Good online scheduling tool for helicopter tours?

by philg

Folks:

It will soon be our busy season for helicopters tours over Boston. I’d like to find some software to assist with online scheduling. Here’s what we need to do…

  1. select some 2-hour blocks of time when we expect the weather to be good and the Red Sox and Harvard University not to be playing (in which case flight restrictions are in effect)
  2. allow the public to come and schedule themselves into a block, ideally typing in number of seats desired and passenger weights
  3. cut off registration for a block once a certain number of seats have been reserved
  4. if we have to cancel because the weather turns ugly, allow us to spam the folks who signed up to let them know that they need to return to the site and pick another block of time

It would be ideal if this were a free online service that could be adapted. Our second choice would be a paid online service. Third choice would be some sort of open-source tool that we could install and run.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

16 thoughts on “Good online scheduling tool for helicopter tours?”

  2. This is pretty low-tech, but you can actually do a lot of this with Google Calendar. Set up a calendar, create events and invite anyone to join. There’d be some manual aspects [people above the passenger number limits would have to know they weren’t getting in], so it’s non-ideal, but it would be very easy.

  3. Hey Phil-
    I’m a subscriber and regular reader of your blog. Based on what you outline, I think you could hook up a few different things. Here’s a solution that *may* work. Create a form with Formspring (http://formspring.com). Here, you could collect weight, seats desired, etc. Then use a scheduler like Super SaaS (http://supersaas.com) to actually schedule things. You could either embed the calendar into the formspring form, or possible embed formspring into SuperSaas, or only take people to the calendar once they submit the initial form.

    Formspring can “turn off” a form after a certain number of submits, email you whenever someone enters info, and other great things.

    You may have to live with a manual step here or there, but for a really minimal price – maybe $10 to $20 per month you should be able to hook up what you need, at least to get some sort of public facing thing out there.

    Let me know if you need any help, I’d be happy to lend a hand. I love hooking this kind of stuff together. You’ve got my email so feel free to write.

    Good luck.

    Andrew

  4. scheduly.com might be willing to add weight. What size would the flight market be in the developed world?

  5. Thanks, everyone, for the pointers. Keep them coming!

    rif: I thought of Google Calendar but didn’t see a way to enforce the number of people in a slot; we have only three seats in the helicopter so it is tough to be completely elastic.

    Greg, Edith: We will play around with scheduly ASAP. How big is the market for aerial tours and/or little air taxi hops? Probably there are at least 200 airplanes and helicopters doing it 1000 hours or so per year, so that’s 200,000 hours times an average of 4 people in a tour… 800,000 passengers? That was my guess. http://www.bluehawaiian.com/about/articles/passion_for_perfection/ says that just one company (admittedly big) serves 140,000 people per year. So probably 2-3 million is a better estimate.

  6. Genbook has all the features you mention. Although I don’t know how automatic the spamming is.

    http://www.genbook.com/index.html

    Regarding the weight requirement…this is from their website:
    “We give you an additional information field that you can use to collect special customer requests and additional notes, which are attached to specific appointments. “

  7. Tyler: Thanks. Genbook’s last News entries were in 2008. That’s a little worrisome. I also wonder if they will let multiple people into the same slot. It looks as though it is designed for one-on-one appointments, e.g., with a doctor or dentist.

  9. @Andrew
    Actually within the SuperSaaS system you can define a custom form (not unlike form spring) that is collected and kept with the booking, no need to use formspring.

  10. Folks: We’ve tried Scheduly. They have an incredibly heavyweight and cumbersome registration process that requires the person who wants to book one appointment to jump back and forth to his or her email client. Once finally registered with their system, the customer comes back to Scheduly and it has lost all of its memory about which page or service the customer cared about. It might be useful for a business where customers endured for years and came every week or so, but not for what we want to do (as great as we think that we are in flying tours, we almost never get someone who repeats more than once per year).

  12. If Scheduly were to visit this thread and study your clearly stated assessment of their processes with respect to the substantial market segment where your flight business operates … Do you see any signs on their site as to whether they might have the problem-solving approach and/or programming skill to tune their process to what the flight market needs?

  14. We could not figure out how to use timedriver.com to schedule multiple people into one slot. SuperSaaS seems to do everything except it won’t spam the list of registrants if you have to cancel an event. It will let you gather up the email addresses, though, and spam them from your mail client.

  16. Hi Philip,

    You could use timecenter.com for scheduling of the helicopter tours.

    1. Yepp
    2. Yepp (Check Settings > Client fields)
    3. Yepp (number of spaces)
    4. Yepp, You can export the client list with Account > Statistics

    Let me know if you need any more help! Just click on contact on our site.

    Have a great day!

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