As I write this, Book That In is about halfway through our 5th year in business. It feels a lot less than that!
Quite a lot has changed in that time, and yet our core purpose and the central service that we provide stays the same.
Why We Do What We Do
Our mission is simple: we want to help people make the most of their lives.
It’s really not a complicated mission – but we believe it is important: life is short, so let’s fill it with as much happiness as possible!
How Do We Do That?
We do that by creating tools that make it easy for you to do more of the things you love with the people that matter to you. In the real world.
The virtual world, for all its ills, is amazing. It connects us, informs us and entertains us. But nothing will ever beat the sheer joy and happiness that comes from spending real, face-to-face time with the people we love and experiencing new and wonderful things in the real-world.
It feels like the pendulum has swung too far to one side and we’re spending too much time in the virtual world. We’re helping to swing the pendulum back. Bringing balance to the force, as it were.
What IS Book That In?
Depending on who you are, Book That In offers different things:
To Business Owners
If you run events or classes, or take appointments, we offer you the chance to dramatically cut your admin time and get your life back. We give you the gift of time.
Book That In provides you with an Online Booking System that allows you to automate the process of taking bookings and payments for your business.
No more back and forth emails to find the right date and time.
No more late nights updating spreadsheets or checking for payments.
Book That In automates it all for you. Just ‘set it and forget it’.
For Franchisors, we provide further automation to free up your time and allow you to focus on growing your business. Or perhaps to chill out a bit.
Introducing Marketplaces, powered by Book That In...
For the ambitious business owner, we offer you the ability to create a whole new business, or a new ‘arm’ to your existing business. Book That In is more than a booking system for individual businesses – it can actually power whole marketplaces where people can search for, and book with, multiple different businesses.
If you run a yoga business, you could start up a Book That In marketplace for yoga classes.
If you are a therapist, you could start up a Book That In marketplace for mental health practitioners that helps people find the right support and help for them.
A marketplace could help you to amplify your own mission and realise your ambitions.
To the Individual
At the simplest level, Book That In makes it easy for you to book and pay for the activities you want to enjoy.
A single login gives you access to hundreds of different businesses, offering wildly diverse experiences from the likes of ante-natal classes and baby massage to pop-up restaurant dining, foreign language lessons and yoga classes.
Track all your bookings from your central account. You can even create calendars for each member of your family, making it easy to see who is doing what and when.
Download the Book That In App to bring those calendars and bookings onto your phone. Sync with your phone calendar to bring everything into one place.
Then connect with your family and friends so you can manage your complicated home and social life with ease! Within your close family, you can see what everyone is up to and even put things in each other’s calendars to make sure you’re all on the same page.
Connecting with your friends through the app allows Book That In to suggest the best times for you all to get together (without compromising your privacy), so organising meet ups becomes easy - even fun!
If you’re on the look out for new activities (and you have young children!), check out the first Book That In marketplace, Toddle About, to discover what’s on for little ones near you. And book that in, of course :-).
The Future
We are constantly evolving and growing Book That In. How can we improve what we do? Please get in touch and let us know!
As I write this at the end of July 2021, we have so far processed over £3 million of bookings through Book That In – over 60,000 people now use their Book That In account to make bookings, and the number is rising every day.
That’s thousands upon thousands of new moments of happiness that we have facilitated. Thousands more new connections between real people in the real world. It’s hard to imagine the knock-on effect of all that!
It puts a smile on our face, though. It makes us happy. We hope it makes you happy too.
Alec Wadey & Tim Freed
Co-Founders, Book That In