Schedopia – Appointment Booking, Scheduling, Events & Seat Reservations

Schedopia is a free appointment booking plugin for WordPress that lets service businesses accept appointments online, manage staff availability, prevent double-booking, and send automated booking reminders.

Customers can choose a service, staff member, date and available time from a mobile-friendly booking form. Schedopia also includes event booking and seat reservations, letting venues, classes, workshops and small theatres create dated events and allow customers to choose specific seats from a visual seat map.

Everything is self-hosted on your WordPress site. There are no per-booking fees or seat commissions, and your booking and customer data stays on your own server.

Why choose Schedopia?

• Bookings while you sleep — a mobile-friendly booking form takes reservations 24/7, so you never miss a customer.
• Never double-book again — every appointment is checked against real staff availability, and every seat against what’s already reserved, so two people can never take the same time slot or the same seat.
• Your data stays yours — 100% self-hosted, no CDNs, no per-booking commission. Nothing is sent to a third party unless you opt in to reCAPTCHA spam protection yourself.
• Set up in minutes — a guided setup wizard asks what you take bookings for, then walks you through your services, staff and hours, or your venue and first event.
• Two ways to book, one plugin — timed appointments with a staff member, and seat reservations for dated events, on the same site and the same form.
• Looks like your brand — a live design customizer for the booking form’s colours, fonts, shapes, buttons and wording, with a preview that updates as you type.

Who is Schedopia for?

Appointment-based businesses

• Salons and barbershops — haircuts, colour, nails and grooming, each with its own duration and price, booked with the stylist the customer wants.
• Spas, massage and beauty studios — treatments with prep and clean-up time built in, so back-to-back bookings never overlap.
• Clinics, dentists and therapists — consultations and follow-ups against each practitioner’s own hours and days off, with a minimum notice so nobody books ten minutes before opening.
• Tutors, coaches and consultants — one-to-one sessions with each tutor’s own hours, and add-ons for longer or extended lessons.
• Repair, home and automotive services — service calls and workshop slots with a capacity per slot, so a garage with two bays can take two cars at once.
• Photographers and studios — sittings and studio hire, with buffers for setup and turnaround.

Events with seats

• Yoga, fitness and dance classes — dated sessions where each mat or spot is a seat on the map.
• Cookery, craft and art workshops — small-group classes with a fixed number of places, with the tutor seeing exactly who is coming.
• Talks, seminars and community meetings — halls with rows and aisles, and tiered seating for members and guests.
• Theatres, concerts and shows — real seat maps with VIP, standard and balcony tiers at different prices, and an event that can open more than one hall.

If your business takes bookings for a time, a place, or a seat, Schedopia handles it.

The booking form

A clean, mobile-first form for both flows: pick a service, staff member and time, or pick an event and choose seats on the map. Customers see only the times that are genuinely free, choose the staff member they want, and confirm in a few taps. Add it to any page with the [schedopia_booking] shortcode, or [schedopia_booking mode="event"] to place the seat flow on its own.

Live design customizer

Make the form look like part of your site rather than a plugin. From Design in the dashboard you can:

• set the form’s colours, fonts, corner radius and button style globally, from a curated set of typefaces and shapes;
• rewrite every label the customer sees — step titles, button text, field hints — so the wording matches your business;
• watch it all in a live preview that updates as you type, before anything is published.

Appointment and event flows each keep their own wording, so a clinic and a workshop can share one site without sharing a vocabulary.

Services, staff and availability

• Service catalogue — organise services into categories, each with its own price and duration.
• Service add-ons — offer extras alongside a service. Each add-on carries its own price and duration, so choosing one extends the appointment’s total and the time blocked on the calendar.
• Staff and hours — set each team member’s weekly working hours and days off. A member with no schedule of their own follows the business hours; any member can override them.
• Buffers, capacity, slot interval and minimum notice — set them once for the whole business, and override them per service where a treatment needs more prep time or a class takes more people. Slot interval controls how finely times are offered, so a 60-minute service can start at 9:00, 9:15 or 9:30.
• Real dated appointments — every booking carries its own date, time and timezone, protected by a transactional guard that makes a double-booking impossible.

Events, venues and seat maps

• Venues and halls — build your venue once, with as many halls as it has.
• Visual seat planner — lay out rows, aisles and seat numbering the way the room actually looks, and customers pick from the same map.
• Seat tiers — VIP, Standard, Balcony or whatever you call them, each with its own colour and price. Any individual seat can override its tier’s price.
• Dated events — create a session, open one hall or several, add a cover photo, and customers browse upcoming events with live seat availability. A seat can never be reserved twice for the same event.

Notifications and customer self-service

• Automated emails — booking confirmations, cancellations, new-booking alerts for your team, and reminders before the appointment.
• Require approval, or don’t — confirm bookings automatically, or hold each one as a request until you approve it.
• Self-service cancellation — customers cancel from a secure link in their email, with no account needed. You decide whether it’s allowed and how close to the start time it stays open.
• Add to calendar — customers save an appointment to Google, Outlook or Apple Calendar straight from their confirmation email.

Your dashboard

• One place for everything — a fast admin with a dashboard, a filterable bookings list, a team calendar, the service catalogue, scheduling, customers, staff, payments and an activity log.
• Customer records — every customer with their full booking history.
• Calendar feed — subscribe Google Calendar, Outlook or Apple Calendar to a read-only feed of your bookings, so your team sees them wherever they already look.
• CSV export — download your bookings as a spreadsheet. The export follows whatever filters the list is showing, and covers the whole filtered set.
• Manual and offline payments — record cash, bank transfer and mark-as-paid payments against a booking.
• Spam protection — a built-in honeypot and timing check on the public form, with optional reCAPTCHA v3 if you want more.

Works with your page builder

The [schedopia_booking] shortcode works everywhere, including the Gutenberg shortcode block and the Elementor Shortcode widget. No page-builder-specific setup, no separate widgets to learn.

External Services

Schedopia loads nothing from third-party services by default. One optional feature connects to an external service when you explicitly enable it:

Google reCAPTCHA v3 (optional spam protection for the public booking form). Only when you enable reCAPTCHA in Settings → Booking rules and provide your own site and secret keys, the booking form loads Google’s reCAPTCHA script, and each form submission sends the reCAPTCHA response token and the visitor’s IP address to Google’s siteverify endpoint to obtain a spam score. No booking or customer data is sent. This service is provided by Google: terms of service, privacy policy. If you never enable the feature, no request to Google is ever made. The built-in honeypot and timing checks work without any external service.