Booking online

The address

/book/your-branch for one location, or /book/your-business, which resolves to your only branch or sends a chain’s customer to the directory to pick one.

What the customer does

1. Picks a service. This is what sets the length of the appointment, so it has to come first.
2. Picks a date. Only days with something available are offered.
3. Picks a time from the slots that exist for that service on that day.
4. Gives their details — the same configurable set of fields as the join form, and you can ask different things of somebody booking than of somebody walking in.
5. Confirms, and lands on a confirmation page with everything on it.

Where the slots come from

A slot has to survive several filters before a customer is offered it:

• The branch’s booking hours. Nothing outside the working day, and nothing on a day the branch is closed.
• The service’s length — and any buffer after it, so back-to-back bookings do not leave you with no time to reset between them.
• Notice rules. How soon something can be booked from now, and how far ahead. A service can be stricter than the branch, never looser.
• Resource availability. Where you use resources, a slot only exists if something that can perform that service is working then and not already claimed.
• What is already booked. Existing appointments take their resources out of circulation for their duration.

What stops somebody booking

If online booking is switched off for the location, the page says so instead of showing the form. If Queue Join support has suspended the account, the location is beyond what your plan covers, or this month’s visits are used up, it says “This business isn’t taking visitors online at the moment.”

When they confirm, the number goes through the same protection from misuse as the join form — premium-rate and non-mobile numbers, countries the location doesn’t take numbers from, blocked numbers, too many attempts from one number or one connection. Bookings add one more: a number can hold three upcoming bookings at a location, or six if you have served them before. Whatever the reason, the customer sees “We couldn’t take this booking online. Please contact the business to book.” You can still book them in yourself, unless the number is blocked.

As on the join form, a security check (Cloudflare Turnstile) occasionally appears before the booking goes through. See blocked and test numbers.

Which time zone the customer sees

Slots are shown in the branch’s local time, because that is where the customer has to physically be. Somebody booking from abroad sees the time the appointment will happen locally rather than a translation into their own zone, which would tell them the wrong thing to write in their diary.

After they book

The confirmation page carries the date, time, branch and service, and a link the customer can come back to. From there — where you allow it — they can confirm, reschedule, tell you they have arrived or are running late, cancel, or correct their details. Rescheduling re-checks availability the same way the original booking did.

The foot of the page links to Queue Join’s terms, privacy policy and SMS policy. If the customer’s number has replied STOP to a Queue Join message in the past — at any business — the page tells them so: “You’ve asked us not to text this number”, with the number to text START to if they want messages back. Otherwise they would be waiting for a reminder that is never coming.

A reminder goes out ahead of the appointment and, if you have a survey on, a follow-up afterwards asking how it went. Both are driven by the clock; choose their channels under customer messages.

Bookings and walk-ins together

Both flows can run at the same branch at the same time. What keeps them from colliding is resources — a booked stylist is not available to the waitlist, and the waitlist’s throughput accounts for the ones that are busy. See waitlist and bookings.