the online booking should only show available times that are back to back. At present we are getting a 15 min appt being booking in the middle of an hour slot

So for example, a client books your first slot for a haircut which should start at 9:30am but chooses to book the 9:45 am slot instead, perhaps so they have time to get a coffee after the school run.... But the thing is, the ability for the clients to do this can leave hours of gaps in a single week/month when you add it all up. Surely there is a way for the system to intelligently point the client to the start time of the day instead of allowing them free reign to create empty spaces in our diaries that we can't fill with any paying appointments...

Problem definition:

Salons do not have enough control over time slots offered to clients booking online, meaning "bad" times for the salon staff member can be booked online. One churned client sums it up quite well:

"Clients are still able to destroy my day with dropping 30min appointments where ever they want."

An existing competitor solution for this is giving salon staff the option of restricting slots offered so that they are touching any of the following:

This allows appointments to be built up together in blocks. This is offered by Timma in Finland and is a missed feature. It is a staff level feature (not a branch level feature).

I believe it would also help increase adoption of OB in other regions, who have a fear of opening their calendar to clients.

Very few people understand the existing feature (incl. internally) and it is not strict enough for some staff that honestly would rather have no appointment than a bad appointment.

Minimise online booking gaps! Have an option to only offer appointments at the start of the day, end of the day and next to other appointments. Instead of showing all the available times.

This stops a 15-minute appointment from being booked in the middle of a 2-hour gap and not being able to utilise the time efficiently.

Ovatu offers this option.

Hi team, We would love a setting that only allowed clients to see the times available straight after another appointment or directly before the next appointment. We are constantly having to contact our clients to make better use of our booking availability to fit in more appointments. It is quite time consuming for reception and also can come across as unorganised or unprofessional if we are doing this to clients frequently.

Restrict online bookings to appointments available next to another one i.e. if an hour or more space is free, do not allow a short treatment to book in the middle of this space. This will prevent us turning clients away who would like a longer treatment because we don't have the space but would have had if the online booking wasn't allowed.