Minimum and maximum booking notice: which values to use for your business

It’s 4:40 pm, you’re halfway through a haircut and your phone buzzes: someone has just booked for 5:00 pm. With you. That’s the first setup mistake we see on new booking pages: leaving the minimum notice at zero because “the easier it is to book, the better”. The second is the opposite: opening the calendar a year ahead, having someone book for seven months from now, and that slot being taken by an appointment neither the client nor you remember when the day comes.

Both settings live in your page’s booking rules, next to the 15, 30 or 60 minute grid and the cancellation window. They take a minute to set. Choosing the right values takes a bit longer, and it depends on what you do.

What each setting controls

Minimum notice is how much time there must be, at the very least, between the moment the client books and the appointment itself. With a two-hour minimum, at 3:00 pm the first slot on offer is 5:00 pm. The earlier ones exist, but they don’t show on the page.

Maximum notice is how far ahead they can book. With eight weeks, today someone can book for a month from now, but not for three months from now.

Neither affects what you do from the calendar yourself. If a client calls and you give them a slot in 20 minutes, or you pencil them in five months out because it’s a special case, you can. The rules are for online booking, which is the kind that happens while you’re not looking.

Minimum notice: the question is how long until you notice

Minimum notice doesn’t protect the client. It protects you from a booking you haven’t seen. So the right value comes from a single question: when a booking comes in, how long passes until you see it and can react?

If you work alone and check your phone between clients, that’s 30 or 45 minutes at worst. If someone is at the front desk, it’s immediate. If your service needs preparing (mixing colour, heating wax, reviewing a patient’s file), add the preparation time on top.

From there, the rule that works: minimum notice has to be longer than the time it takes you to notice plus the time it takes you to prepare the service. Anything shorter will, sooner or later, catch you with someone at the door.

Maximum notice: as far as you know your own calendar

With the maximum the risk is different. A booking five months out has three problems: the client forgets it, you didn’t yet know your hours or holidays for that month, and that slot has been blocked for everyone else the whole time.

The rule: don’t open the calendar beyond the date you already have hours and holidays set for. If you’ve entered your Christmas break in the dashboard, you can open up to January without worry. If you don’t yet know what you’re doing in August, don’t let people book August.

One nuance matters: the further ahead, the more no-shows. An appointment booked two months out is far likelier to be forgotten than one booked the day before. That’s why a long maximum only makes sense with the automatic reminder switched on. With a reminder the day before, the appointment made two months ago comes back to the client’s mind in time, and if they can no longer make it, they cancel from the notification itself and the slot goes to the waitlist.

Recommended values by type of business

These are starting points, meant for a small business with no receptionist. Adjust them if your case is different.

• Barbershop. Minimum: 30 to 60 minutes. Maximum: 4 to 6 weeks. A haircut is short, needs no preparation and clients decide on the spot, so the minimum can be low. Beyond a month hardly anyone plans a haircut, and what gets booked two months out gets forgotten.
• Hair salon with colour. Minimum: 2 hours. Maximum: 8 to 12 weeks. Colour needs preparing and the service is long; a colour booked for half an hour from now wrecks the afternoon. On the other hand, colour clients plan every six to eight weeks and many want to book the next one as they leave, so the maximum has to reach the next visit comfortably.
• Beauty salon. Minimum: 2 to 3 hours. Maximum: 8 to 12 weeks. Treatments in courses (laser, facial cycles) get booked in one go for the coming weeks. The minimum covers getting the room ready.
• Physiotherapy. Minimum: 3 hours, or up to the day before if you prefer to review the file first. Maximum: 4 to 6 weeks. Patients under treatment book their run of sessions together, and everyone else comes with this week’s pain, not next month’s.
• Psychology. Minimum: 24 hours. Maximum: 8 to 12 weeks. A first consultation booked for an hour from now isn’t an emergency that gets solved through a booking page, and the professional needs room to prepare it. The long maximum lets regular patients lock in their weekly or fortnightly slot well ahead.

If your business mixes very different services (a 20-minute cut and three-hour highlights), the minimum notice is one value for the whole page: set it with the service that needs the most preparation in mind. The alternative is to turn on manual approval and accept short-notice bookings by hand.

Line up minimum notice with the cancellation window

There’s a relationship between two rules almost nobody checks, and it decides whether a cancelled slot can be filled again.

Say the cancellation window is 2 hours and minimum notice is 4. A client cancels their 5:00 pm appointment at 3:00 pm: they’re inside the window, so they can. But nobody can book that 5:00 pm slot online any more, because it’s less than 4 hours away. The waitlist sends the alert, the client taps the link, and there’s no slot.

The rule: minimum notice equal to or shorter than the cancellation window. That way any slot freed inside the window stays bookable online. If you want short-notice cancellations to be recovered, as we explain in how to reduce last-minute cancellations, this is the condition.

Checklist

Before you sign off on the setup, go over these four points:

1. Minimum notice is longer than the time it takes you to see a booking plus the time to prepare the service.
2. Minimum notice doesn’t exceed the cancellation window.
3. Maximum notice doesn’t reach beyond the date you already have hours and holidays set for.
4. If the maximum is more than a month, the automatic reminder is on.

And don’t leave it fixed. If you’ve had two or three bookings with very little notice in the last few weeks, raise the minimum by half an hour. If nobody books more than three weeks ahead, you don’t need the calendar open three months out. The booking rules are there to fit the way you work, not the other way round.