Booking Experience
The booking page is what your customers see when they click your portal link to place an order. It walks them through five steps — from entering a property address to confirming the booking.
Everything on this page reflects your Branding, Products, and Availability settings, so there's nothing to build from scratch. Set up your services and availability once, and the booking page takes care of the rest.
The booking page is fully responsive and works great on mobile — your customers can book on the go.
Step 1 — Property Address
Your customer enters the property address and interior area (size).
Property address — They start typing and pick from Google's autocomplete suggestions. The street, city, state, postal code, and country fill in automatically.
Address Line 2 (optional) — For unit or suite numbers.
Interior area — The property size in square feet or square meters, depending on your settings.
What happens behind the scenes
Service area check — Fotello uses the property coordinates to confirm it falls within your Service Area. If it's outside your coverage, your customer sees a message letting them know.
Pricing lookup — The property size is used in the next step to calculate area-based pricing for your services and packages.
To configure your service areas, see Service Area.
Step 2 — Products & Services
Your customer picks what they'd like to book. This step shows your packages, individual services, and add-ons — with pricing that adjusts automatically based on the property size.
Packages appear as cards. Each card shows the included services and total price. Clicking a package opens a detail sheet with a full breakdown.
Individual services appear as a selectable list. When a service has multiple variants (e.g., different area ranges), the right one is selected automatically based on the property size.
Add-ons appear after the main selection. These are extras your customer can tack on — things like drone footage, twilight photos, or rush delivery. A running total updates at the bottom as they make selections.
Add-ons are a great way to increase order value without any extra effort. Customers see them at just the right moment — while they're already committing to a booking.
To set up what appears here, see Services, Packages, and Add-ons.
Step 3 — Scheduling
Your customer picks a date and time for the shoot. Fotello only shows slots where you (or your team) are actually available, so there's no risk of double-booking.
Calendar view — Available dates are highlighted. Your customer taps a date to see time slots.
Time slots — Each slot represents an opening based on your availability and the total duration of the selected services.
Notes (optional) — A text field for special instructions, gate codes, or anything you should know before the shoot.
What happens behind the scenes
Fotello builds the available slots using your settings:
Availability windows — Your business hours and days off
Buffer time — Padding between appointments (e.g., 30 minutes for travel)
Minimum notice — How far in advance customers must book (e.g., 4 hours)
Slot duration — Based on the total service time for the selected items
Look-ahead days — How many days into the future the calendar shows (e.g., 30 days)
Existing bookings — Slots that overlap with accepted orders are hidden
Google Calendar — If connected, events from your Google Calendar also block out time
If you have a team, Fotello checks each member's availability and service area coverage to determine which slots to show.
To configure your availability and scheduling rules, see Availability Set Up, Scheduling Settings, and Calendar Integration.
Step 4 — Contact & Account
Your customer identifies themselves before confirming. Depending on your settings, they can sign in, create an account, or continue as a guest.
Returning customers enter their email and password to sign in. Their contact details are pre-filled from their profile.
New customers are prompted to create an account with a password. Once signed up, they can access the Customer Dashboard to track orders going forward.
Guest booking — If you've enabled guest bookings, a third option appears. Guests complete the booking with just an email, company name (optional), and phone number (optional). No password needed. They're still added to your customer list, and can create a full account later.
Guest bookings reduce friction for first-time customers who just want to book quickly. They can always create an account afterwards.
To enable or disable guest bookings, see Order Settings.
Step 5 — Review & Confirm
Your customer reviews the full booking before submitting:
Property address and area
Selected services and add-ons with line-item pricing
Appointment date and time
Total amount
Payment is not collected during booking. Your customer pays later when you deliver the final assets. Learn more: Payments
After they submit
Once your customer clicks Confirm Booking:
You get notified — The order appears in your Orders Dashboard with all the details.
They get a confirmation email — Sent from your domain (if connected) or from Fotello, with a summary of what they booked.
What happens next depends on your Order Settings:
Auto-accept on — The order is accepted automatically, a listing is created, and a team member is assigned.
Auto-accept off — The order stays Pending until you review and accept it.
Signed-in customers are redirected to the Customer Dashboard. Guests see a success screen with an option to create an account for future bookings.
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