Parents Booking Reviews 

Reply from Parents Booking

Updated Sep 14, 2026

Hello. I'm very sorry to hear you had trouble logging into our website. Can you tell me a little more about where things went wrong? I presume you received an email from the school with your invite, and a clickable link to the correct school login page? If not, is this where things went wrong? Were you trying to Google for your school? Or, when sent to the correct login page, were you unable to type your email in and receive the Magic Link, or unable to use one of the single sign-on buttons? Feedback much appreciated - anything we can do to try and stop parents from having difficulty will be done! We serve millions of parents per month, so things do go wrong sometimes at that volume, and I'm sorry you've had a bad experience - especially a 1-star experience!
Will, co-owner

Reply from Parents Booking

Updated Jun 16, 2026

Dear Ross,

I'm very, very sorry to see you have had a frustrating experience trying to book the breakfast club last night. You don't know us personally of course, but we put all our effort (and money, we're independently/family-owned) into making a booking system that helps schools and families - the small niche we've carved out and our almost twenty years' experience is our expertise, we're not 'stretched' or over our skis - and when someone has a bad experience it hurts us too. I am very sorry you didn't get to book what you wanted, and that all places were taken literally in seconds.

It was a Scottish bank holiday yesterday, and obviously the bookings opened at 7:30pm last night, so I'm only getting a chance to look at your complaint emails now (it's been an extremely busy day). We're a small company and the hello@ email is not an email we prioritise replies to. The correct course of action would be for you to contact the school (our customer), who have a direct line to our support team. Through that process I have been in touch with the school today and helped investigate your issue. I believe they have separately replied to you already, but I am happy to as well, and will answer your follow-up questions.

Parents Booking uses enormous Amazon AWS cloud servers, with multiple instances, load balancers and an array of sophisticated technologies to ensure that there is always far more resources than will be required.

To be certain about what I was writing in my reply here, I had our server admin consult the server resource via an Amazon AWS dashboard, and the servers didn't even 'spike' a little at 7:30pm last night, meaning the logins and bookings for Yorke Mead Primary had almost no effect on server resource. This makes sense to me, this was, for us, a small club opening in the grand scheme of things, but I understand this isn't what you want to hear, when you believe that a factor beyond your control was responsible for your trouble.

To give you some further context, we have many nights every year where hundreds of schools open parents' evenings (the booking of which is more 'resource hungry' than wraparound clubs) all at exactly the same time, so I am confident the issues you had with logging in / book places won't have been server resource. I think this is further evidenced by the 9000+ bookings that were made in 2 minutes at the school last night.

The breakfast club is evidently a victim of its own success, and our learning from this is that we need to try to make the experience better for parents who have tried and been unable to get what they wanted - I hate that you've come away with having had a horrible experience. I've had the same personally when trying to book tickets for concerts, and even yesterday morning at 9am when I was trying to book IMAX tickets for the Odyssey!

I'll look into what we can do, including offering a waiting list for missed places (something that is already on our development roadmap), to make the booking experience for those who miss out less disappointing. If you have any thoughts for what might have made this a less horrible experience once you'd discovered it was fully booked, I'd be grateful for your insight by reply. Ultimately, though, this was evidently a club that was going to book up in seconds no-matter-what, and there were not enough places for everyone who wanted.

Sorry again to see you didn't get to book the places you wanted last night (it looks like you have been able to book some today though, which is hopefully a silver lining).

Best wishes,

Will (Co-owner)

Reply from Parents Booking

Updated Jun 8, 2026

Hello BC.

I'm sorry to see you've felt the need to leave a two-star review. Everything you've mentioned above are new, known bugs - almost brand new bugs in most cases, and we are presently coding fixes. I expect you'll see these remedied in the next week or two, with the only further delays, beyond the fixes being coded, being the testing and release procedures. The calendar dates being out of alignment on mobile UI was literally only reported last week - if you're a long-time user you'll maybe spot this is a new calendar interface - it replaced an older one, and the fact the days of the week aren't in perfect alignment when you reduce down to mobile UI is bad slip up which somehow passed through our testing. The website is, of course, mobile responsive (this is a bug). Your note on being able to select older dates is fair, but you won't be able to book these.

I hope you'll have a much better experience next time you book, in our new software update, and will be open to changing your two-star review, because bad reviews do cut our TrustPilot score significantly and because we're both an independent, family-owned business and working fast to add new, innovative features for schools and parents such as yourself, our score is important to us. As you've fairly pointed out, we've a few new (largely cosmetic) bugs to squash to refine what was a big software update that brought these features out recently.

Best wishes,

Will

Edit 8/6/26: The bug where the days of the week were out of alignment with the date columns, when you used our new calendar to book a wraparound club, has been resolved, along with a few other bugs. I have a developer making sure the order of dates booked is chronological, in the confirmation email for wraparound clubs, as well, and this will release next week I expect :)