Definition
Appointment
What is an appointment booking?
An appointment is a one-on-one booking against a person, room, or piece of equipment — like a salon haircut, a coaching session, or a court reservation. The customer picks any open time from the resource's weekly hours and the slot is theirs for the window.
Appointments are how service businesses turn their weekly hours into bookable, paid time. Instead of fixed sessions everyone joins together, each customer reserves their own window with the person or room that serves them — a stylist, a therapist, a coach, a tasting room, a court, a treatment bay. The window is theirs alone until the booking ends.
The defining feature is exclusivity. Booking software has to make sure the same stylist can't be booked twice in overlapping windows, and that a customer who picks 2pm with one therapist doesn't also see 2pm shown as available against another after the first books. Good software prevents this at the database level so concurrent bookings can't race.
On Zillo, the merchant creates a resource (a stylist, a room, a court), sets its weekly hours, and picks a duration and lead time. The storefront then generates open times on demand — no merchant has to type each slot — and shows them as a Calendly-style picker. The booking lands with a QR the customer brings to the appointment; the merchant scans once on arrival.
Where a ticket is for a fixed occasion everyone attends together and a class ticket is for a session with shared capacity, an appointment is one customer per timeslot. For shared seatings — restaurant tables, tasting rooms — use a reservation instead.