Avantio vs Bookerville: Which is a better fit?

Nick: Hi, I'm Nick. I'm a director of igloo.scot. We're a holiday home agency in Scotland. We've been using Avantio for about six months, and we would rate them five out of five so far. So before we were with Avantio, we were using a company in Scotland called Bookster. They were quite small. They were a startup at the same time we were a startup. For our needs to begin with when we were relatively small, Bookster worked okay for us. However, as we grew, its functionality didn't really meet our needs because the amount of properties we had, it made things like pricing and the availability calendar quite difficult and time-consuming to use. So Avantio offered quite a lot of automations and things that were time saving that made us make the switch basically because of our growth. We outgrew Bookster in our work. Yeah, we spent quite a lot of time researching different options that were out there. There was a number of things that we were impressed with Avantio, was how integrated with various other software we use. So Minut, which is a noise monitor system and Touch Stay, which is our digital guest guides, Avantio, both integrated quite well with them and also the future proofing that we could integrate with other service providers like Breezeway, Key Data. There was another one as well that we were thinking about. I can't remember off the top of my head. But overall, just the scalability of it. So obviously I was talking before about the time-saving features, but there was a lot of stuff in Avantio that basically meant that if we grow as we have done over the past three years, we keep growing at the same rate, then we're going to be future proofed and we'll be having a system that will meet our needs. No more what size we're at. Yeah, so it wasn't the easiest. It was quite time-consuming. The onboarding process process took probably about three months. There was some delays and stuff with... We've basically done in three different elements. There was the backend, there was the website, and then there was the connectivity to the booking channels like Airbnb and booking.com. So some parts of that onboarding, certainly the backend with the guy called Marcel was amazing. It was really five-star, it was excellent. The web side of it was quite slow, which we found a bit frustrating. And we had a number of issues with the connectivity side of it, with the channels, which took quite a bit of back and forth to resolve, which wasn't break. But we got there in the end.So yeah, it wasn't the easiest and it wasn't the shortest. But once we were fully onboarded, we were very happy with what we had. I think to bear in mind that the onboarding process is very in depth. It's quite complicated and you really need to be in a position in your business where you can dedicate time to it. There's a lot of calls with the onboarding team. There's a lot of actions you have to do yourself to do the setup. So it's basically just knowing that it's not just a flick of a switch. You need to actually spend a decent amount of time and resource to get onboarded.