SpacetoCo vs Skedda

1. Bookings Growth

Not only is SpacetoCo a bookings management tool, but it helps drive your bookings to grow too! That’s because SpacetoCo is also a local venue-finding marketplace. When you list a space, it has its own profile page with a unique URL. You can find your space on Google, the marketplace, your website or privately. This means people can find your space in more ways! In comparison, Skedda is a widget that you can embed on your website or standalone page, but they don’t have a marketplace to drive bookings growth.

2. Advertising and SEO

Speaking of bookings growth, you’d have to fund your own marketing and SEO efforts if you used Skedda - they don’t actively promote venues like we do. SpacetoCo promotes your venue through Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Each space webpage is full of rich text and data that helps it rank in search listings. The best part is that you don’t have to know anything about SEO - we do the work for you. We also promote venues through social media and Google Ads. We want you to get booked because it’s a win for us too!

3. More bookings control

Both Skedda and SpacetoCo accept online bookings. But what if you get people booking your space, but you don’t want to accept (eg. someone books your venue for a 21st blow out, but you don’t want to take the risk)? Skedda would automatically accept the booking, so you’d have to cancel and refund the customer (and that might incur a charge from Stripe). SpacetoCo would give you the control to accept or decline a booking before the customer pays! No need for refunds or cancellations, but more control for you!

4. Complexities? No sweat!

We know that venues are all different with unique requirements, availability and additional services/items. Skedda only manages space bookings. It’s limited when you want to offer additional things or charges. However, you can add items and charges as part of listing your venue on SpacetoCo. You can link items and charges to any space you want, and they can be paid for hourly or per booking.

Speaking of complexities, while Skedda and SpacetoCo allow you to set up complex spaces (eg. a large space that can be split into two), SpacetoCo allows you to list spaces that have multiples of availability. For example, you can set up a space that has 10 bookable hot desks on the one page. You’d have to manage one desk as its own space if you use Skedda.

5. A better way to bond

SpacetoCo has a simple, cashless flow for handling bonds called SpaceProtect. You can schedule a bond with an amount of your choice. This amount will be held on the customer’s card four days before their booking. Unless a claim is made, SpacetoCo removes this bond automatically, five days after the booking. Skedda doesn’t have this ability. You’d have to manually handle bonds for each booking and hold cash (which can be a liability).

6. Payments and Refunds

You have to chase up payments and mark invoices as paid if you use Skedda, since they don’t automatically collect payments. However, SpacetoCo automatically charges a card or direct debit for each invoice, and even send reminders if we can’t collect payment on the first try.

What about refunds? Customers can self-cancel and get refunded on SpacetoCo. You as the venue can also refund a booking with a few clicks of the mouse. Customers can’t cancel and get a refund themselves if they pay upfront on Skedda, and venues would need to cancel the booking, go into the payment platform and get a refund manually.

7. Reconciliation

Skedda isn’t a reconciliation tool. You’d have to use a separate accounting software which means chasing up outstanding debtors, managing cash liability and manually reconciling payouts to invoices. Also, you’d have to collect all of your invoice and payment information from more than one source. SpacetoCo handles all the payment collection and debtor management. We pay you one fully reconciled lump sum each month - meaning 12 transactions in a year and no cash to worry about! Plus, we are an end to end bookings and payments system, which means you can get all that info from one place - us!

8. Bookings Management

While both Skedda and SpacetoCo allow you to see your bookings in a calendar view and sync this up to Google, Apple and Outlook calendars, SpacetoCo has heaps more functions to help manage your bookings better. For example, our platform lets you to search and filter through bookings (eg. by space, status or customer) as well as add custom tags, write notes and tag members to bookings so that they are easier to find and look after.

9. Communication and Reports

While Skedda has some automated emails to let customers know about their booking, all other communication needs to be done elsewhere. This means more than one thread of comms, which can be a hassle! SpacetoCo on the other hand has a native messaging system so you can communicate with customers all in one place.

Our reporting is off the charts too (pun intended)! We have a dashboard of data that you can customise and the ability to set up custom reports and even schedule reports to be emailed to whoever you want! While Skedda also has a dashboard, they more limited with customisation.

10. Customer Support

While Skedda and SpacetoCo have email and chat support for venues, the former doesn’t provide this for hirers. On the other hand, we do! We handle many of the small technical enquiries from your customers that can take heaps of your time. We also provide FREE onboarding support from our local team to help you transition well into online bookings.

The bottom line:

SpacetoCo is a comprehensive, end-to-end platform that manages bookings AND everything else around this process. Skedda is a booking tool for simple availability and bookings management.

We hope this helps you decide which platform to use to manage your bookings...and judging from our top 10, we’re pretty confident SpacetoCo is it!