[UK] Online booking and reservation system BookingBug has left beta, been given a new look and announced a raft of new partners, including the UK’s Trusted Places and voucher and discount search engine BView.
BookingBug enables businesses to share their availability – by hour, day, week or as classes, courses or events – and take bookings and enquiries online. The system is both realtime and distributed: BookingBug provides booking and enquiry widgets that businesses can embed onto their own sites, or those of their affiliate partners and through social media.
We recently profiled competitor Bookfresh but this site is a lot more limited in terms of the number of businesses it can be used for (they only work for small one-man-bands offering minutes/hour based services). BookingBug has the potential to scale across a much broader range of service businesses. Bookfresh also lacks BookingBug’s affiliate program angle which lets destination sites earn revenue for showing bookings for businesses that are relevant to their market. Libersy is another competitor, but this too lacks the innovative affiliates model.
Letting businesses push their services and availability to major destination sites – and in front of many more eyeballs – where they can also close a sale by taking actual bookings is the real pull for BookingBug and, inevitably, how the company hopes to make money. The site, in part, charges per-booking.
Here’s the full list of partners announced today:
- TrustedPlaces, user-generated local reviews.
- BView, the UK’s largest voucher, sale and discount search engine.
- SchoolOfEverything, a website that helps users find teachers and lessons local to them.
- SocialGo, allows its users to create a social networking website and start building an online community in minutes.
- QuickTV, enables users to create dynamic videos in order to increase client engagement.
- FoodLoversBritain, a searchable database of nearly 4000 places to buy, eat, visit, stay and learn.
- Kashflow, an accounting application for small business owners.
Last month we reported on an additional partnership (which appears to have been re-announced today) with Brownbook, the wiki-style business directory that lists 27 million business globally. At the time we described the deal as evidence that BookingBug was “poised for some traction” and today’s full launch and new partnerships certainly point in that direction.
nice looking site, I’ve just check their affiliate programm, sounds good as well, will check to try it.
Charly,
please do, and drop us an email if you have any questions about how we can help
Or you catch me on twitter on @glennbookingbug
Glenn
Awesome idea and site Glenn. I noticed there’s a US flag next to the BookingBug icon – probably since I’m in the US – but Bview appears to be strictly UK based offers. Any plans on adding a US based voucher partner to the mix? If so, I would love to chat.
Twitter @loadedbeachbum
Peace and congrats!!
Congratulations
Congrats Glenn — sounds like a good model (i.e. the affiliate program) and great progress! Keep it up!
Congrats Glenn. The affiliate angle is quite interesting. Also, love the new look!
This looks like one of the few innovative booking sites out there among the multitudes. Still, there are many SMB’s that will not want their book to be “exposed” to the general public. Salon’s don’t want their competition to know about that they are dead on Thursday, or booked to capacity on Friday.
Looks like a competitor to Setster.com, not as cool looking but I like the affiliate idea.
Well done Glenn. Great to see such an innovative app take off.
Hats off. Awesome job Glenn!
The whole SocialGO team are thrilled to be working with Glenn.