Tripleseat

Pros

Setting up and working with events and groups is simple and intuitive. Tripleseat ahs many options, so everything can be done within the software.

Cons

Tripleseat acquired Gather, our previous event software, and the price went up substantially. Tripleseat is competitive with other software's pricing, but Gather was a bargain.

Pros

Ease of use, functionality, the ability to communicate directly with our clients

Cons

There are no cons with the product that I see

Pros

Easy To Use, Set Up, and Make Changes. The BEO's are well formatted and easy for the client to read. My favorite is that you can turn an event lost and it comes off the calendar but all the contact information is still captured.

Cons

The COST of Tripleseat software vs. competitor like Perfect Venue. Tripleseat double the price and not much different.

Pros

The software is fairly easy to use and learn.

Cons

The price of service has been going up 5% each year for the past 3 years. They used to help with updating our documents, but now they are not so helpful after being with them for almost 7 years.

They try their hardest not to update the documents that you use to create contracts. They want you to do it yourself. If you want them to update the contract then you have to pay $125/hour for their "Professional Service Reps" to update it for you or you can wait over two weeks for them to do it at no extra charge.

Pros

Tripleseat makes my life and my client's lives so much easier!

Cons

The only area for improvement would be that I wish there was an app!

Pros

Tripleseats ability to organize my events, calendar, contracts and payments literally shaves hours off of my work day. At this point, I literally can not (will not) work without it.

Cons

I have no actual complaints. It seems like I.T. tickets used to move a little bit faster, but the overall speed is more than adequate.

Pros

I love how easy it is to use. I have been using it for the past year. I use it everyday and my job has been made exponentially easier due to tripleseat.

Cons

When the site is being worked on, it takes forever to load. This is a burden considering how much I use tripleseat.

Pros

Best CRM for restaurant events! Contract creation, and great integrations, and internal communications are great. Notably, the Stripe payment integration is a huge help. Being able to create tasks for yourself and others is a great way to streamline communication.

Cons

The guest discussion center has a few downsides, the formatting of emails is not how the email shows up in the guest inbox, and it is sometimes hard to decipher. it is great that guest messages can show up in my email inbox, but the entire thread doesn't populate and makes switching between my gmail and TripleSeat a hassle.

Pros

I love how many ways you can diversify and collect data and contacts through each function. Being able to document each interaction with a guest has been paramount in creating the best and most unique experience for our clients.

Cons

I'm not a fan of how contacts must be assigned to a booking. Some guests have the same names and I have to create an odd name to separate it from a previous unrelated booking.

Pros

Triple seat is very user friendly, I learned all of the basics in under a week and still discovering new ways to utilize all of the resources available on triple seat. Reporting features are very useful when compiling data. I love that the support team is quick to respond when I reached out directly. Love the available webinars and trainings provided by TS as a resource. They listen to feedback and forward it to the appropriate channels so that the service can be improved upon. The service makes following up, so easy as well as keeping conversations with clients in one place so it's always quick and easy to go back without digging through my emails.

Cons

Triple seat is VERY specific- I don't like that it doesn't have any suggestions when you spell the name of a client or event wrong even if you're off by one letter no search results will be generated.
When trying to clear old leads it's frustrating that it takes you back to page one after every lead that is cleared. The integration with the Knot was a complete fail. I trusted tripleseat to integrate my leads from the knot months later I found out that it wasn't working properly, this resulted in missed conversions for the venue due to months of unanswered leads which should've to my knowledge been coming through directly to tripleseat. I Could have caught it earlier on if tripleseat sent communication to us about the issue. Clients constantly have issues accessing their payment portals. They can be the main contact and receive a message saying they don't have access to their own event. Clearer troubleshooting solutions would be great. I would also love it if the system could recognize types of events so that when I am pulling email lists I could separate weddings from corporate etc...

Pros

I love how the event request links can be embedded into your website for client ease. They have a task function which is essentially a reminder for the Sales Manager to complete something.You can see if an email was received and if the client opened it.Also TS Direct is life-changing. Guests can book themselves a private room or catering order, select a menu, and submit payment.

Cons

TS Direct has evolved so much over the last year. The only wishes I have are the following:When you change menus on the main TS site, I would love to be able for those changes to mirror that.I would also like the toggle between locations features to stick so that each time you are making changes you don't need to re-select the location each time.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Tripleseat

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to Tripleseat

Pros

I'll start out by saying that I'm a one woman operation. I'm the only one in our restaurant that sells, details and facilitates all of our events, plus plans all of our in-house events, plus managing the actual restaurant side...so I have a lot to do! Tripleseat makes my job exponentially easier and more streamlined. One of my favorite things is that they listen to their users. Every month there is something updated that makes it that much butter, and their customer service is fantastic. They've also started hosting events so you can get hands on training, meet the team, etc. I love that!

Cons

There are a lot of features that I don't use being one person in one unit. It would be nice if there were different tiers of pricing based on the parts you use and those you don't (like a Tripleseat Lite vs. Tripleseat Multi-Unit). That's about it!

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Tripleseat

Pros

Ease of use. I can easily train other employees quickly on how to book orders. I love the customization and ease of adding new menu items. The reporting is excellent for keeping track of sales and other marking tools.

Cons

I wish that it had the ability to auto populate a packing slip for the kitchen. I.e. when fajitas are ordered for 10, it would populate on the kitchen sheet the exact amount of food by oz or quarts the kitchen would need to prepare.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Tripleseat

Pros

You can set up menus and prepare offer to the clients in few minutes.

Cons

Sometimes send it emails, get lost in guest email.

Pros

Tripleseat is easy to use and they are a great partner. Anytime that we need something they are always willing to listen and figure out a solution.

Cons

Daypart segmentation and minimums for Tripleseat direct Surveys Texting to Guest feature

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Tripleseat

Reasons for Switching to Tripleseat

Pros

MY absolute favorite feature is how incredibly user friendly this platform is. I am NOT a technically advanced person but I find this platform incredibly user friendly and I just adore it! It makes me feel confident in my ability to share information with my team and clients!

Cons

This sounds almost impossible, but I don't have a single negative thing to report about this platform.

Pros

Extremely user friendly, customizable, great calendar and template options.

Cons

The way they save contacts on their server is very frustrating as your client's contact name could be changed by other Tripleseat clients (shared by email). The discussion center is not great and could use some updating

Pros

I appreciate tripleseat's ability to quickly turn leads into events/bookings with all of the necessary info saving us a ton of time on the turnaround for client's proposal requests.

Cons

I do not enjoy how fragile some of the features can be. Sometimes it is a matter of one checked box that can have things completely turned around, but we have no way of knowing/finding the box that needs to be checked or unchecked. This can sometimes make it feel like we need to contact our reps just to get a simple thing fixed.

Pros

Tripleseat is a full service platform that can manage a lead from start to finish and has become industry standard at this point. It is easy to use both for clients and team members.

Cons

The biggest area of opportunity for Tripleseat would be to build a feedback capture tool native into the platform, in my opinion.

Pros

We are a restaurant with a huge catering business and this software was designed for an on site caterer with event rooms versus everything being off site like our business model. I am looking forward to the modifications in the future that close the gap on the two concepts better. It has made proposal writing a dream! I love that everything is live across the entire booking with a click of the mouse. The customer service is unbelievable! Everyone is always so pleasant & receptive with all of my questions, comments, concerns & suggestions. The mobile app is great and we want to use it more but the team communication alert email doesn't function on mobile which renders it useless to our team. The reporting seems to constantly improving but we can not connect it to our system so we do not currently use it but I look forward to a day when we can. I absolutely love all of the filtering throughout the entire program and how there are multiple ways to find a previous booking. The calendar is my favorite view and I am looking forward to beginning to use the task function shortly. I have created many many menu templates which is superb but would like to copy one from an actual booking as well. Overall, I completely understand that this is meant for more formal venue catering so I am just grateful that I am able to utilize it at the level that I can for corporate/off site catering. It is so quick & easy and I just cant believe how effective it is to update for a client. Great job!

Cons

The biggest issue with Gather for us is that it does not report to our inventory/reporting system. We have to manually ring everything into our Revel POS system in order to capture an accurate product mix. Basically this means that this software is really only for me to create the proposal and our comptroller must recreate everything in another program. Huge waste of time but a necessary evil for me to have this valuable tool to do my job. I wish that there were more templates for multiple sections including but not limited to the notes sections. I find myself copy & pasting my own words dozens of times a day. I would like to see the lead be able to be customized because I have to ask a set series of additional questions before I may even begin a proposal. It would be really helpful to copy & paste emails into the message section to be able to assure an accurate add. I think that it is important to add a confirmation to the client that their CC info has been added correctly. I get MULTIPLE emails a week asking if we are all set since they do not get a confirmation. Please finalize the condensed versions that you have been toying with. Please go back to the notification to COMPLETE the gratuity, 50% miss it. Lastly, add the onsite contact info to the CHEF BEO. We use that version for the driver because it is a cleaner version to pack the van with. The regular BEO is only sent to the client with the proposal because it has too much going on for the delivery pack list. Thanks!

Pros

I like how triple seat make it as easy to convert leads and keeps all of your event planning organized for each event. Extremely easy to send documents and contracts. They even hosted a meeting and a local class to help new client's.

Cons

Starting out its not so easy to figure out how everything works. But you can find triple seat university and it will walk you through everything.

Pros

Our team loves how each client has his/her own customer portal. It is fairly easy to change any details at any time. It is also imperative for us to be able to send an approval request to each client at the time of solidifying details for an event. Really helps us to ensure our team can execute the event flawlessly.

Cons

We wish that Gather was able to track any changes made by one of our team members so that when a change occurs, we can know exactly who made it and why... Or that there was specific place for a team member to track changes in the portal. Also, we wish that there was a way to approve each specific section instead of just an over all proposal. Our clients are dealing with TONS of wedding details (not always through us) and they have a lot on their minds.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Tripleseat

Pros

I'm not at all a pro but so the ease of use is very important. The software was not designed originaly for my type of use, I'm a movie theater with special events. However it has been curved to be able to offer me everything I require to keep track of my special events. The calendar is esential for the number of events we have as each new movie release generates a new special event be it birthday parties or receptions and sometimes just a movie only seat reservation. Each style has to be noted and written up using the software to outline for each department in the Theater. The ability to arrange the many buckets we use to otline an event form the original set-up, as our understanding of the software increases is great.

Cons

Having to update each time changes are made to see how it will look onl the BEO is a little challenging. Then to view any changes I have to open up the BEO to see how it looks/fits etc. It would be nice to have a real time view/function of some sort to be able to see what someting looks like without having to udate first.

Pros

It is easily accessible and great if we need to work from home. Leads are captured for us to respond and sorted accordingly. The calendar for event planning is critical for us to see and use to rent our event spaces.

Cons

I would love if there was an app for it on the phone instead of having to go on a site. When multiple members are booking potential leads, If there was a way to block spaces better besides using the hold mark on the calendar as that does not guarantee a proper blockage sometimes (for example if it can note the space is currently being blocked as multiple users are trying to block the space at the same time that would be great) Also putting potential events on our calendar does require multiple steps with a lot of info -if this could be more compact, that would save time in booking during high demand.

Pros

Very easy to learn and setup due to the onboarding team and account representative.

Cons

It’s hard to find something I don’t like about tripleseat. I guess my only complaint would be there’s no mobile app, just a mobile website. So you have to sign in each time on mobile. It’s really not a bother, but if you are forcing me to say something negative, that’s all I can think of!

Pros

Ease of use, easy & clear way to communicate with clients & staff members. Partnerships and linking to other software that I use regularly like Open Table and Prismm.

Cons

I think the biggest issue I have is the concern that my emails (coming through Tripleseat) often get filtered into client's spam and they don't receive the emails or contracts that I send. Also, I would like the ability to send multiple contracts at once to a client through the "booking" portal. It makes it very cumbersome and confusing for the client when I am sending multiple contracts with different emails. There are a few smaller issues here and there, but I think those are the biggest ones. OH! And also - please bring back the sales funnel that used to be on the reports page!!! I miss it so much!!

Pros

I love the automated tasks that keep me organized so I don't have to rely on my memory or handwritten lists to keep track of hundreds of tasks. I also love the discussion templates as they give me the ability to communicate quickly with clients, and I can see when they have opened/read my messages.

Cons

There isn't a lot of downsides, but a couple of improvements I would love to see:
- Drop down options for declining a lead (helps simplify reporting)
- More CRM abilities within Contacts such as tracking touchpoints, notes, in person tours, sending gifts, etc.

Pros

Tripleseat has robust booking and event scheduling tools. Communication is clear and organized internally and externally. New and useful features are consistently added.

Cons

There is no integration with Toast, our POS, available at this time.

Pros

I love how organized Triplseat keeps me. I can do communication, contracts, payments, and follow up on leads all within the same platform. It was a game changer.

Cons

I think because the platform is SO useful, there are little tweaks on things I would love to add. I think I would love a draft option for if you start an email and exit out of the page.

Pros

It is very user friendly. Love the reporting aspect of it.

Cons

The email system. Lots of bounced emails. Almost all of our emails from tripleseat end up in spam or junk folders, so we probably have missed a ton of leads because of that.

Pros

Tripleseat has been a fantastic product from the very beginning, but has never rested on their laurels and continually adds features & improves their offerings! Also, extremely fast to respond and so helpful!! (This part might be my favorite!)

Cons

The new items layout in selecting from the picklists in my documents. The quantity & price boxes are entirely too wide. The overall new look just feels clumsy and antiquated. Also, once you've selected the items, when you got to modify them, the item box moves a little and is frustrating.

Pros

Tripleseat is very user-friendly and supports our events operation with easy to read documents and a great color-coded calendar. The online portal is fantastic- clients sign contracts and pay their invoices while I am sleeping! Their support staff is extremely responsive and helpful- they get a 20 out of 10!

Cons

We really have no complaints. The program is very efficient and well supported.

Pros

Tripleseat is very user friendly and saves time when creating proposals. We also love the integration between the option to pay directly through tripleseat which we are just starting. The reports are also great for budgets, and projections.

Cons

I like everything about it. Tripleseat makes it very easy, and you save so much time.

Pros

SO easy to use for multiple locations on a property. We use it for events, reservations notes on the day.

Cons

The change you just made on Menus very hard to add menus now.

Pros

Convenience and that it is compatible with Outlook and Open Table.

Cons

Email threads should read newest to oldest.
All emails are blind copies so clients cannot see who else is CC'd

Pros

The east of writing contracts and completing bookings all in one place.

Cons

Wish the fees for credit card processing were lower.

Pros

Tripleseat is very user friendly. I like how it keeps all discussions and documents in one central location

Cons

It used to be very easy and timely to talk with a person if there was a question. Now it can take multiple days and it's only done by email.

Pros

They make the booking process easy and tracking leads simple. Being able to store templates, create task deadlines and automated discussions have been a huge time-saver for our small business.

Cons

There are a few integrations that could be more dialed in, but they seem to come out with new helpful integrations all of the time.

Pros

Very customizable to set up different locations with varying offering and price points. Sending payment links and invoicing to clients is seemless. Guest and internal communication with calendars makes it easy to stay organized.

Cons

A bit expensive and cuts into margins. I wish it would integrate with TOAST POS directly.

Pros

As an event team of one, I find Tripleseat to be comprehensive and easy to use. Tripleseat is absolutely critical to my success and efficiency as an event manager. The lead, event, and calendar features are all functions I use countless times a day. I love the ability to import email response templates and BEO templates. Customer service is super friendly and fast.

Cons

Tripleseat has some weird quirks that I feel like should be easy to fix when suggested. There is a lag time when entering a new client who you'd like to add to an account which really slows down my work flow to have to wait for. You can only have one client on a lead, so if you are communicating with a couple or both parents of the groom, you can only communicate with one email address. It is hard for clients to tell who is on the thread. I would say the email function is one of the weakest. There have been other feature upgrades that seem like common sense/basic requests to me that Tripleseat has not been able to accomodate.

Pros

It gives me such piece of mind every day. I pull up the calendar each morning and I know exactly what needs attention, and what I need to do. I literally cannot do my job without it.

Cons

I cannot think of one thing that they have not thought of. I wish I could give you ne, but for me I can't think of anything.

Pros

We love the event order and pick list process. It makes it easy to create.

Cons

The feature we wish the beo /event merge to share with clients was a more seamless process. There are too many steps to create a pdf that assembles all events in date order for the client to be able to review. We know there are work arounds, but it is to many steps and the downloading process should be accessible from a drop down vs going into you inbox to click on a link to then download. We also experience glitches with TS taking with SNT not talking to each other. They happen often and area also corrected quicly.

Pros

Extremely user-friendly, easy to set up and customize, and reporting is great!

Cons

Need more customization options to fully implement it with all of our systems.

Pros

The functionality of receiving leads and booking events are great

Cons

It has consistently been slow and we have had service interruptions, our contracts have had issues from original set up - copied over contracts linked together which is still ongoing, and little things like not being able to add a color to the calendar for our company functionality. As the admin for leads, I am still confused on how to clear them from years ago.

Pros

You actually get to speak to real people when it comes to setting up, onboarding, and support.

Cons

I with the UI was a bit more functional like competitors sites.

Pros

Extremely customizable once you understand the backend

Cons

Not super user friendly and difficult to use on the go

Pros

Streamlines all data very well and super organized! Great features for the everyday user.

Cons

The transition to the software was a lot and could be difficult/ time consuming to set up. Also would love an app and more flexibility in the layout of documents.

Pros

Tripleseat is connected to Merri, which is a product we enjoy using. The customer service is also good quality.

Cons

Inability to customize certain settings.

Pros

It streamlines our entire business and has allowed us to be more strategic in our hiring processes.

Cons

There are some quirks to iron out like any newer business but for the most part, no complaints as their customer service team is almost always available and fantastic.

Pros

The ease of booking events is awesome! Especially since we are a property that houses private and social events. Easy access to documents for the client and love that we can have all discussions with clients and staff organized under one event.

Cons

We need an app that works for smartphones.