Jim E.
MotoPress products and support? Nope, not anymore.
We've been using MotoPress Hotel Booking plugin for almost 3 years, and believe me, I know the software very well. Let me say, I had great hopes for this plugin and it could still have a future, but it’s going to take a lot of work. Sometimes I feel like I’m more of a beta tester than an end user. MotoPress focuses on selling you a plugin one time. There seems to be little or no interest in improving the plugin with the functions that the end user will need in the future. There have been a couple of improvements, but they are generally sold as “add-ons”. As your business grows, you will be suddenly faced with the reality that you are going to have to move to another solution. One that actually provides software designed for the growth of both business’s, and not as a one-time sale for the benefit of MotoPress. There should be dozens of reports, both generic as well as roll your own. But there are none. There is a place to export bookings to a CSV file, but that is all. We’ve been using this to print out a list of daily visitors for the campsite host, but it has to be manually run each day, sorted and manipulated into the proper format, and then printed. This takes someone 10 minutes or more every single day, when it should be a simple click, print, and done process. Try running a business when that sort of approach. How many times have you wanted to keep notes on a repeat visitor? MotoPress allows you to make notes, but each booking is treated as a separate record, so any notes you keep on Mr. Smith are stored in one of Mr. Smith’s many reservations. Good luck figuring out which one has the vital note you are looking for. Support is a much-needed service. Sure, you can submit a trouble ticket, and you’ll get an automated response. But you may not hear back from anyone for several days, sometimes longer if it’s a weekend or holiday. I’ve read some of the reviews from other users, and it appears that most of the reviews that praise MotoPress support are relatively new users. My guess is they’re excited because a support person helped them to configure the software to do what they needed. That’s great, and I’m glad you got your software configured, just don’t throw anything serious at them. As of writing this review, it's been 4-weeks and I'm still waiting for them to address an issue where the export has stopped including data from any of the user added checkout fields. The “Checkout Fields” function by the way, is a feature that is already included in any piece of booking software out there, but it’s one that MotoPress sells as an add-on. All my efforts have yielded an endless chain of emails, rife with misunderstandings of the problem and plagued by unacceptable delays. The last email response we received from support stated, and I quote, “As soon as I get access we will check immediately and try to do our best to resolve the issue.” I responded within seconds, telling them that all security was shut off, their login was ready, and please let me know what they find. That was 5 days ago and we have heard nothing since. MotoPress wants you to use their software to run your business, but they don’t consider your business important enough to respond any quicker than that? Seriously? Watch the credit card transactions too. I’ve experienced multiple transactions being processed for a single booking. Not good! On one occasion, their support team needed to access the plugin and asked that I create an Admin login for them. I complied. However, they left the 'Test Payment' option enabled when they exited, resulting in customers making bookings without actually being charged. We realized something was wrong when the accounting didn’t match the deposits in the bank. MotoPress apologized, but that didn’t do much for the lost revenue or to instill confidence in their support. And the booking price methodology is very poorly throughout. For example, make a pricing change for a property or a set of properties, and any new bookings will be charged at the new price. And that’s what you would expect to happen. But make a change to a booking that was made prior to the new pricing and the entire booking will be recalculated at the new pricing. This is seldom, if ever, what you wanted to have happen. And there is no way to override this ridiculous mess. Very confusing to the customer and to the keeping of accurate records going forward. Would I recommend MotoPress? Yes, absolutely—to my competitors. Edit: I tried for over a month to get someone in support to acknowledge the issue I was reporting. I finally gave up and changed software providers. Today I see from their changelog, that an update was posted to fix the problem. From the changelog: "Fixed an issue with custom checkout fields that were not exported to the CSV report." If only someone would have paid attention to us when we told them.