Every empty chair costs you money. Vollstart Appointment Desk turns no-shows and empty slots into booked revenue for hair salons, dental and medical practices, consulting firms, and repair shops. Customers book in 30 seconds. Walk-ins pull a queue number at the door. Native WooCommerce checkout for paid appointments — no third-party connector, no per-extension upsell.
https://youtu.be/qBe6n6e66BQ
Video
No double bookings. Slot holds reserve the time slot while the customer fills out the form. Other booking plugins let two customers book the same slot simultaneously — Appointment Desk prevents this.
No per-extension upsells. One plugin, one price. No surprise add-on costs for basic features like email notifications or calendar views.
GDPR-friendly by design. All customer data stays in your WordPress database. No external tracking, no third-party data sharing. Your data, your server.
Perfect for
- Hair salons & barbershops — online booking + walk-in queue for busy days
- Medical & dental practices — patient scheduling with check-in kiosk
- Consulting firms — client appointment booking with calendar sync
- Government offices & citizen services — queue numbers + TV display for waiting rooms
- Fitness studios & yoga — class booking with capacity management
- Repair shops & workshops — appointment slots with custom fields
- Coworking spaces — room and desk booking
- Any service business that handles both scheduled and walk-in customers
Free Features
- 1 calendar, 1 service, 1 team with 1 staff member — up to 100 customers and 50 appointments per month
- Mobile-friendly online booking form (Shortcode + dedicated booking page)
- Multi-column booking layout — services, calendar, and form side by side
- Inline month calendar in multi-column view
- Live price display in booking form (updates on service/extras selection)
- Email confirmations for new, cancelled, rescheduled, and declined bookings
- ICS calendar file attached to confirmation emails
- Day and week view in admin
- 2 custom fields per booking
- Auto-confirm or manual approval workflow
- Double Opt-In — email confirmation before booking is active
- Customer self-service: cancellation and reschedule via email links
- Slot holds — prevents double bookings while customer fills out the form
- Walk-in queue system: queue numbers, kiosk page, live TV display
- QR code check-in and check-out
- Customer CRM with full appointment history
- Appointment change history — audit log of status changes, reschedules, and file uploads/deletes
- GDPR customer management — export data as JSON, import from CSV/JSON, delete all data with double confirmation
- Rating system — customers rate their experience after the visit
- Blocked times for breaks, holidays, and closures
- Reception cockpit — live front desk overview, no WordPress login needed
Pro Features
Everything in Free, plus:
- Unlimited calendars, services, and staff members
- Unlimited custom fields
- Team management — assign staff to calendars and services
- Service Extras — optional add-ons per service with price and duration
- Special Days — override business hours for specific dates
- Buffer times for preparation and cleanup between appointments
- Min. advance time / Max. booking window per calendar
- File Upload in booking form — customers attach files with secure storage
- Double Opt-In per-calendar override (global/enabled/disabled)
- WooCommerce integration for paid appointments
- ICS feed — subscribe with Google Calendar, Outlook, or Apple Calendar
- Unlimited cockpit auth tokens for staff access
- Custom email attachments per email type
- Queue themes: Light, Dark, and custom CSS upload
- Staff service desk page for multi-desk setups
- Remove branding
Business Features
Everything in Pro, plus:
- Customer Self-Service Page — customers view, cancel, and manage their appointment via a secure token link
- Per-calendar override for self-service permissions (cancel, file edit)
- Custom HTML email templates — full control over email content
- Rating email — automatic feedback request after appointments
- Google Calendar Sync — two-way sync (push bookings, read busy times to prevent double bookings), OAuth2 flow, per-calendar assignment
- Customer File Management — files attached directly to customer records (allergies, medical records, contracts). Persists across all appointments.
Why Appointment Desk?
Most booking plugins only handle online appointments. But real businesses also have walk-in customers, a reception desk, and a waiting room. Appointment Desk handles all of it:
- Book — Customers self-book online. Slot holds prevent double bookings.
- Queue — Walk-ins pull a number. TV display shows who is next.
- Done — Staff manage everything from one cockpit. No spreadsheets, no chaos.
Built by the team behind Event Tickets with Ticket Scanner.
Languages
Vollstart Appointment Desk is translated into 20 languages:
- English (default), German (DE/AT/CH), French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese (PT/BR), Hungarian, Polish, Czech, Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Greek, Romanian, Bulgarian, Chinese (Simplified), Japanese
All translations are included in the plugin. Community contributions welcome via the WordPress.org translation platform.
Links
Third-Party Libraries
This plugin includes the following third-party libraries:
- FullCalendar v6.1.15 — fullcalendar.io — MIT License — Source
- DataTables v2.3.7 — datatables.net — MIT License — Source
- html5-qrcode v2.3.8 — QR code scanning — MIT License — Source
- chillerlan/php-qrcode v4.4.2 — QR code generation — MIT License — Source
All libraries are included locally within the plugin. No external CDN calls are made.
External Services
This plugin does not connect to any third-party or external services. All data is stored locally in your WordPress database. No customer data leaves your server.
The optional Pro add-on plugin (sold separately at vollstart.com) connects to vollstart.com for license validation and update checks. The free plugin hosted on WordPress.org does not make any external connections.
The Business tier of the Pro add-on offers optional Google Calendar Sync. When enabled by the site administrator, appointment data (customer name, email, service, date/time, location) is sent to the Google Calendar API (https://developers.google.com/calendar) to create, update, and delete calendar events. Busy times are read from Google Calendar to prevent double bookings. This requires the administrator to create OAuth 2.0 credentials in the Google Cloud Console and authorize the connection. Google’s privacy policy: https://policies.google.com/privacy.
