How to fill a last minute cancellation

Before anything else, decide the earliest notice you would accept. If somebody needs thirty minutes to get to you, a slot starting in twenty is not fillable and chasing it costs you the twenty minutes as well.

Pick a number and hold to it. For most practices it is somewhere between one and two hours. Having it written down turns a scramble into a decision you already made.

Fastest to slowest, and the order matters because the first that works ends it:

1. Somebody already booked, who wanted earlier. The highest hit rate by a distance. They are already coming, they have already paid or will, and moving them forward costs them nothing. Keep track of who asked for something sooner when they booked.
2. Whoever asked and could not get in. The people who wanted a session and found nothing free. This is the group most practices never write down, and it is the group most likely to say yes.
3. A standing client who buys sessions in blocks. Low friction, no new client paperwork.
4. Anybody, publicly. A post to your list or to social. Lowest hit rate at short notice, and the one everybody reaches for first because it is the one that feels like doing something.

A short message with one decision in it beats a friendly one with three. The things that have to be in it are the time, the date, how long it is good for, and one way to say yes.

• Put the time in their timezone, not yours, if you ever work across one.
• Give a deadline. “Let me know” gets answered tomorrow, which is too late.
• Make yes one tap. A reply, a button, a link that books. Not “go to my booking page and find it”, because by the time they have, somebody else has it.
• Say what happens if they are too late, so a no is not a disappointment.

The instinct is to tell everybody at once, on the grounds that it maximises the chance somebody takes it. It does, and it also does this:

• Most of the people you told could never make that time, so you have trained them to ignore you.
• Whoever refreshes fastest wins, which is rarely whoever has waited longest.
• Two people reply yes, and you have to tell one of them no.
• If the slot is also live on your public booking page, a stranger can take it mid conversation.

Telling a few people at a time, with a deadline, fills roughly as many slots and costs you none of that. The only thing you lose is the feeling of having done something immediately.

Short notice cancellations are a pricing problem as much as a scheduling one. A cancellation policy with a window and a fee, stated when somebody books rather than when they cancel, moves most of them earlier, and an earlier cancellation is one you can actually fill.

A waitlist and a policy are not alternatives. The policy reduces how many land inside your window, and the waitlist handles the ones that still do.

The honest test is how often it happens and what a session is worth. One cancellation a month at $80 is not worth automating. Two a week at $120 is about $1,000 a month of slots, and the reason they go unfilled is almost never that nobody wanted them. It is that the cancellation arrived while you were working and the forty minutes passed.

That is the specific thing worth handing to software: acting on a cancellation at the moment it happens, while you are in a session.

What Slotghost does: When a cancellation comes in, Slotghost checks the time is still free with Calendly, then offers it to the people whose stated days and times fit, a few at a time with a deadline, in the order they joined. One press books them into your Calendly. You find out it happened afterwards.