I know the topic of a booking system provokes a lot of discussion in the community. At Repair Cafe Gosport, we needed to limit the number of guests in the Maker Space at one time for safety.
After a couple of iterations, we have been using Tito, for a few years now. Tito is not only free (so long as the tickets for the event itself) and does almost everything we need.
After initially tweaking the configuration, we have something that seems to work well. I have been gradually automating bits of the process:
Making a report to share with volunteers about the guests who have booked it
Setting up the events in Tito (this used to be a monotonous 20-minute job, going through all the setting menus each time)
A lot of this automation builds on the Tito API and a Python wrapper for it I have developed: PyTito. The scripts I have created so far are all in Github: repair_cafe_gosport_booking_automations.
I would love to hear from anyone doing similar things or who wants to collaborate.
We use Eventbrite for booking, to even the flow of jobs (we typically offer 6 30 minute slots per fixing table for a 3 hour session) and to ensure a reasonable match between numbers of jiobs and numbers of fixers. It can be a pig at times and I’ve toyed with using Tito but never got further than an initial look. I’d be interested to see what you’ve done though realistically I’m not sure when I’d get around to doing so. I suspect we’ll just stick with the devil we know.
We use google forms to ask for information about items because of its extensive customisability and it’s what I was familiar with.
I use a dedicated column to write whether an item should be accepted or rejected, and a note to the owner of the item.
I then allocate each repair request a time and repairer, and use conditional formatting formulae to make it easy to avoid double-booking a particular slot. This conditional formula bit makes it more complex than I would like.
We use a custom Google Apps Script (Javascript) macro to mail merge everything and send the note and booking time to the owner of the item.
Item owners have to RSVP within 7 days to say they are attending (or not) using a different form, which then updates the spreadsheet and makes it clear to us who is and is not going to show up on the day.
This system helps to avoid no-shows and double bookings - we usually don’t have any. Booking in advance is advantageous for us because we are usually fully booked, so we can preemptively reject items that are likely to take 4 hours to not fix, and therefore spend more time on items that would be an easy fix with the right tools.
The downside is that the timeslots are pre-set, we have chosen 45 minutes as our default. It’s not possible to vary this much on the day.
You can see the template in this google folder. Feel free to copy it, but do not modify our copy.
We started out with Google forms too but found it needed a lot of custom code to get it to do what we need. One of our goals was setup and forget, so I set up up months in advance in a quite moment, then everything else happens with limited human intervention. Platforms like TicketTailor, Tito and EventBrite have the main advantage of offering a lot of functionality out of the box for free. However, you are always limited by the operating model the platform offers. Our first two years have needed no code, which may be important to some groups.
Thanks for sharing you code that is definitely something that can help the community.
My goal is to make this as easy as possible, less admin, easier events and more time doing the fun stuff. I know EventBrite is a leader in this field but I saw two disadvantages when I looked I the beginning:
it was not free, Tito is free for £0 tickets
it required people to create an account to make a booking which was off putting to some people.
I think Eventbrite is free so long as your tickets are free. In any case, we’ve never paid them a penny in the several years we’ve been running. And you definitely don’t need an account to book tickets - never have done to my knowledge.
But the UI is confusing and difficult to navigate until you get used to it.
A few niggles we’ve largely overcome or got used to:
The waitlist function is worse than useless. If the slot you try and book is full it offers the waitlist instead of saying there is availability at other times, causing frustration and confusion. So we turned it off.
It allows you to apparently complete a booking without answering mandatory custom questions.
You can’t limit bookings to one per person.
If you set up a reminder to be sent a day or two before the event, it only goes to people who were already booked when you set it up.
Best regards - Philip
Yes, Google Sheets is amazing if you’re familiar with it, but some of the groups in cambridgeshire are run by people who have been retired for 15+ years and never worked with spreadsheets, meaning they find the prospect of learning such a system very intimidating and it’s immediately unsuitable.
Simple booking systems don’t work for most Cambridgeshire repair cafes because we are usually fully booked and therefore prefer to triage items. Triaging means people don’t make a trip only to find the repairer knew it was impossible from the start, meanwhile a highly repairable item was told we were fully booked.
But triaging creates its own challenges, that there must be a repairer available to review the items and give a guess about high/medium/low repairability.