What a booking integration actually involves

"Can people book on the website?" is the request we hear most, and it hides more variation than any other feature. A booking integration can be an afternoon or a fortnight, and the difference is not the website. It is the system behind the diary. Here are your options.

Shape one: the embedded widget

Every serious booking platform (TeamUp, Cliniko, Jane App, Glofox, Momence) offers an embeddable widget. A small piece of code goes on your page, their calendar appears, bookings land in their system. It takes an afternoon, it works, and it is the right answer for most clinics and studios.

The trade-offs are cosmetic and structural. Cosmetically, the widget looks like their software wearing your colours: close, but never quite native. Structurally, the booking technically happens on their website, which matters if you want to track every step or restyle it completely. For nine out of ten businesses, neither trade-off justifies more.

Typical cost as a fixed add-on: £250–£400, including matching the surrounding page, mapping services correctly and testing the whole journey on a phone.

Shape two: the styled embed

Some platforms let you go further: your fonts, colours and button styles on every booking screen, with their own branding stripped back. The result passes for native at a glance.

This is the sweet spot for businesses where the booking is the product: gyms whose timetable is the most-visited page they own, clinics whose new-patient exam funds everything else. The extra spend buys the moment where a hesitant visitor stops noticing the machinery.

Typical cost: £400–£700, mostly in the detail: error messages, loading states and how it behaves on a phone.

Shape three: the API build

Where the booking platform lets other software connect to it (for availability, services and new bookings), your website can show its own booking screens while the platform's diary does the work underneath. The timetable is your design. The slot picker is your design. The confirmation page, the reminders, the upsell: yours.

This is the right call when the standard journey is wrong for the business: practitioner-level booking where patients must choose the vestibular physio, class capacity shown live to create honest urgency, multi-step corporate bookings that no widget anticipates.

Typical cost: £800–£1,500, and a week of the timeline, because availability is where software goes to lie. Timezones, buffer times, recurring slots, cancellation windows, all of it must be tested against the real diary, not a test copy.

Shape four: no platform at all

Sometimes the right answer is that you do not have a booking system, and the website should not pretend otherwise. A structured request form (service, preferred times, contact details) with a fast human confirmation converts nearly as well as live booking for lower-volume businesses, and it costs nothing per month. Plenty of trades run their entire diary this way.

The rule we apply: if you take more than ten bookings a week, pay for a platform and integrate it properly. Below that, a good form beats a bad subscription.

What to ask before spending anything

1. Does my current system have an embed or an API, and what does it cost per month?
2. Do my customers book specific people, or just services?
3. What happens to no-shows and cancellations, and whose rules?

Answer those three and the right shape is usually obvious. The prices above are what each option costs with us. See website development for gyms or website development for physiotherapists for how it works in each industry, or try a working slot picker in the clinic demo.