates you already negotiated. Moving online cuts your labor cost without handing a percentage of every reservation to a software vendor.
Keep reading: see how booking, waivers, and marketing fit together on our features page, compare plans on our flat-rate pricing page, check any term in the glossary, or find out who's behind Simplo on the about page. If you run a specific kind of venue, we've detailed the workflow for escape rooms, axe throwing venues, and trampoline parks, all of which run booking, waivers, and marketing on Simplo with 0% taken from their bookings.
Give customers a way to book and sign a waiver at any hour, keep your own payment processor, and run booking, waivers, and marketing on one system that takes 0% of your bookings. Most venues are live in an afternoon.