Frances has finished her GCSEs now, so she’s hanging around the house.

There’s only so much scrolling down her phone she can do though, so I decided to drag her out and do something nice.

After chatting it through, we settled on a spa visit, so I jumped straight online to research and book it.

I found a lovely spa, very quickly.

It was less than an hour away, and they had a ‘Signature Package’ that was a reasonable price if you went Monday to Thursday.

So I bought it. I was expecting to confirm the date of our visit and all of that stuff, but didn’t get any of that, so I rang them up the next day to finalise the treatments and get us booked in sometime in the next few days.

Or so I thought, until I was told by a polite, bubbling operator, “we don’t have any appointments for day spa free until August this year!”.

That was super helpful, as obviously we were desperate to wait six weeks, and it got me thinking about how infuriating this must regularly be for prospective clients.

There’d be a simple way to fix it: do exactly what hotels, airlines and beauticians all do, and have an online booking system that allows you to check availability and book.

Sure, they could lose a few clients who can’t get their desired day, but that’d be the case whether the prospect visited the website or gave them a call.

As far as I can see, it’s lose-lose – not only is the experience frustrating, clunky and stressful, but there’s no guarantee of actually getting what you want to buy, when you want to buy it.

Simple message here:
Are you making it easy for your clients to buy from you when they want? Or is the system set up to suit you?

The spa certainly seemed to be the latter, which means that I’ll remain grumpy and unrelaxed until August now!