These days you just expect to be able to book things on your phone or computer. Restaurants, hotels, plane flights, you name it. But there was one industry that up until recently had not joined the rest of the world in the 21^St Century.

Beauty is big business in Australia, the beauty service industry alone is worth over $5 billion dollars a year. So it is no big surprise that there are tech entrepreneurs looking into the space to see if there are problems that need solving.

And there are. Despite the huge advances made in cloud technology in recent years, salons still tend to be independent operators relying on a paper appointment book and the phone to receive appointments. There are huge disadvantages to this for the salons themselves as such static business practices remove the opportunity to dynamically respond to current situations.

An example of this is the ability to see how much downtime the salon has in a day/week and attempt to fill that time up with special offers to existing customers. Downtime is lost time, and those lost profits can have serious ramifications for small businesses. Decrease down time and your business immediately becomes more robust.

Across the world, solutions are appearing which hope to bring these independent operators into the 21^St Century, to the benefit of all. In Australia, Bookwell is expanding their operations daily and their network of venues has become quite substantial.

In the UK Treatwell (formerly known as Wahanda) is the big fish in the pond with thousands of salons to select from on their platform.

It is no wonder these platforms are proving popular with formerly tech phobic salon owners, as the partnerships truly do represent a win-win situation for all involved. Business owners get reliable access to new clients and more convenient time management, customers get the convenience of online booking, and the platforms themselves increase in success as the venues do.