Qaiyo Smart Appointment

Qaiyo Smart Appointment is a clean, fast scheduling plugin for service businesses — salons, clinics, coaches, consultants, studios and freelancers.

Its standout feature is fluid slot allocation. Most booking plugins slice the day into a fixed grid for one chosen duration. Qaiyo instead works on the open gaps around existing appointments and fits each requested service into whatever space is left. Book a 2-hour service, then a 1-hour one, and the remaining time stays fully bookable for any mix of shorter or longer services that still fit — packed dynamically, never wasted.

Free features

• Fluid, gap-based slot engine (mixed durations in the same day)
• Unlimited services, staff members and bookings — no caps of any kind
• Step-by-step booking wizard, placed with a shortcode [qsab_booking], a Gutenberg block, or a native widget in Elementor, Bricks, Breakdance or Oxygen — the same settings in every one
• “Anyone available” or specific staff selection
• Per-service duration, price, colour and buffer times
• Fixed mode too — classic back-to-back time bands, if you prefer them, set globally or per service
• Quote requests — a booking mode that reserves no time at all: the customer names a preferred day and part of day and asks for a price, so an enquiry never takes a slot away from a real booking and two enquiries never clash
• Online payments — require payment before confirming a service, and the customer pays on a hosted checkout before the booking is confirmed. WooCommerce is the built-in provider, so you keep whatever gateways your shop already has (card, PayPal, bank transfer, cash on arrival)
• Working hours per staff member, with split shifts (e.g. a lunch break), falling back to your global opening hours
• Days off / vacation blocking — each range can carry a name (“Vacation”, “Public holiday”) that your visitors see
• Staff details on a page — [qsab_staff id="3" field="phone"] prints a staff member’s name, email address (spam-protected) or phone number, always as set under Staff
• Opening hours widget — [qsab_hours] shortcode, block and page-builder widget: your weekly hours with today highlighted, whether you are open right now and until when, and a notice for coming days off. It stays correct on cached pages
• Soft hold — a request can leave the time open until you approve it, so an enquiry never locks a resource; first approval wins
• One-click Approve / Decline buttons right inside the admin notification email
• Editable emails — five messages (request received, confirmed, cancelled, completed, reminder) plus the admin alert, each with its own on/off switch and its own wording, written with merge tags like {customer_name} and {when}
• Appointment reminders — an automatic email a set number of hours before a confirmed booking, sent once and only once
• Add to calendar — the confirmation and the reminder carry a calendar file (.ics) for Apple Calendar, Outlook and the rest, plus an “Add to Google Calendar” link; the booking form offers both the moment a booking is confirmed. The entry shows the service and its time, never the customer
• Public availability calendar — [qsab_availability] shortcode and block showing free and fully-booked days at a glance, with no customer details on the page
• “Upcoming” agenda card — [qsab_upcoming] shortcode and page-builder widget: today’s date, how many bookings today has, and the next few bookings with their service colour and time. It shows what runs and when, never who booked, so it is safe on a public page; it can also be kept to logged-in users for a team page
• Two customers cannot take the same time — a booking is re-checked the moment it is stored, so simultaneous submissions for one slot never both succeed
• Customers always see the time their service starts, not the buffer reserved around it
• Personal data tools — bookings appear in WordPress’s own Export / Erase Personal Data screens, and the suggested privacy-policy text lists what is stored
• Spam trap and a per-connection limit on the booking form, so bots cannot fill your calendar with junk requests
• One-click confirm / cancel / complete in the admin, and permanent delete (single or in bulk) for clearing out test data
• Customer self-cancellation links
• Settings export / import (JSON)
• FluentCRM integration — add booking customers to your lists & tags automatically
• Qaiyo ecosystem dashboard card — if you also run Qaiyo Admin Booster, a “Today’s appointments” card on your WordPress dashboard shows today’s booking count and the next appointment’s time
• Live status in your email signature — a small image (“Open now · until 17:00”) for an HTML signature, drawn at the moment the email is opened. Off until you switch it on
• Accessible to WCAG 2.2 AA (keyboard, screen readers, focus, contrast, reduced motion) and ready for right-to-left languages
• Translated into Hungarian, German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Turkish and Polish

Pro features

The Pro add-on is a separate plugin. Everything above keeps working without it.

• Stripe and PayPal connected directly, for sites with no shop — the customer pays on the provider’s own hosted page, and the booking confirms from the webhook, from the customer’s return, or from an hourly check, whichever comes first
• Deposits — collect a percentage or a fixed amount up front instead of the full price
• Five more booking modes: group sessions for classes, hourly and multi-day rentals where the customer picks the length, an arrival-order queue, and recurring series booked (and paid for) in one go
• Customer booking portal — customers look up and cancel their upcoming bookings through a short-lived emailed link, with no account to create
• Waiting list — customers join a full day and are emailed, one at a time, when a slot frees up
• Multiple locations, each with its own opening hours; the customer picks one on the form
• Staff days off — take one person out for a holiday or a sick day while the rest of the team stays bookable
• Daily breaks and per-service booking windows
• Custom branding (colour, font, logo) and three more booking-form layouts
• A richer “Today’s appointments” dashboard card (with Admin Booster)

Learn more at qaiyo-plugins.com.

External services

This plugin makes one outbound request, and only from the WordPress admin.

WordPress.org plugin directory API — used by the “Discover Qaiyo” screen
(Smart Booking → Discover Qaiyo) to list the plugin author’s other free plugins so
you can install one without leaving your site.

• What it is used for: fetching the public plugin listings (name, description,
  icon, ratings, install count) for author “qaiyo”.
• When the request happens: only when a logged-in administrator opens that screen,
  and at most once every 12 hours — the response is cached in a transient.
• What is sent: the query itself (the author name and the fields requested). This
  goes through WordPress’s own plugins_api() function, which is the same call the
  built-in Plugins → Add New screen makes. No personal data, no site data and
  nothing about your visitors or bookings is transmitted.
• Endpoint: https://api.wordpress.org/plugins/info/1.2/

This service is provided by WordPress.org: terms of service,
privacy policy.

Google Calendar — a link, not a connection. With “Add to calendar” on (Settings → Emails, on by default), confirmation and reminder emails and the booking form’s success screen contain an “Add to Google Calendar” link. The plugin itself never contacts Google.

• What it is used for: letting a customer add their own booking to their own Google Calendar.
• When anything is sent: only if the customer follows the link. Their browser then opens Google Calendar’s new-event page.
• What is sent: what the link itself holds — the service name, your site’s name, the staff member’s name, the start and end time and, with the Pro add-on, the location. Nothing about the customer is in it.
• Endpoint: https://calendar.google.com/calendar/render

This service is provided by Google: terms of service, privacy policy.

The calendar file (.ics) involves no service at all: it is attached to the email and generated in the booking response.

The booking form itself makes no external requests. Booking data stays in your
database, and notification emails are sent with wp_mail() through whatever your
site is already configured to use.