Book a Lesson News Find out what’s been going on at Book a Lesson and what’s next.

New Feature: Waiting lists.

Group session filled?  Well now you can join a waiting list.  A few of our instructors had a few times this summer where their classes filled up and some didn't.  Without a waiting list, they were not able to tell if a certain class was more in demand than the others.  Only until it filled up could they understand the demand.  With the addition of a waiting list, you can be first in line when another student cancels or if the instructor decides to open another group session due to popular demand!

Weather Forecasts!

We've begun to place little weather icons in places we think can be helpful.  The forecasts are based on the location of the lesson.  The forecast gives you today's weather plus 3 days out.  We can do some amazing things, but one thing we can't do it predict weather ourselves so we are limited to the data we retrieve from outside sources.

See it in action!!

The link shows upcoming lessons for Dee Forsberg-Voss, one of our golf instructors in Minnesota.  The weather icon is a little useless this time of year when you are indoors using video, but we hope that it can be of help for other instructors!!

Multiple calendars?

With some newer features in many popular desktop calendar applications, we can begin to eliminate the need for double entry of lessons. It would be nice when a student books a lesson with you if that lesson would magically appear in your Outlook calendar? With Outlook 2007, you can subscribe to "internet calendars", which are basically XML or iCal formatted calendars that are updated in real-time so that you can aggregate multiple calendars into one application!  This is coming shortly to Bookalesson.com!  You will be able to copy the location of your lesson calendar and use that with your favorite calendar application that supports "internet calendars" and you'll only need to look at 1 calendar to plan your day!

text messaging!

Now available for certain actions in Book a Lesson!

Instructors, wouldn't you like to allow students to signup for last minute lessons and get quick notifications on your mobile phone?

You can adjust your preferences in your profile to determine the windows of communication you desire.  Perhaps you want emails for lessons booked with less than 2 days notice and text messages for lessons booked with less than a day, this is now available to you.

Students, these capabilities are available to you too! Changes to your schedule by the instructor can be sent to your mobile phone as well!

We want to continue to give you the control of how you and your students are communicated with.  Increasing the customization of your services is on our radar everyday.

Thanks!

Videos are here!

Instructors, you may now upload videos to share with your students and the Book A Lesson community. In your instructor account there is a page dedicated to uploading videos and saving video information.

Check it out and show us what you got!

Invoices, another way to simplify things…

Instructors can now send invoices to their students with a link to pay for their outstanding unpaid lessons. In addition to students being able to pay when a lesson is booked, you can now send an email to your students with missing payments. The email invoice will detail their missing payments and give them a link that they can click on which will bring them to the Google Checkout page for the invoiced items. Of course, you will need to be a Google Checkout merchant for this integration to help you out! But with Google Checkout, payments are no longer a hassle and can be made and accepted painlessly.

Multiple users update

We have implemented a "friends and family" aspect to your profiles where you can add students to your login. Currently only individual lessons support this and shortly group lessons will be available with this feature. This will be extremely useful for the parent who has a few kids to book lessons with the same instructors. See the feature in your profile area after logging in.

Next up…

I remember a month ago I was buying 2 airline tickets on NWA.com. 2 people, 1 flight, 1 login...

What a great concept, and today I was thinking that this type of scenario applies to what we do. I thought back to an example from my younger days. My 2 sisters and I took piano lessons, back to back to back. Fast forward 15 years... Online booking exists, would my mom have to create 3 logins one for each of us?

Login/create account, book lesson, logout... Repeat 3 times... Ouch...

We are going to remedy this scenario so that you can have multiple students under a single login. This will be great for parents booking lessons for kids, spouses, even friends as gifts.

Stay tuned as we work on this. We welcome any suggestions/thoughts on this as we get started!