The chat assistant is paused. We have switched it off on every booking page while we sort out two things it was getting wrong: it looked only ten days ahead, so it told clients a treatment had no availability when your diary simply had nothing free that soon, and it could only book one appointment per conversation, so couples booking together were turned away. Your /dm link now takes clients to your normal booking page, so anywhere you have shared it still works. Everything below describes how it worked, and roughly how it would work again if it comes back, with those two problems fixed.
Some clients would rather message you than fill in a form. The chat assistant let them book by having a quick conversation, straight into your calendar like any other appointment. This is what it did and where it got to.
What it was
A Prefer to chat? Book by messaging button sat on your booking page. Tapping it opened a friendly assistant that worked through the same steps as the booking form, just conversationally: whether they'd like your clinic or a home visit, which treatment, a few available times, and their contact details. It then made the booking. That button is not there at the moment.
It only offered times you really had free
The assistant never invented availability. It read your live diary, so it only offered treatments available at the chosen location and times you genuinely had open, honouring your buffers, travel time and notice period. For a home visit it asked for the client's address, checked it was within your travel area, and quoted any travel surcharge up front. Where it fell short of the booking form was how far ahead it looked: only ten days, where the form pages forward as far as your own booking window allows. That is one of the two reasons it is paused, because a diary with nothing free for a fortnight came out as “no availability” rather than “nothing until the 3rd”.
Payment
The chat never took payment, and this still matters for any chat booking sitting in your diary. It is there unpaid rather than pre-marked as cash, so marking it complete gives you your normal payment options instead of only one.
If you've connected Stripe, that means Tap to Pay in the app (no card on file needed), and alongside it either Charge client now if that client already has a card saved with you, or a payment request you can email them if they don't. If you haven't connected Stripe, you can still email a payment request when you have a payment link saved, and otherwise the booking simply waits for you to tick Mark as paid — which is also how you record a cash payment or bank transfer at any time.
It was already off for some practices
Because the chat could not take a card, it stopped being offered on practices that need paying up front, in two steps: from 9 August where money or a deposit was due at booking and you had no cash or payment-link fallback, and from 17 August where your When to charge asked for payment at the moment of booking, with no way around it. Before those dates it was offered, and on a couple of practices it took bookings without the deposit that was due, which is what the 9 August fix was for. If that was you, nothing has changed for you now. There is no setting that brings the chat back at the moment, for anyone: it is off everywhere until we have fixed the two problems in the note at the top.
The /dm link you may have shared
The chat also had a direct link of its own: your booking address followed by /dm (for example massagehub.app/your-name/dm), meant for an Instagram bio. If you have shared it, you do not need to change it. It now takes clients to your normal booking page instead of the chat, so the link still does its job. The link isn't case sensitive.
Will it come back?
Possibly, and there is nothing for you to switch on or off in the meantime. It was part of the Plus plan and appeared on Plus booking pages automatically, so pausing it takes nothing away that you set up yourself, and your booking page and every other Plus feature carry on exactly as before. If it returns we will say so in the changelog.