← No-show & cancellation fee calculator
Trainers, salons, tutors, and therapists search this after a week of empty chairs. A booking app will toggle a fee. A colleague will say “just book one extra.” Those are different recoveries. The fee pays you when the chair stays empty and you actually collect. Overbooking tries to fill the chair in advance and risks a double-booked hour when everyone shows.
Open the no-show calculator, keep your own price and no-show rate, and optionally type what a collided chair costs you. The table below uses the page defaults: $75 a session, 20 bookings a week, 8% no-shows (1.6 empty chairs), a 100% fee collected 70% of the time, and overflow priced as one full session.
Book only the 20 chairs and 18.4 of them sit. Service for the year is $71,760. The 83.2 no-shows, charged at $75 and collected 70% of the time, add $4,368. Net kept: $76,128.
Put 1.6 extra names on the same book — matching the no-shows you already expect. Expected arrivals rise to 19.872. Nobody overflows on the mean. Service rises to $77,500.80 and the larger book still generates $4,717.44 of fee revenue. Net kept: $82,218.24, which is $6,090.24 more than the fee alone.
Drop the fee and only overbook those 1.6 names and you keep $77,500.80. That still beats the fee-only book. It does not beat filling the chairs and collecting on the names that still miss.
| Policy | Extra / week | Overflow / week | Net kept / year | vs fee only |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Capacity only, collect fee | 0.0 | 0.00 | $76,128.00 | $0.00 |
| Overbook 50% of expected no-shows + fee | 0.8 | 0.00 | $79,173.12 | $3,045.12 |
| Overbook 100% of expected no-shows + fee | 1.6 | 0.00 | $82,218.24 | $6,090.24 |
| Overbook 150% of expected no-shows + fee | 2.4 | 0.61 | $80,520.96 | $4,392.96 |
| Overbook to match, drop the fee | 1.6 | 0.00 | $77,500.80 | $1,372.80 |
Booking 150% of expected no-shows fills every chair on the mean (20.0 served) but overflows 0.608 chairs a week. At $75 per collision that is $2,371.20 a year, and the net falls to $80,520.96 — still above the fee-only book, below matching the rate. Price overflow at $0 and the aggressive book wins, because the extra fees are then free. A medical chair or a one-person studio often prices overflow above one session; type that number.
This is a mean-value model. A week whose average fits can still collide on a high-show day. The overflow cost is how that risk is priced, not a promise that 1.6 extra names never double-book. Rates are yours. The page does not tell you to overbook, to charge, or that a fee is lawful in your location.
They recover different money. On the calculator example — a $75 session, 20 bookings a week, an 8% no-show rate, a 100% fee collected 70% of the time, and overflow priced as one session — booking only the chairs you have keeps $76,128 a year. Overbooking to match the 1.6 expected empty chairs and still collecting the fee keeps $82,218.24, which is $6,090.24 more. Dropping the fee and only overbooking keeps $77,500.80.
When extra names push expected arrivals past capacity and a collided chair is expensive. On the same example, booking 150% of expected no-shows serves every chair but overflows 0.608 chairs a week. At $75 per collision that costs $2,371.20 a year and the net falls to $80,520.96 — still above the fee-only book, below matching the rate. Price overflow at $0 and the aggressive book wins because the extra fees are free.
No. The fee compensates you for holding the slot. The service revenue only counts chairs that were actually sat. That is why a collected fee and a filled chair are not the same dollar, and why the calculator shows both lines.