No-show rate is the share of booked appointments where the client does not attend and does not cancel in time.
No-shows cost twice: the empty slot, and the slot someone else could have taken. For a service business they are usually the largest recoverable loss, and they are highly responsive to three simple changes.
Reminders reduce them the most — one 24 hours ahead and one an hour ahead. A deposit or full prepayment reduces them further, by converting a free option into a decision. Making cancellation easy reduces them too, counter-intuitively: people who cannot find the cancel link simply do not turn up, and the slot is lost rather than released.
Track the rate by source. Bookings from a warm email list behave very differently from bookings from cold social traffic.
In practice
Free intro calls commonly no-show at several times the rate of the same call with a small refundable deposit.
Common mistake
Treating no-shows as unavoidable. Reminders and a deposit fix most of them, and both take an afternoon to set up.
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