What's New in LovingBooking 2.1

Release 2.1 is a wide one. Most of it came from two places: a yoga studio that needed a real timetable rather than a calendar with numbers written on it, and a long list of small things owners have asked for since the console was rebuilt. Here is the whole of it, in the order you are most likely to notice.

You can see every release as it lands on our updates page.

The Schedule view, classes and packs

The headline is for studios. Classes are now sessions with a seat count, there is a day-grouped Schedule view in the console, an attendance sheet with present and no-show on every name, class packs that bundle sessions at one price, multi-session series for a course, and a public timetable page you can embed on your own site.

It is enough on its own that we wrote it up separately: class booking, packs and schedules covers the setup end to end.

Booking questions and charge lines

The booking form stopped being fixed. You can add your own questions — short text, long text, a choice list, or a checkbox — for service bookings, class bookings, or both, and the answers land on the booking, in the customer record, in your notification email and in the CSV export.

Alongside them, charges and taxes let you put GST or a service fee on the booking page as either an added or an inclusive line, so the total the customer sees on the page is the total in their confirmation email. Neither of these turns LovingBooking into a payment processor; the money still moves between your customer and you. There is a full walkthrough in booking fields, fees and GST.

Service images

A service can now carry a photo. Upload it in the service editor and it appears on the tile in your console and on the card in your booking page, which matters most for anything a customer chooses visually — a nail set, a facial, a haircut style, a class. It is part of the booking page's appearance, so it is free on every plan.

Online or at your venue, per service

Until now, being an online business was a single switch for the whole account. It is now a property of the service: inherit the business setting, at the business, or online. The same radio exists on a class.

An online booking behaves accordingly all the way through. The location step is skipped where it makes no sense, the venue address is dropped from the confirmation and reminder emails and from the calendar event, and where the staff member has Zoom connected the booking carries a meeting link. A class marked online carries the joining link you paste in yourself — the platform does not create a meeting for a class, and the email says so rather than promising a room.

One rule to know before you configure a mixed catalogue: a customer cannot put an online service and an in-person service in the same booking. One booking happens in one place. The page asks them to book those separately, and the server enforces the same rule, so it cannot be worked around by going back a step.

A one-time meeting link

Not every call is a booking. There is now a one-time meeting option in the calendar's share menu and on the Zoom panel in Integrations: pick the host, give it a title and a length, start it now or at a time you choose, and you get a link to send. An owner can create one for any staff member with Zoom connected; a staff member can create one for themselves.

The address is a real field now

For anyone doing mobile work — a groomer, a trainer, a photographer, a cleaner — the address the booking is going to used to arrive as a line at the top of the notes. It is now a proper field on the booking. It shows as its own labelled row in the calendar popover and in the appointment drawer, in the owner email, and as a column in the reports CSV, and old bookings that carry it in the notes still display correctly.

Two places it deliberately does not go: the Google or Outlook calendar description, and the context given to Lovie, our in-app assistant. A customer's home address does not belong in a shared calendar event or in a chat prompt.

Daily repeats

Recurring bookings could repeat weekly, fortnightly or monthly. They can now repeat daily, which is what a bootcamp week, a short course of treatments, or a five-day school-holiday programme actually looks like. Series stay bounded — a daily series is capped so it cannot run away and quietly fill a year of your calendar.

Custom booking domains on Pro

If you are on Pro you can put your booking page on your own domain. You claim it in the Booking Page settings and add the DNS record at your registrar; LovingBooking then checks the record and, where the deployment is configured to do so, attaches the domain for you and moves the status to Connected without anyone having to do anything by hand. Where automatic activation is not switched on, the status reads Activation pending, the exact records stay on screen, and the domain is attached manually — the same route as before, but you can now see which state you are in instead of guessing. A misconfigured record shows as Needs attention with the reason.

Calendar settings that follow you, not your business

Off-hours, double booking, hidden weekends, the collapsed rail and panel, and which view opens by default are now stored against your login rather than the business. Change your default view to Schedule and it stays Schedule for you, without moving anyone else off the week grid.

Lovie remembers what you pointed at

Lovie, the in-app assistant, understands mentions properly now. Type an @ and pick a service, a staff member, a class, a customer or a booking, and the reference is stored with the message rather than re-guessed from the text. Lovie still only reads and navigates — it does not write to your data, cancel anything, or send anything on your behalf, and that boundary is not changing.

What has not changed

Worth restating, because a release note is exactly where people start hoping. LovingBooking still does not process booking payments, hold cards, or take a commission; a paid plan lets you show your own PayNow QR and mark bookings paid yourself. Reminders still go out by email — there is no SMS, and WhatsApp reminders are still coming rather than live. Class sessions have a waitlist with emailed four-hour offers; appointment standby lists are not automated. Calendar sync is still one-way with a free/busy read, not a two-way sync.

Where 2.1 sits on the plans:

Free covers your first 200 bookings, for up to 3 people and 1 location. Pro is US$12 a month or US$120 a year for up to 3 people, then US$12 a month or US$120 a year for each extra person, with one bill for all your businesses and free logins for anyone without a calendar. The one app-managed Pro trial is cardless and never charges automatically. Current numbers live on the pricing page.

If you have been running your studio timetable in a group chat, or typing the same two questions to every new customer, this is the release that closes both. Set up your booking page, or open the console and start with the one thing you are most tired of doing by hand.