Appointment booking system ≠ capacity management
What is an appointment booking system?
Appointment booking systems are designed to make it possible to reserve time slots in a structured way.
They show available slots, manage registrations, and help avoid conflicts.
As long as there is available capacity, these systems work particularly well.
They make calendars transparent, reduce administration, and provide a clear framework for registration.
What assumption are these systems built on?
The operation of appointment booking systems relies on a fundamental, mostly unspoken assumption:
– there is available space
– the goal is for someone to book it
In this situation, the question is simple:
who registers, when, and for which time slot.
As long as this assumption holds true, there is no particular tension in the system.
What happens when this assumption is no longer true?
The break appears when an event becomes fully booked.
When there are more applicants than available places.
At that point, the time slot is no longer the issue.
There is nothing left to book.
The system, however, is still built on the same logic:
booking.
While the real situation has already changed completely.
What does capacity mean in this case?
At this point, we are no longer talking about a time-slot problem, but about capacity.
Capacity is not a date or an hour.
Capacity is a series of decisions:
– who gets in if a spot becomes available
– which order is considered fair
– how ad hoc solutions can be avoided
Capacity management is not about booking, but about what happens after the booking.
Does this make appointment booking systems bad?
No.
An appointment booking system is not faulty, not outdated, and not a “bad system.”
It simply was not designed for this situation.
It solves a different problem:
the distribution of available capacity.
When the question becomes what to do with overbooking, we move to a different level of thinking.
How can you tell that this is no longer a time-slot problem?
Usually not from a single sign, but from recurring patterns:
– manual emails after the event is full
– “a spot has opened up” mass emails
– a waitlist that no one dares to touch
– after-the-fact explanations of why a particular person was admitted
These are not technical errors.
They are signs that the situation has outgrown the original model.
When the question becomes personal
If these situations sound familiar, you are probably not looking for yet another appointment booking system.
You are looking for an answer to how order can be maintained
when there is no more space.
👉 [Who it’s for: When your event is full – and that’s when the problems begin]
From another perspective, the waitlist question also leads here:
not as a list, but as a decision-making system.