How to set up an online booking system in your business

> Declaration of interest: BAI Business offers diary and online booking and publishes this article. It is signed by Héctor Redondo, CEO and founder of BAI Business.

Today I want to talk about how to set up an online booking system in your business, without it turning into an endless project.

An online booking system is a link where your customer chooses a service and a free time on their own, without calling or writing, and receives their confirmation and their reminder. Setting it up comes down to six steps: define your services, set your hours, publish the link where people find you, switch on reminders, decide what happens if someone cancels and review it after two weeks. You do not need more.

The six steps

1. List your services with their duration. A haircut, a first visit, a check-up. Each one with how long it really takes, breaks included. If you put less time than the real one, your diary will run behind all day.
2. Set your hours and those of each person on the team. Which days, which hours, which breaks and how many bookings you accept per day. The customer should only see times when somebody is really free.
3. Publish the link where people find you: your website, your Instagram profile and your Google listing. Whoever finds you at night books with whoever lets them do it at that moment.
4. Switch on the reminder before the appointment, by email or by WhatsApp if the customer accepted it.
5. Decide the cancellation policy: until when it can be changed or cancelled, and whether you ask for a deposit when booking. It must be easy to use: a customer who cannot find how to cancel simply does not turn up.
6. Review after two weeks: how many bookings arrive outside opening hours? How many do not show up? Which hours stay empty?

What to avoid

• Asking the customer to create an account to book. Every extra step loses bookings.
• Double bookings: two people on the team noting appointments on their phones, without a shared diary.
• Not confirming: if the customer gets nothing, they doubt whether they have booked.
• WhatsApp reminders without permission: the customer must have accepted them.

What providers say about no-shows

A warning first: these figures come from companies that sell booking software, so they are one side's data, not independent studies. Even so, they give an idea.

• Reservio, a booking software provider for salons, writes that no-show rates are 15 to 30% and that more than 40% of bookings are made outside regular hours (page accessed on 11 October 2026).
• Qamarero, a provider for restaurants, cites an average no-show rate of 3.3% of bookings (attributed to TheFork, 2025) and says that a reminder 24 hours before reduces no-shows by up to 40% (attributed to OpenTable, 2024) (page accessed on 11 October 2026).

Two different sectors, very different figures. The lesson I take: measure your own. For a month, write down how many appointments are made and how many do not show up.

Imagine a hair salon with 30 appointments a week and five people on the team. If two clients fail to show each week, that is eight slots a month that nobody fills and nobody is paid for. It does not know how much that is until it writes it down. (An invented example, not a real customer.)

What we have built at BAI

I use BAI's calendar and appointments. According to what we publish on the website, the diary has booking pages by service, by professional, by team or by group places; the customer sees only genuinely free times, books without creating an account and receives the confirmation in their language. The reminder goes out by itself by email, or by WhatsApp if they accepted it; whoever cannot come changes or cancels from their link and frees the slot; and if you want, you collect a deposit when booking. Every booking goes into your diary, into your Google calendar and into your customer list.

The six steps work with any tool.

What to do now

Do the first two steps today on a piece of paper: your services with their real duration and your hours. With that, setting up the rest in any tool takes an afternoon. If you want to see how we do it, there is diary and online booking. And if you receive messages outside opening hours, also see what a customer service chatbot is.

How we checked this

The no-show figures come from the pages of two software providers, read on 11 October 2026; they are not independent studies. What I say about BAI comes from the published pages of our website. I wrote it with the help of artificial intelligence from the cited sources and from what we use at BAI; I sign it myself.

Sources

• Reservio, "Los 7 mejores software para salones de belleza en 2026": https://www.reservio.com/es/blog/consejos/elegir-el-mejor-software-de-reservas-para-salones (accessed on 11 October 2026). A provider's figures.
• Qamarero, "No shows en restaurantes: qué son y cómo reducirlos": https://qamarero.com/blog/no-shows-en-restaurantes/ (accessed on 11 October 2026). Figures from a provider that cites TheFork (2025) and OpenTable (2024).
• Description of BAI's diary: published page Diary and online booking.