This page used to tell you that 84% of consumers prefer to book online, that 72% abandon a business without upfront pricing, and that 65% factor sustainability into their decisions. Those figures were attributed to “research shows” and “studies indicate”, which is to say to nothing at all. We couldn’t find any of them, so they’re gone.
What turns up in published consumer research is a narrower picture, and a more usable one, because you can check it.
How clients feel about booking online
Most people like booking online. The useful part is the size of the group that doesn’t.
| Attitude to online booking | Share |
|---|---|
| Prefer it and use it whenever possible | 45% |
| Like it, but only use it sometimes | 30% |
| Comfortable with it, but prefer other methods | 20% |
| Dislike it and avoid it | 3% |
| Find it inconvenient and rarely use it | 2% |
Three quarters are positive. But a quarter sit in the bottom three rows, and for a shop with a narrow, local client base that quarter is not an abstraction: it’s the regulars who still ring you.
Going online-only is a decision with a real cost attached, and it isn’t obviously the wrong one. It just isn’t free, and the surveys that get quoted as “everyone books online now” tend to leave that part out.
Why they book online when they do
| Reason for booking online | Share |
|---|---|
| Being able to view available slots | 69% |
| The convenience of booking any time | 50% |
| A faster process | 41% |
| Easier to make changes or cancellations | 40% |
| Booking exclusive add-ons | 26% |
The top answer isn’t speed or convenience. It’s seeing what’s actually free. People want to know your Thursday evening before they commit to asking for it.
That’s an argument for a booking page that shows real availability rather than a contact form that promises a call back. The form technically accepts bookings; it withholds the thing being valued most.
What personalisation they actually ask for
“Personalisation” in software marketing usually means behavioural targeting. Asked directly, clients described something much plainer.
| Personalisation wanted | Share |
|---|---|
| Rewards and offers | 50% |
| Remembering in-salon preferences | 41% |
| Product and at-home care recommendations | 41% |
| Services recommended to them | 34% |
| Communication | 27% |
Two of the top three cost nothing but attention. Remembering that someone likes the room warm, or reacted to a product in March, is a note on a client record read before the appointment. No segmentation engine produces it, because it isn’t data you can buy.
What they value in a loyalty programme
If you’re weighing up a loyalty scheme, consumers ranked what they’d find valuable in one:
| Valued in a loyalty programme | Share |
|---|---|
| Exclusive discounts | 84% |
| Ability to earn rewards | 83% |
| Personalisation | 69% |
| Alerts and notifications | 64% |
| Exclusive events | 61% |
The two money items lead comfortably. Worth reading beside a figure from the same body of research that usually gets quoted on its own: operators are far more enthusiastic about memberships than consumers are. We covered that gap, and its numbers, in our guide to what spa industry statistics are actually published.
On AI, roughly half are open to it
We go further into what AI has and hasn’t actually reached this industry in AI and spa booking in 2026.
Asked whether they’d be comfortable booking through an AI assistant, 54% said they were open to it.
We’re quoting that one figure and no others from that chart, because the published answer labels are partly garbled and the column sums to 101%. It’s a rough signal that resistance isn’t universal rather than a measurement, and anyone quoting it to two decimal places is reading more into it than the report supports.
Where these numbers come from, and what’s wrong with them
Two sources, both worth naming and both worth qualifying.
The booking, personalisation and AI figures come from Phorest’s Consumer Insights 2025. Phorest sells salon software, so this is vendor research. Respondents qualified by having visited a hair salon in the past six months, which makes them adjacent to a spa or massage audience rather than the same as it. And the report’s own front and back matter disagree about the sample: the introduction describes 716 responses from the UK and Ireland, while the methodology page describes 2,083 responses of which 38% were American. Nothing states which basis the charts use.
The loyalty figures come from Square’s Future of Beauty 2025, also vendor research, reporting 2024 field data across the US, Canada, the UK and Australia. Square’s landing page indicates roughly 2,000 businesses and 4,000 consumers, but we couldn’t confirm the sample size from the report itself.
One more thing the same Phorest report contains, which we’re including because leaving it out would be selective: a 2022 chart sits beside the 2025 booking-sentiment one, asking a different question about preferred booking method. The two don’t form a time series, and presenting them as one would be wrong.
What isn’t published
For completeness, because the absence is the more useful finding: we went looking for consumer figures on sustainability preference, on abandonment after unclear pricing, and on the share of bookings made from a phone. Those are the three claims this page used to make. None of them has a published, dated, methodologically transparent source we could find. They may well be true. They just aren’t evidenced, and we’d rather leave a gap than fill it with a number that sounds right.
Where WellDesk fits
The finding with the clearest implication is the first one: what people want most from booking online is to see what’s free. WellDesk gives you a booking page showing your real availability, with your services, durations and prices on it, rather than a form that promises a reply.
Client records carry your own preference notes, which is the personalisation clients ranked second. There’s a discount engine when you want to run an offer deliberately.
Two honest gaps against the tables above: there’s no loyalty or rewards programme yet, which is the thing consumers ranked top of that list, and our AI features aren’t live.
The first 100 shops use WellDesk free and lock in their price for when we start charging, which is 9.99 € a month for you plus 5 € a month for each additional person taking bookings.
Create your account and set your booking page up in an afternoon.
