How to Create an Online Booking System for your App or Site

Nowadays, the booking industry moves towards digitization at a rapid pace.

According to Finances Online research, the average annual growth rate of the online booking industry will amount to 15,1% in the next several years. Thus, to keep up with the times, many businesses take a step in this direction as well.

It’s also pretty common for existing solutions to not allow users to change reservation details or cancel them. By implementing such a feature into your platform, everything can be displayed there & fully managed by users.

Generally, custom booking functionality can be fully tailored to your business needs.

# 2: No-shows & Less Confusion 😕

Sometimes, people confuse the time they’re supposed to come at or forget they have a reservation. Plus, it’s not always easy to deal with similar situations.

Maybe an online booking tool won’t be able to really help you with solving such issues, but it will definitely be much easier to prevent them.

You can:

• Offer users to turn on push or desktop notifications (depending on what your current platform is, it may or may not be possible) so they can be reminded of their reservation a couple of times.

If it’s not possible to use notifications, you can use text messages or call instead.

It might be a good idea to make them customizable. For instance, you can offer to set the time when the notification/reminder pops up. It can be 24/12/6/2, etc. hours before, for example.

• Integrate with users’ calendars on their devices, so the booking time is displayed there. Normally, after the booking is done, the “Add to calendar” button pops up.

In fact, setting automated reminders can help companies reduce the rate of no-shows by 29%.

# 3: Data Collection Automation 📚

Working with data collection through custom booking functionality can be more accurate & suitable for your business, compared to a ready-made option.

First of all, you can fully manage what metrics the software collects. Often, businesses track metrics such as:

• The overall number of customers per period of time.
• The overall revenue.
• The revenue made on a certain day/week/month.
• The number of no-shows & others.

What’s great about such custom tools is that you don’t have to manually change someone’s reservation status if it’s been canceled or rescheduled — the software will do it for you.

The data can be presented in various forms of infographics. It helps to track the dynamics & make the analysis easier.

# 4: Productivity Increase 📤

The booking process might require additional manual work or approval from managers, and needs to be controlled because of the lack of automation. For instance, if the booking is done by phone, a manager has to take it & add it to the CRM or whatever system you use.

Such additional tasks can result in lower productivity or distract managers from more important tasks.

Not to mention that managers’ productivity has a significant impact on the workflow’s structure, and it can be improved without such routine tasks.

# 5: 24/7 Booking Accessibility ⌛

The problem with phone booking is that users can’t be fully free in terms of when they can book an appointment. That can and most probably will result in huge opportunity costs.

So, on-demand booking implies services that are expected to satisfy customers’ needs in the shortest time possible.

Normally, these types of businesses are called On-Demand:

• Taxi — Uber, Curb (in the USA), etc.
• Food Delivery — Glovo, UberEats, Doordash, etc.
• Home/Repair Services — Handy, Sears, etc.

The core feature of on-demand booking services is that customers are more likely to use them regularly without quick access to their desktops, meaning, they might need to install an app.

Thus, if you have an on-demand service, you might want to integrate booking functionality into your app.

Actually, we have a couple of articles dedicated to developing apps for your on-demand services. Here’s one about on-demand food delivery:

On the other hand, there are in-advance booking services that imply that customers book a certain day and time to receive a service.

There are a bunch of businesses that use such booking practice:

• Hospitality — hotels, restaurants, etc.
• Beauty.
• Medical Appointments.
• Events & Entertainment.
• Transportation.
• Education & others.

What’s important to understand when providing booking services for such businesses is that people don’t use them that regularly. Moreover, the appointment/service will be booked rather in advance than spontaneously, which requires time to think.

Thus, users are more likely to do their research from their laptops or tablets.

Consequently, it might be more practical to integrate a booking software into the web app or PWA, so users won’t need to install an app for one-time use (at least, for now).

We have an article dedicated to PWAs & Technologies for building them, which goes a little more in-depth regarding the tech part of the development. So, if you are interested in this topic, here you go:

CheckMyBus is a service that helps users compare bus ticket prices from different providers.

When their team reached out to us, they already had an app, but it was quite buggy and it only had a 2-star rating. For us that meant that the new app needed to be more user-friendly but provide an experience similar to what the old one did.

Besides, the online bus booking market isn’t new to the world which means that the app had to follow the existing patterns that users are used to, yet bring uniqueness to the industry.

The final product turned out to be a cross-platform app that’s consistent with the CheckMyBus website. Eventually, the overall rating reached 4.6 stars.

If you’d like to get more insights on this project, you could visit this Case Study on our website:

Many booking tools add built-in calendars as well. Some use them to increase users’ engagement. So, instead of using external apps, users could plan their visits in the calendars.

Others do it to provide a better user experience in terms of scheduling the reservation — it can be easier to book if the dates are visualized.

# 2: Feedback & Ratings 💬

It’s of high importance to show your customers that you care about what they think of your business & the service you provide them.

So, when implementing a booking system, think about adding a feedback feature & letting customers rate your services.

Besides, you can use feedback as a tool to determine & work off the negative impression. So, when a customer remains unsatisfied enough with the service, you could smooth it out with a discount or let them know that their opinion is taken into account and “everything possible will be done to prevent it the next time.”

You can also ask users to explain the reason for canceling the reservation when they do so. This way, you’ll be able to gather valuable info on how to improve your services.

# 3: Payment Gateway 💲

If you want to offer to pay in advance via the booking software, you’ll need a secure & reliable Payment Gateway.

For a great user experience, it should:

• Be consistent with various OS options.
• Allow using popular payment methods like credit card, Apple & Google Pay, PayPal, etc.
• Work fast with no delays.
• Strongly protect users’ personal data.

If it’s possible for your type of business, think about allowing each client to opt for payment in cash.

# 4: Push- & Desktop Notifications 📲

This feature is possible in two cases:

• You have or will have a mobile app — push-notifications.
• You have or will have a web application — desktop notifications.

If you have a PWA, it’s not possible to use notifications.

Implementing push- or desktop notifications can be helpful in several ways. You could use them to:

• Increase sales by sending personalized offers.
• Retarget customers.
• Remind clients of their reservations to reduce the amount of no-shows.

To begin with, businesses in such industries as beauty, home services, taxi & transportation, etc., that have multiple service providers, need to be able to delete, add, and edit the list of service providers.

Staff member profile description:

• Full name.
• Photo.
• Contact information.
• Position & others.

Some businesses add more features by integrating with an HCM (Human Capital Management) System — a set of tools to manage all HR-related processes.

It has a bunch of features like payroll, recruitment & onboarding, performance management, but in terms of integrating an online booking software, the most useful one is workforce planning.

It implies distributing bookings & workload in general among workers, as well as tracking sick leaves and vacations to be able to reassign workers on time.

Additionally, many businesses use various levels of access. For instance:

1. Administrator — has full access to all features & settings.
2. Manager — allowed to manage service provider lists, cancel or change reservations, etc.
3. Employees — have access only to their own bookings.

Even though we named this section “Staff Management,” a feature that will manage lists of not only staff but whatever it is you offer to your clients will be needed.

Appointment Management 📆

For better workflow control, you can add various features for appointment management.

👨‍💻 Our Expertise: Yangol

Recently, we integrated a complex booking functionality into Yangol — a product that helps companies digitize their onboarding processes.

The main goal was to enable booking of onboarding meetings for new employees & their managers.

Besides, Yangol needed to empower booking other onboarding-related events of relative companies.

Our goal was complexified by the need of sending calendar-invitations to all meeting participants with the option of being able to accept them within a month.

To successfully implement this series of actions, we integrated the rrule.js library.

This integration helped us make the format of a sequence of exact dates out of specific “recurring events” (for instance, “every week on Mondays”).

This is a great example of quite a complicated case of booking appointments functionality integration into an existing product.

If you’d like to learn more about this case, you could visit our website & read this case study: