Take a booking over the API

Released 20 August 2026

Reading your free times was half the job. The API can now book one — so an assistant, a CRM or a site of your own can finish the booking instead of sending someone back to your booking page.

What's new

• Book one of the times you were offered — pick a free time, send who it's for, and it's in the diary. The person, the place and the service can each be named in words or by id, and you can leave the person or the place out entirely to let whoever is free take it.
• It's an ordinary booking — the customer gets the same confirmation and calendar invite, the same reminders. Your calendar is updated. It appears in their chat thread, and they become a contact if they weren't one already.
• You can see it wasn't a person — a booking made this way is marked as coming from the API, so a booking that surprises you is never a mystery.
• Your clock, not ours — send a time with no time zone on it and it means your diary's local time. It's the kind of thing that would otherwise go wrong quietly.
• Requests stay requests — if a service is one you approve before confirming, a booking made this way comes back marked as waiting for you, not as confirmed. Worth checking before you tell the customer anything.
• Safe to retry — send a reference of your own with the booking, and if the connection drops and you try again, you get the original booking back rather than a second one in the diary.
• Don't email them twice — if your assistant has already told the customer their time is booked, you can ask us not to send the confirmation email. Reminders and the calendar entry are unaffected.
• "That time just went" is normal — two people can pick the same minute. If someone gets there first you're told plainly, and you can offer another time.

Tick Take bookings on an API key or client under Developers to switch it on. It's deliberately separate from reading free times: something that only draws a calendar shouldn't be able to commit you to being somewhere.