Parents Booking Reviews 

Reply from Parents Booking

Jun 3, 2025

Hello Kip,

I'm really sorry to see your one-star review. What's gone wrong? If you want to pop us an email using hello@parents-booking.com, we'll investigate fully for you. As a family business, whose sole concern has been helping thousands of schools for almost two decades, it's extremely unusual to see a review like this and I'd love to help remedy the situation.

Best wishes,

Will (Director)

Reply from Parents Booking

Nov 3, 2023

Hi Jammer.

I'm really sorry to hear you've had a bad experience. As you'll hopefully see from other reviews, and hopefully understand from the fact thousands of schools use Parents Booking successfully, your experience is definitely not representative of most. We're a family business, we're passionate about education technology and how it can improve student success, and Parents Booking is what we've put all our efforts into over the last decade, so when things go wrong for even one parent/carer, it hurts us too. We care, hence my long, hopefully solutions-focused reply here - and also because I'd like the opportunity to remedy your problem.

If you want to pop us an email (hello@parents-booking.com) with the name of the school you were trying to connect to video meetings for, I'll personally, thoroughly investigate your issue. I can grab your video meeting IDs and send them to Twilio to check for the exact joining/compatibility issues you were having, because - as I understand it from your message - you couldn't join your video meetings at all. There will be a technical reason, and as much as you have frustrations with our (new-ish!) UI, it sounds like a video meeting connectivity issue that's what was the biggest cause of frustration.

(You'll forgive me for pushing back that your opinion that ours is a terrible implementation of Twilio's programmable video, I'm sure that's not actually the cause. I understand you're a software engineer and no doubt have huge experience in this arena, but Twilio have long-since reviewed and validated our implementation as being of a very high standard.)

This may sound patronising, but I mean it sincerely: As someone who has implemented Twilio technology before, you'll no doubt know that in rare cases, even more the most tech-savvy users, a combination of the end-user's technology and/or external factors can mean meetings cannot 'connect'. We 'signal' to the Twilio servers to create the meeting, and if your signalling doesn't work and cannot connect you to the video room, that's almost always a software or hardware issue. For example, for the benefit of others reading this more-so - and these may well not be your issues - users behind certain work/government firewalls might find the firewall blocks the 'signalling' (even if Teams, Zoom and other web-based video chats like Google Meet are unblocked) to Twilio, perhaps because the ports/domains at play are being blocked / not unblocked. Another issue that I've seen is where other video software that has been used recently is still controlling a webcam and will not 'allow' a user to share their webcam with the internet browser. For these reasons, there is a test centre built into Parents Booking, and hopefully the error message you will have been provided gave some clue as to whether this was a connection, web cam or other issue.

I do understand how frustrating it will have been to have wanted to converse with the school's teachers and not been able to, so please do get in touch and I'll use my connections to hopefully both determine what your problem was and also to either help rearrange your meetings, or at least help make sure this doesn't happen again. Video meetings are probably here to stay in many cases - they enable the school to communicate with parents who couldn't have otherwise attended in-person, and I can promise you attendance statistics are through the roof for almost all schools, which is a good thing when you consider that parents meeting with teachers is a driver to greater student success, so with that in mind - and being solutions-focused - I'd like you to be able to have your meetings later and also know this will work for you going forward.

Again, I'm really sorry you had a bad experience and hope we can make it up to you - get in touch so we can investigate and help repair your trust.

In hopes we can help remedy your experience and re-gain your trust.

Best wishes,

Will, Co-owner.

Reply from Parents Booking

May 3, 2023

Hello Mr Hesford. I'm very sorry that you had a bad experience yesterday. You caught us having a bad few hours and I'm sorry we let you down, and promise this was very unusual. Hopefully you saw that our servers sped up significantly within an hour or two of them being very slow last night, but if you are still not scheduled properly, please feel free to email hello@parents-booking.com with your name, school name and preferred first appointment start time (or when you'll be available from on the day, so we don't book you too early) - we'll be happy to set up your schedule this morning. Sorry again, and we'll be much, much better next time.

Reply from Parents Booking

Updated Dec 15, 2021

Hi Jayne. I am so sorry to hear you had a bad experience. This is very unusual, but it is possible that (rarely) video meetings do not 'connect' for users. Normally, especially if you cannot connect on several devices (phone and desktop in your case), this is caused by some sort of 'blocking' on your network or firewall, and won't have been a product issue. I understand that if you use Teams and Zoom successfully on these devices you might question that, but the internet-browser-based video meetings we use use a different technology. We do supply guidance to parents and teachers in their invites and appointment confirmations, to help advice on how to test in advance and also how to troubleshoot if anything goes wrong in the moment. Furthermore some error messages should have shown to help you with any connection or 'hardware' (webcam/mic/computer/internet browser) incompatibility issues you were having. None the less, in spite of the fact we observe that 99%+ of video meetings connect, sometimes the above issues happen and we absolutely understand that it will have been a very frustrating experience, an event you were looking forward to and a key time to talk to teachers.

If you can email hello@parents-booking.com, we will be happy to reach out to your school and discuss an alternative plan for how you can discuss with teachers, or advice for how to stop this happening next time.

All the best.
Will