BookaSalon – Online Booking for Hair Salons, Barbers & Beauty Studios

Try it before you install: a live demo salon runs at https://demo.bookasalon.dk — real plugin, real calendar, nothing is saved and no emails are sent. BookaSalon is a WordPress booking plugin built specifically for hairdressers, barbers, beauty salons and similar appointment-based businesses — not a general-purpose scheduler with a salon skin on top. Everything is free. Not "free to start" Every feature below works the moment you activate the plugin. There is no locked feature, no nag notice, no "upgrade" link, and no licence key field anywhere in the admin. There is no paid tier, and there is no licensing code in the plugin at all. Nothing leaves your server BookaSalon makes no outbound requests of its own. Ten typefaces ship inside the plugin and are served from your own domain: no font CDN, no third-party analytics, no update check, no phoning home. The statistics you see in the admin are counted and stored in your own database, never sent anywhere. Your visitors' IP addresses are not handed to anyone just for opening your booking page — which matters if you are the data controller under GDPR. Two features can reach outside, and only if you switch them on yourself: Gmail sending, and the "add to calendar" links your customer clicks in their own browser. Both are documented under "External services" below. You can see whether your emails actually arrived Every automatic email is written to a delivery log with its result and, when something fails, the reason why. "Did the customer get the confirmation?" is the question a salon gets asked most, and you can answer it without guessing. The log keeps the last 90 days — it is a troubleshooting tool, not an archive. Key features

• Per-staff calendar booking — customers pick a service, a preferred staff member (or "no preference"), and see only real, live availability.
• Multi-service bookings — customers can select more than one service per visit (e.g. haircut + beard trim); durations and prices combine automatically.
• Full admin control — services (name, price, duration, image), staff (photo, bio, working hours, time off), multiple locations, bookings list with status tracking.
• Individual time and price per staff member — an experienced stylist works faster than an apprentice, so duration and price can be overridden per staff member. The calendar books exactly that much time, and the customer sees exactly that price.
• Time-limited offers/discounts — percentage, fixed amount, or a fixed sale price, restricted to a date range and optionally specific weekdays/hours, handy for filling quiet periods.
• Automatic emails — confirmation, reminder, and an optional follow-up/review email, each with "add to calendar" links (Google Calendar, Outlook, .ics).
• Self-service cancellation & rescheduling — customers can cancel or move their own appointment via a secure link in their email, no phone call needed.
• Branding — accent color, font, and logo upload, so the widget matches your site.
• Two shortcodes — [bookasalon] for the full widget, [bookasalon_button] for a customizable button that opens the widget in a modal.
• A dedicated booking page — a clean, fixed URL (e.g. /bookasalon/) ideal for pasting into your Google Business Profile booking link.
• Statistics & revenue overview — clicks per booking button, completed bookings, estimated conversion rate, and a revenue dashboard with year-over-year comparisons and service trends.
• Custom SMTP support — connect Gmail/Google Workspace, SendGrid, Mailgun and others for reliable email delivery.
• CSV import — bring services, staff and bookings over from other booking plugins.
• CSV export — export bookings and payments.
• Multi-language — Danish and English built in, independently configurable for admin and the customer-facing widget.

1.5.4

• New: the bookings detail panel now shows when the booking was placed, not just when the appointment is. A no-show booked three weeks ago is a different conversation from one booked twenty minutes before.
• Fixed: the Customers and Revenue pages still showed a 24-hour clock and a fixed date order, ignoring your WordPress setting. They now match the rest of the admin.
• Fixed: clicking a booking in the admin Calendar never opened its detail panel. Booking IDs arrive as text while the click sends a number, so the lookup silently failed and nothing happened -- no error, no panel. This affected every version so far.
• Fixed: the payment amount in the booking details, and the discount labels on the Offers page, printed the currency symbol after the number with a hardcoded space. A salon using £ saw "18.00 £" instead of "£18.00". They now use the same formatter as the rest of the plugin.
• Fixed: closed days, offer periods and customer dates were printed as 05.09.2026 with a fixed Danish day-month order. An English-language salon reads that as 9 May. Dates now follow your WordPress language, and the three duplicate copies of that code are now one.
• The salon logo in the booking widget is 25% larger.

1.5.3

• Fixed: customers who chose "no preference" instead of a specific staff member could not book at all. The final step failed with "Invalid parameters" and the booking form reset. Anyone with two or more staff was affected.
• The price shown before booking and the price actually charged are now decided by the same code, so a "no preference" booking is priced for the staff member who genuinely takes the appointment.
• A customer can no longer be booked at a price she was not shown. If the price changes while she fills in the form -- because the staff member gets taken, or a time-limited offer expires -- the booking is refused, the new price is shown, and she decides whether to accept it.

1.5.2

• Fixed: times are now shown in the format you have chosen under Settings > General in WordPress. A salon set to "2:00 pm" no longer sees 14:00 in the booking widget, the calendar, the bookings list or the dashboard.
• Fixed: confirmation emails used a hard-coded Danish date format, so an English-language salon sent its customers "5. May 2026 kl. 2:00 pm". Date, time and the joining word now all follow your own settings.

1.5.1

• First public release.
• Booking widget with per-staff calendars, working hours, lunch breaks and closed days.
• Multiple locations, multi-service bookings and time-limited offers.
• Automatic emails: confirmation, reminder, follow-up, birthday — with a delivery log.
• Self-service cancellation and rescheduling via signed links in the email.
• Statistics, revenue overview, CSV import/export.
• Danish and English, custom SMTP, branding (colour, font, logo).
• Font options: match your website's own font, use the system font, or pick one of ten bundled typefaces. All font files are served from the plugin folder — no requests to Google or any other third party, so no visitor data leaves the salon's server. Bundled fonts are SIL Open Font License.
• Optional "delete all data on uninstall" setting for GDPR requests.