I think Treatwell works well for clients who are looking for availability for a particular service at a particular time/date. We use Treatwell and it's annoying to make so little out if it, but the reviews gain us lots of visibility on google. It's worth paying for this IMO.
We don't upload all of our services, so clients can only book certain treatments. We block out our peak booking hours and only upload our off peak availability/new therapists. I'm only bookable through Treatwell about 10 days a year, and those dates are earmarked as my holiday dates for next year! We've learned to manage Treatwell to sell off our surplus capacity. We track the number of discounted (Treatwell) services we offer and they are a tiny %age of our turnover.
We have used Groupon in the past and will do in the future. We use it to build the speed and experience of our new starters, to practise new services and to retail products associated with the discounted service, rather than selling off our off peak time, (which we upload on Treatwell). We are always up front to our Groupon Customers about why we are running an offer and we've never had a negative response. Customers would rather we explain than suspect that they are propping up a fake discounted service or a failing business that isn't worth the full rate. Again, we manage our availability carefully. If customers offer a Groupon voucher at checkout without having told us at the time that they booked, we explain carefully why their voucher isn't valid for the treatment that they have received. As long as the terms and conditions are correct and you're not afraid to point out, politely, that the client is in error, there is rarely a problem.
We find that we get a few repeat or additional bookings or sales out of Groupon, which when we look at the "cost" of the offer, (the no of sales x the discount and Groupon's commission) ensure that we break even - so we've achieved our training/marketing objectives at nil cost.
