Amelia: Easy Appointment Booking for WordPress

Not all WordPress booking plugins are all they’re made out to be. Some of them lack the features needed for you to run an efficient appointment operation, while others look old and outdated. You don’t want either of those, but it appears that the Amelia booking plugin wants to ensure that all users are happy with both functionality and style.

In this Amelia booking plugin review, we’ll talk about its best features, why we think it’s one of the best appointment booking WordPress plugins available and how it’s a highly customizable booking engine for many types of businesses.

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What Makes the Amelia Booking Engine Different?

Amelia is considered an enterprise-level booking plugin. Therefore, your entire team can log in to the engine and manage the appointments that come in. It’s a fairly lightweight system, yet you still receive a full suite of tools for things like managing services, locations, customers, and payments.

All of this is done through the WordPress dashboard, where all of the Amelia settings and tools are consolidated into one sleek user interface. Amelia offers an insightful dashboard complete with easy to interpret charts and tables, streamlining the process of tracking appointments, employees, and services.

So, if I were to argue the two things that make the Amelia booking engine stand out, I would say the backend and frontend interfaces. We already talked a bit about the backend, but it’s important to realize how smooth the bookings go through the plugin.

First of all, the Amelia booking plugin can be customized for several types of industries. for instance, a law consultant would have no problem making a powerful module to bring in new clients.

Here are some of the other businesses that are known to get the Amelia plugin:

• Spas and salons
• Gyms and personal trainers
• Repair centers
• Private clinics
• Beauty salons
• Psychologists
• The tourism industry
• Any type of doctor
• Many more

And that’s what’s great about Amelia. You begin by grabbing a template and adding the fields needed for your booking engine. Then, you’re able to adjust the branding to fit your current theme, all without having to code the module yourself. This is a step-by-step booking wizard that guides customers through the appointment process for the least amount of confusion possible. And the plugin supports SMS notifications to both customers and employees.

The Best Features from Amelia

With the Amelia booking plugin you can customize the booking engine for your own business and integrate a payment system for your customers to send you money right away. In addition, there’s plenty of information on the backend for you to see how many appointments have come through and what you need to manage.

What else can you expect from Amelia?

Multiple Employees, Hours, and Locations

The Amelia engine is pretty flexible with your hours and employees. For instance, it allows for bookings with several employees. The plugin has options for selling multiple services or breaking them down into categories.

I also enjoy the business location features, which means that a gym would be able to collect appointments based on the location closest to the customer.

An Easy Calendar to Manage

A calendar is viewable on the front and backend. Use settings see and show filters based on staffing, locations, and services. In addition, Amelia includes a joint calendar view with options for revealing different views like monthly or daily views.

A Booking Interface with Search Tools

Amelia provides a search bar, which has become the norm for many booking websites. This way, the user is able to type in a few keywords that match their search preferences. After that, the booking engine decides which results are the most relevant to the customer.

A great example of this would be for a personal trainer in a gym. That particular gym might have dozens of trainers on staff, but I personally only like two of them for my training regiment. Therefore, I would tell the booking engine that I want John as my trainer on a certain date.

The Amelia booking plugin would then deliver all of the available times for John on that date.

A Catalog for Services and Categories

Services are often broken down into special categories. For instance, a yoga gym has all sorts of classes, some of which aren’t appropriate for all customers. So, you can have a beautiful grid-based gallery to showcase all of these services. This works with a shortcode, so the gallery can be inserted anywhere on your website.

You can also set a specific schedule for each service during the employees working hours. For example: if your employee has different services, you can set up how long during the day they will be working or available for each.

Combine this with the step-by-step booking wizard and the search bar and Amelia makes for a wonderful user interface.

How Much Does it Cost?

The Amelia booking plugin is sold by TMS plugins. The individual site license (as of May 2019) is $59 per year for a single site, which is an incredible price for such a powerful appointment plugin. This license is for use on a single site – whether it’s your own site or a client’s. This provides access to all of the plugin’s awesome, powerful features for booking and charging end users (with the one exception being restricted areas of your website, e.g. when users must first pay before accessing the booking form).

So, as you can see, the pricing is rather reasonable. This even includes a full year of customer support making the price well worth it in our opinion.

As with all CodeCanyon plugins, there’s no requirement to extend your support. The $59 fee is a one-time payment that provides the plugin with updates for life.

Customer Support from the Amelia Developers

Customer support for Amelia is provided by TMS-Plugins, who are known for responsive and helpful replies. This is essential when your business relies on a booking engine to keep customers coming through your doors.

As mentioned in the pricing section, Amelia users receive support for six months with a regular license. You can extend this support to 12 months and continue paying if you’d like even more than that.

TMS-Plugins has a ticketing system on its own website so you can directly interact with the support squad. From what I’ve experienced, the support team is very responsive and knowledgeable for this particular plugin.

It’s also nice to see that the comments are filled with replies from the developers. This is great for all of your presale questions. Overall, it appears that you shouldn’t have any problem getting in touch with customer support if you pay for Amelia.

Who Should Consider the Amelia Booking/Appointment Plugin?

I would argue that if you need a booking or appointment engine for your business, consider Amelia as one of your number one choices. It’s risky to install a free plugin and try to run your entire business around it. There’s no guarantee of quality support, and who knows if the plugin is going to be around in two years?

With Amelia, you receive an excellent support team, a booking engine with lots of features, and the customization options you need to fit the booking tool into your current website.

In addition, the plugin works with a wide range of businesses and industries such as doctors, gyms, and salons. And Amelia is also RTL ready – supporting all users using Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Urdu, and other languages that use right-to-left writing. So, give Amelia a try and check out the demos before making your purchase.

Learn More About Amelia

If you have any questions about this Amelia booking plugin review, let us know in the comments below. Or if you’ve used the plugin and want to share, we’d love to know what you think of this powerful booking plugin.