Help · Migrating
Moving from another booking system
These notes come from moving a working dive school, not from a whiteboard. Where something was painful, it says so.
Start with the honest part: what Side Quest Booking does not do yet
Read this first, because it is cheaper to find out now than in March.
- No reusable saved schedules. You build a repeat rule per course rather than saving one and applying it to several.
- No per-date seat-type limits. You cannot yet say "this Saturday is students only".
- No calendar view of your dates in the dashboard yet — the schedule is a list. (Customers and the Take-a-booking screen do get a calendar.)
- No connection to Viator or other booking sites. Side Quest Booking sells from your own booking page. A booking a site sells for you can be entered by hand, with the site's reference and commission, but nothing syncs automatically.
If any of those is load-bearing for you, say so on a demo and we will tell you honestly whether it is weeks away or not planned.
What we move for you
You download a few reports from your old system; we do the rest. From those reports, we bring across:
- Your courses, with their seat types (Adult, Child…), prices and extras such as a photo package.
- Your dates that have bookings, with enough places for everyone your old system sold.
- Your upcoming bookings, at the prices your customers actually paid, with what they have paid so far and what they still owe.
- Past bookings, as history, so a returning student is recognised.
- Your customer list, with their marketing permission where your old system recorded it.
- The answers customers gave to your booking questions, and the questions themselves as a draft form for you to tidy.
Money already paid through your old system stays there: it shows as paid on each booking, and is kept out of Side Quest Booking's money totals so nothing is counted twice.
Nobody is emailed
Moving systems should not be something your customers notice. Customers brought across from your old system are never emailed or texted automatically — no confirmations, reminders, balance notices or follow-ups — for anything they booked before the move. If a message would have gone to one of them, it is held back instead of sent. When one of them books again through Side Quest Booking, that new booking is treated like any other.
We learned this the hard way: on our own first move, a handful of customers got a reminder they should not have. Side Quest Booking now refuses to finish an import if it would queue a single message.
How the move goes
- You download your reports from your old system as spreadsheets (see the list below). Ten minutes, and you stay in control of your customers' data.
- You check one sheet. We send back a list of your courses with the seat types, prices and extras we found. You correct anything we got wrong — the price, the real capacity, a course to leave out.
- A dress rehearsal. The whole move is run once and then thrown away, so you see exactly what would change before anything does.
- The real move, all at once: either everything lands or nothing does.
- You look it over in your dashboard. New courses arrive hidden from your booking page until you are happy and switch them on.
- The switch. Point your website's Book buttons at Side Quest Booking and close your future dates in your old system on the same day, so a place cannot be sold twice. Anything booked in your old system in between is picked up by running the move again — it only adds what is new.
What to download from your old system
All from Reports, as CSV, with every column included:
- Bookings — the detailed report, by activity date, from a year ago to your furthest date, cancelled ones included.
- Contacts — your customer list.
- Custom field answers — your booking questions and paid extras.
- A price breakdown, if your account offers one. It helps when a booking mixes adults and children.
Plus three things most systems cannot export: your cancellation policy (paste it into an email), your waiver PDFs, and any future dates nobody has booked yet.
What does not come across
- Dates nobody has booked. The reports only show dates with bookings, so empty future dates are added from your schedule.
- Descriptions and photos of your courses. The reports do not include them; we copy them from your website with you.
- The wording of your questions. Only your customers' answers export, so your questions arrive as a draft to tidy.
- Customers with no email address. Side Quest Booking needs one to keep a customer; they are listed for you rather than guessed.
- Waivers. These are set up fresh, from your own PDFs — see below.
How your old system's ideas map onto Side Quest Booking's
| Your old system | Side Quest Booking | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Item | Course | Same idea, same scope |
| Availability | Date | Places live here, not on the course. A course can run on days that are not next to each other |
| Customer type | Seat type | Direct equivalent |
| Custom field with a price | Extra | Photo package, video, rental |
| Custom field without a price | Question | Side Quest Booking's can branch and follow up |
| Waiver template | Waiver | Your own PDF, not retyped text |
| Booking | Booking | Each place is a person, with their own forms and waiver |
The bit that genuinely differs
Waivers. Many booking systems ask you to type your waiver text into a rich-text editor, and offers a fixed menu of extra fields — date of birth, phone, emergency contact and so on. There is no PDF upload and no question builder.
For an agency-affiliated school that does not work, because the release and the medical statement are documents the agency published. Side Quest Booking prints your students' answers onto those documents instead. It is more work to set up once — you mark where each answer goes on the page — and then it is the real document coming out the other end.