guides · 2026-09-05
How to choose a booking model
The choice looks like a question about your trade and is really a question about scarcity: when a customer commits, what stops being available to everybody else? Answer that in one sentence and the model chooses itself. Get it wrong and you spend a year typing every booking twice.
Ask what becomes unavailable
A haircut consumes one person’s hour. A yoga session consumes one place out of twelve. A court consumes that court for ninety minutes. A scooter leaves the yard and comes back. A villa consumes a night. A boiler repair consumes an engineer, a van and the drive across town. Each of those is a different scarce thing, and each has its own model. Say your sentence out loud before you look at any platform: “when somebody books, this stops being available.”
Time with a person: appointments
Use the appointment model when the scarce thing is a named person’s time, usually with a room or a chair beside it. The signals are that customers ask for somebody by name, that services have very different lengths, and that a gap for cleaning or setup exists between customers whether or not anybody writes it down.
A place in a session: classes
Use the class model when several people share one start time and the limit is how many fit. The signal is that you count places rather than hours, and that capacity belongs to Tuesday at seven rather than to “yoga”. If you catch yourself creating a class with capacity one, you wanted an appointment.
Something that stays put: resources
Use the resource model when a customer uses a thing where it stands and nobody is handed anything: courts, meeting rooms, studios, desks, workshop bays. The signal is that resources look interchangeable but are not — floodlights on court two, a piano in the small studio — and that a gap is needed between bookings to reset the space.
Something that leaves and comes back: rentals
Use the rental model when the item goes away with the customer. Two things separate it from a resource: availability comes from the specific units you own rather than from a category, and there is a handover and a return, with condition, fuel, extras and a deposit that somebody has to record. If the argument in your trade happens when the thing comes back, this is your model.
Nights and addresses: accommodation and field service
Accommodation is the only model measured in nights, which is why the day a guest leaves is the day the next one arrives and why changeover time is unsellable. Field service is the model where the work happens at the customer’s address, which makes the drive between two jobs part of the day and turns a promised minute into a promised window.
When your business needs two of them
Plenty of businesses do. A hotel books nights and also sells spa hours and cabanas; a farm runs tastings and lets a cottage; a garage services cars and hires out a courtesy van. That is not a problem to solve with one clever configuration — it is two models running side by side, each honest about its own scarcity. Trying to force nights and hours into a single shape is how both become wrong.
Test the choice with three real bookings
Before you build anything, take three bookings from last month — an ordinary one, an awkward one and the one that went wrong — and walk them through the model you picked. If any of them needs a field you invented on the spot, a note in the margin or a second entry somewhere else, the model is not right yet. That fifteen-minute test is cheaper than discovering it in August.
Product documentation · Product owner
