One Booking Flow Was Never Enough
Long before Resbit existed, back when I was just a customer with no way to do anything about it, I believed that no single booking flow should have to fit every kind of booking. It's something that bothered me for years before I ever had the means to fix it.
One mold, every booking type
Every booking software you can name (Mindbody, FareHarbor, Peek Pro, Mangomint) builds the same thing under the hood anyway. One linear process. Select service, select time and date, add details, and confirm. Then they take that single mold and stretch it over every kind of booking a business might offer.
Take overnight booking on some of these platforms. If you've ever tried to book a multi-night campsite, you know the moment I mean. You want three nights, so you go looking for where to enter "3." Except the box in front of you is labeled "1," and the box labeled "3" is somewhere else entirely — maybe it's asking how many sites you want, not how many nights. Get it backwards and you've just booked three separate sites for one night each, instead of one site for three nights.
Is it technically possible for you to do what you want? Sure. Is it intuitive? Not even close. And that gap between "technically flexible" and "actually makes sense to you" is the whole story here. The flow wasn't built around how you think through an overnight stay. It was built around fitting an overnight stay into a form that was designed for something else.
Different bookings, different mental paths
So here's the question I'd been sitting with for a while: why does every booking flow have to be the same shape, when the things people are booking clearly aren't? Booking a tour is a different mental process than booking a massage. Booking a multi-night stay is nothing like booking a 30-minute class. Why are we mapping all of that onto one rigid template and calling it flexible?
Why can't we just build multiple booking flows?
When we finally sat down to build Resbit, that long-standing frustration is exactly what we built toward. I asked my cofounder that same question I'd been asking myself for years: why can't we just build multiple booking flows? Not one flow with more settings bolted on. Actual different flows, shaped around how you think through each specific type of booking.
And the honest answer was: nothing was stopping us. We just hadn't built it yet.
It's more work upfront, I'll admit that. It means a business owner setting up Resbit has to actually sit down and think like their customer for every service they offer. What's the mental path someone takes when they're booking a tour versus a class versus a stay? That takes a bit more creativity than filling out one generic form. But that friction happens once, during setup. The alternative is friction every single time a customer tries to book.
So far, the feedback from people actually using it has been the kind that makes the extra setup work feel worth it.
It was never a technical limitation
I do have a guess why this hasn't been standard for years, and it's not a flattering one: it's just easier to build one flow and call it good enough. Easier to ship the generic version than to sit down, service by service, and actually think like the customer booking each one. That's not a technical limitation. It's a shortcut. And it felt worth pushing against.
See the difference for yourself
If your customers book more than one kind of experience — tours, classes, overnight stays, hourly services — ask whether your booking flow was built for how they think, or stretched over a template designed for something else.
Request a demo to walk through Resbit's booking flows with your services in mind, or sign up and start configuring them yourself.
Questions? Reach me at kalem@resbit.io.