Robse Booking

Robse Booking takes one-to-one appointments for salons, bodywork and relaxation studios, consultation offices, private lessons and similar small businesses. It is built for businesses in Japan: times are in Japan Standard Time, the form asks for the phonetic reading of the customer’s name, and phone numbers are checked as Japanese numbers. The interface is written in English and is translated into Japanese through translate.wordpress.org.

It works with any theme. Changing the theme does not affect bookings.

How a customer books

1. Choose a service menu item.
2. Choose a staff member, or “no preference”.
3. Choose a date and time from the available slots.
4. Enter contact details and verify the email address with a 6-digit code.
5. Confirm. The customer receives a confirmation email with a personal link to change or cancel the booking until a deadline you set.

What it does

• No double bookings. Every booking reserves the staff member and one shared slot (a chair, room or treatment table) in 5-minute units, protected by a database unique key and a row lock. Twenty simultaneous requests for the last slot result in exactly one booking.
• One calendar for every channel. Phone and walk-in bookings are added from the admin screen with the same availability check as online bookings.
• Business hours and closures. Weekly hours for the business and for each staff member, temporary closures, changed hours, booking deadline, how many days ahead, and the change/cancellation deadline. Changes that conflict with upcoming bookings are not saved; the conflicting bookings are listed instead.
• Notifications. Confirmation, change, cancellation and reminder emails to customers, and notifications to the business (without the customer’s name). Failed emails are retried and can be resent; a failed email never cancels a booking.
• Customer records. Bookings are grouped into customer records automatically, with visit counts, next booking, a front desk note and merging of duplicates.
• Business type defaults. General, bodywork and relaxation, hair and beauty salon, consultation and professional services, and private lessons. These set labels (for example “Stylist” instead of “Staff”) and add sample menu items as drafts. Nothing you have entered is overwritten.
• Design settings. Three presets (Simple, Soft, Calm), six colors, typeface and text size, button style and corners, card corners, shadow, padding and border, and maximum width, with a live preview before saving. Colors that would be hard to read are darkened automatically. Styles apply only inside the plugin’s own output and do not change your theme’s headings, buttons or forms.
• Roles. Booking manager (bookings and settings) and booking receptionist (bookings and customer records only).
• Privacy. Personal data is anonymized after the retention period you set, and the plugin supports the WordPress personal data exporter and eraser. The booking change page is sent with no-store, noindex and no-referrer headers.

Shortcodes and blocks

• [robse_booking] – online booking
• [robse_booking_manage] – check, change or cancel a booking (opened from the email link)
• [robse_booking_policy] – privacy policy and booking terms, built from your settings
• [robse_booking_menus], [robse_booking_staff], [robse_booking_hours], [robse_booking_access], [robse_booking_contact]

Each one is also available as a block.

Not included

Group or class bookings with capacity, multi-day stays, online payment, calendar sync, LINE notifications, choosing a specific room or facility, and multiple locations.

Requirements

MySQL or MariaDB with InnoDB. Bookings cannot be started on SQLite, because double-booking prevention depends on transactions and row locks.

WordPress’s built-in scheduler only runs when the site is visited. For reminders to be sent on time, set up a server cron job that calls wp-cron.php every minute.