How to Set Up a Salon Booking Platform with Gravity Forms

1. Building Your Booking Form
   1. Add Your Service and Stylist
   2. Add Booking Fields to Your Form
   3. Set Durations for Each Service
2. Taking It Further with Your Spellbook
3. Abra-cut-abra! ✂️

If you run a salon, handling appointments online saves everyone time. Gravity Forms is a great starting point because you can collect client info, handle deposits, and send appointment reminders—all on your website.

But basic forms hit a wall when booking gets complex. That’s where GP Bookings comes in. It turns your setup into a proper booking platform. 💇🏽‍♀️

We’ll build a simple example to show you how this works:

• Assign stylists to services so clients can book with their favorite pro.
• Add buffer time between appointments for cleanup and prep.
• Set different service durations (30-minute trim, 2-hour highlights).

If you want to follow along:

1. Open your Spellbook and activate GP Bookings.
2. Grab this ready-made form (right-click and save), or create your own from scratch.

Building Your Booking Form

Let’s build a simple booking system that handles services, stylists, and smart scheduling.

Add Your Service and Stylist

In GP Bookings, Services are what get booked (haircuts), and Resources (stylists) are who does the work. Let’s set them up.

1. Navigate to GP Bookings › Services › Add New.
2. Name it “Haircut” and set Block Size to 1 hour.
3. Click the Resources tab › Add Resource › Create New Resource.
4. Create a resource type called “Stylists” and add “Zoe.”
5. Set Zoe’s Availability Windows to Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm.
6. Add Buffer Settings › 15 minutes after appointments.
7. Hit Publish.

What just happened? Zoe can now take haircut appointments Monday through Friday. When someone books her at 9am, GP Bookings blocks 9am-10am plus 15 minutes for cleanup. 

Add Booking Fields to Your Form

Now we’ll add GP Bookings fields to your form to create the interactive booking interface.

If you’re building from scratch, keep following along! If you imported the ready-made form, jump to the next section.

1. Add the Booking field (under Advanced Fields).
2. Add a Service field › Select Manual Selection › set Available Services service to Haircut.
3. Add a Resource Field › Set Service Field to Service.
4. Add a Booking Time Field (aka booking time picker).

On the frontend, clients can now pick a service (Haircut), choose their stylist (Zoe), and grab an available time slot, all in one form.

Set Durations for Each Service

Not all salon services take the same time. Haircuts might take an hour, while color treatments could run 2-4 hours.

GP Bookings handles this with flexible booking durations.

1. Create another service called “Color Treatment.”
2. Set Block Size to 30 minutes.
3. Toggle Allow flexible booking durations.
4. Set Minimum to 60 minutes, and Maximum to 240 minutes.
5. Assign Zoe to this service too.

Now when someone books a color treatment, they pick how long they need—anywhere from 1 to 4 hours in 30-minute increments.

For example, they could book 2 hours for a root touch-up or 3.5 hours for full highlights.

Taking It Further with Your Spellbook

Once you’ve got the basics down, you can stack GP Bookings with other perks in your Spellbook to further improve your salon booking experience.

Here are some sorcerous combinations:

• GP File Upload Pro lets clients drag and drop photos of their dream hairstyle to the form (learn how to get the most out of file uploads in Gravity Forms). Pair it with GP Media Library so it uploads automatically to your media library for easy access later.
• GP Populate Anything can help your booking form remember your regulars. They type in their email, and their name and phone number populate from past bookings.
• GP Advanced Phone Field validates phone numbers so your text reminders don’t disappear into the void.

Abra-cut-abra! ✂️

This same setup works for barbershops, spas, nail salons—anywhere you’re managing appointments and staff schedules. If you want to learn more, check out the GP Bookings documentation for more features we didn’t cover here.

Have another industry guide you’d like to see? Drop a comment below and we might cover it next!