When we started building AionBooking, we had one goal: make booking as simple as sending a text message. Version 2.5 brings us closer to that goal than any release before it. Today we are shipping three features that have been top of our customers' request list for months.
The centerpiece of v2.5 is our new AI booking engine. Powered by Claude Sonnet, it now parses natural language requests from your customers and converts them into structured booking intents — no forms, no back-and-forth.
When a customer types "I need a trim on Saturday morning, somewhere close to Lekki", the system extracts the service type, date preference, time window, and location — then surfaces the three best matching slots from your availability calendar.
The AI confirmation step is mandatory and cannot be skipped. Customers must explicitly confirm their slot before a booking is created. This is both a legal requirement and a key UX guardrail.
Intent parsing accuracy currently sits at 94.3% on our benchmark dataset of 10,000 real booking requests. Edge cases — ambiguous dates, multi-service requests, off-catalogue requests — are gracefully escalated to a manual flow.
AionBooking now supports Paystack in four additional currencies: GHS (Ghana cedi), KES (Kenyan shilling), ZAR (South African rand), and UGX (Ugandan shilling) — in addition to the existing NGN support. This means businesses across 12 African markets can now collect payments in their local currency without a manual FX conversion step.
All amounts are calculated server-side. The client never sends a price — it sends a booking intent, and the server looks up the correct price from your service catalogue, converts it to the customer's currency, and passes it to Paystack. This eliminates a whole class of price manipulation vulnerabilities.
Stripe remains available for international payments and is still the recommended provider for businesses with a significant non-African customer base. Both providers can be active simultaneously — AionBooking selects the right one based on the customer's billing country.
The old analytics page showed you a booking count and a revenue total. That was fine for getting started, but our fastest-growing businesses needed more — cancellation rate by service, peak booking hours, customer return rate, staff utilisation.
The new dashboard ships with six views: Revenue (daily/weekly/monthly), Bookings volume, Cancellation & no-show funnel, Staff utilisation heatmap, Customer cohort retention, and Service performance breakdown. All charts are built on a lightweight canvas renderer — no heavy third-party charting library, no layout shift.
v2.5 is a server-side upgrade — you do not need to do anything. If you are on the Starter plan, AI suggestions are available as a 14-day trial. Multi-currency Paystack requires a Professional plan or above. The new dashboard is available on all paid plans.
Check your Paystack dashboard for the new currency settings. You will need to enable each currency in your Paystack account before AionBooking can collect payments in it.
As always, if you hit any issues, our support team is reachable via live chat (Mon–Fri, 9am–6pm UTC) or at support@aionbooking.com. We will be hosting a live walkthrough webinar on March 20 — register from the Webinars page.
Part of the core team at AionBooking, working on product, growth, and the developer ecosystem.
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