Real time bookings come to Wahanda

[The Hat]

Visitors to the spa, beauty and wellness site Wahanda will soon benefit from 'real time' online booking - a facility that allows people to shop live for the best deals.

Wahanda - which receives more than 45,000 guests a month - has jumped on a major trend within online beauty and spa websites. Real time displays immediate availability without consumers wasting valuable time - it also means businesses can benefit from instant confirmation on forward bookings.

Lopo Champalimaud, CEO of Wahanda, said: “Consumer demand for wanting to book their spa breaks and holidays immediately means that the standard request system that most companies use has become outdated and misses out on important sales for operators. Wahanda’s move to ‘real time’ bookings is part of our strategy to simplify the spa booking process and bring more immediate business to spa and hotel operators.”

 

[Ruth Mills]

Just a thought, but wouldn't it be a good idea if all the major salon software providers, and websites such as Wahanda and INAA could agree on a common standard for real time online appointment booking, e.g. So a spa or salon running say Phorest or Studio Tracker or whatever would be able to provide an interface into their booking system so that "trusted" aggregator websites such as Wahanda or INAA would then be able to securely authenticate and connect to a salon's software system and perform activities like retrieving a list of available appointments for a given date and time range, and booking an appointment on behalf of a client.

Such a protocol would ideally need to be an open standard though so that a particular provider of salon software would not have a monopoly on a given booking website (or vice versa).

The advantage for salons would be that they would be able to take advantage of online bookings via one or more "broker" websites (e.g. Wahanda or INAA) and/or their own website whilst fully integrating this in with their existing salon software system (which they will have likely already made a significant investment in).