Advantages and disadvantages of going for try-sell lessons

Here is a question that many of us would consider as a student in the driving school, that is, whether you should take up try-sell lessons. In the previous post, I have explained the concept of try-sell and provided some tips to enhance your chance of getting a try-sell slot. Here, I would like to provide you with a list of advantages and disadvantages of going for try-sell lessons.

Advantages

Shorter time taken to complete the course - Usually your advanced booking lessons would be 1 to 2 months away (especially for peak hour slots). If you want to start going for practical lesson immediately (provided you passed your Basic Theory Test already), you can pack your first few weeks with try-sell lessons. In that way you can shorten the time taken to obtain your driving license. In addition, advanced booking lessons are limited to 3 lessons per week. If you want to pack more lessons, you need to go for try-sell.

Different instructors - This can be a double edged sword. If you go for try-sell lessons, it is unlikely that you'll get your default group instructors. Here I will talk about its advantage. With many different instructors teaching you, you can get more pointers and can learn different techniques for each maneuver since different instructor would emphasize on different aspect of driving. Then you can choose the ones that you feel most comfortable with.

Disadvantages

Many different instructors - As mentioned above, this can be a double edged sword. With many different instructors, they will not be able to fully understand your strength and weakness since every lesson you attend would be a new instructor who has no clue of what you have done in the previous lessons. You end up having to do a fair bit of revision at the start of the lesson for the instructor to verify if you are indeed doing alright in your past lesson. In the end, you may end up going for more lessons. If you frequently stay with your default group, the instructors would be familiar with your strengths and weaknesses and would have more chance to focus on improving your weaknesses.

Different group, less committed -  As advised by some of my default group instructors, other group instructors tend to be less committed in the lesson if they know that you belong to another group (since it does not impact their KPI). I'm not sure if this is entirely true as I have met some instructors who are truly committed to make me pass. One even told me a secret technique he said he rarely mention to other students. In fact, the only instructor that cheer me before my test was an instructor from another group whom had only taught me twice.

Less time to prepare - Usually the try-sell lesson I got is on the same day. Sometimes, it could be only a few hours away. There is less time for me to prepare for the lesson (eg reading up on the practical handbook or revising the previous lesson), unless I mug while taking the bus.

A lot of time spent on monitoring for try-sell slots - You may end up starring at your monitor and refreshing your webpages for hours just to wait for a try-sell slot. But from experience, there are some timing that have a higher chance of others releasing slots.

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Tips to increase your chances of getting try-sell lessons

By definition, try-sell lessons are lessons that are cancelled by other students in the school. When a student cancels a lesson that she has previously booked, it will be released back to the pool of available slots for other students to snatch (literally). If a student cancels a slot 2 days or more before the lesson day, it will immediately be released to the pool and the fee gets refunded back to her account. If she does it in lesser than 2 days, the slot needs to be taken up by another student before the fee can be refunded. If nobody takes up the lesson, she will not get back any refund. Also, she is not allowed to sell her slot at all if her lesson is starting in 2 hours time. Otherwise, from my experience, there will always be someone willing to take up your cancelled lesson. All these actions of releasing and snatching are done in the web portal. Many times. the more popular timings such as weekend slots can be snatched up within seconds upon release. I overheard from another student that some people would just sit in front of their computer for hours to just look for try-sell slots. He called them 'campers'.

About 80% of the lessons I attended were from try-sell. This was because I didn't want to wait until my advanced booking lessons to start which were 2 months away. And for advanced booking lesson, it is limited to 3 lessons per week. With the try-sell option, I was able to start my practical lesson the next day after enrollment (I already passed my Basic Theory Test 10 years ago). One thing about try-sell lesson is that, you most likely will not be allocated to your default group instructor. There are pros and cons in this which I will describe in another post. So by the time I got to my advanced booking slots, I was already in stage 2. That's how I managed to complete my lessons in 3+ months.

Some tips to increase your chance to get a try-sell slot. 

As mentioned above, the competition is very intense. You are probably competing with hundreds of other students trying to get a try-sell slot at the same time. I am not trying to scare you but that is how it is (I am not sure about Auto lessons, but it seems Manual lessons are in high demand, probably due to limited supply of instructors). Lessons get snatched up in a matter of seconds. You may lose your slot even if you are not quick enough to confirm the slot you have chosen! It is like snatching for discount deals during an online fire sale. I hope below pointers would be able to give you an edge:

Choose to look for try-sell slots during some odd hours - I realized it is easier to get try-sell slots after midnight when most people are sleeping. Some of my slots were gotten at around 2am in the morning (I am a night person). However, they are usually 730am slots of the next day. Better than nothing right. In addition, it seems it is easier to get try-sell slots during 12-2pm. I guess many people are surfing the net during lunch time.

Choose to snatch during the time in between Practical Tests - These are the times where those who passed the Practical test may release all those extra lessons that they booked in advance.

Familiarize with your browser's hot keys - This is so that once you found a slot, you can quickly confirm on it. Using keyboard short-cuts would definitely give you an extra advantage in speed. Unfortunately, this is only for desktop.

Use a desktop connected to LAN cable instead of mobile devices - with the slower speed of 4G and wifi as compared to a desktop connected via LAN cables, you will definitely be at a disadvantage if you do this using your mobile phones unless you are on the move. In fact, the BBDC website is not optimized for mobile access.

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