Let Claude book your clients: Bookatu's MCP server in practice

It is a Thursday afternoon and a regular emails: can she get her usual gel manicure some time Friday morning. Nothing about answering is hard. You open the calendar, find a slot, create the booking, type a reply. Four small steps, at a moment when you do not have a hand free. Now imagine typing one line to an assistant instead. Book Priya's usual gel manicure on Friday morning. The assistant checks your real availability, places the booking, and hands you a reference to send back. That is what Bookatu's MCP server makes possible.

MCP in one paragraph

MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. It is an open standard that lets an AI assistant use tools a piece of software offers it, rather than guessing about your business from whatever it can find online. The software publishes a short list of actions, the assistant calls them, and the software stays in charge of what each action is allowed to do. Bookatu publishes its booking basics this way. Any assistant that speaks MCP can connect, and that includes Claude Desktop, Claude Code and a growing number of other agents.

Connecting takes one key

In your Bookatu admin you create an API key. It is shown to you exactly once, and Bookatu stores only a fingerprint of it rather than the key itself, so save it somewhere safe the way you would a password. You then point your assistant's MCP configuration at the Bookatu endpoint with that key, and you are connected. There is nothing to install on Bookatu's side and no separate agent account. The key identifies your business, so everything the agent sees is yours and only yours.

Keys come in two strengths. A read-only key can look things up but can never book or change anything, which makes it the right choice for tools that only need to see your data. A read-write key can also create bookings. You can give a key an expiry date, and you can revoke it from the admin at any time, at which point it stops working immediately.

What a connected agent can do

The tool list an agent gets is short and deliberate:

• See your services: names, durations and prices, so it knows what a gel manicure is and how long it takes.
• Check availability: the real open slots for a service across the dates you ask about, up to 60 days at a time.
• Create a booking: place a client into a slot with their name and contact details, and get back a booking reference.
• Look up your clients: so it can use Priya's email and phone from your records instead of asking you to type them.
• List upcoming appointments: so it can answer questions like what does Friday look like.

There is no tool for deleting anything, and nothing that touches your billing, your account or anyone else's business.

A realistic run-through

Back to Priya. You type: find Priya's usual gel manicure a slot on Friday morning and book her in. The assistant lists your services and finds the gel manicure and its duration. It pulls Friday's open slots and sees a 10am free. It looks Priya up in your client list for her contact details, calls the booking tool, and comes back with a reference. The appointment is now in your calendar and on Priya's client record, exactly as if she had booked through your page.

The part worth noticing is what it did not do. The availability it saw was your live availability, with your opening hours, existing appointments and buffer times already accounted for, so it could not offer a slot you cannot work. And if that 10am had been taken in the seconds between checking and booking, the booking is refused rather than double-booked, and the assistant simply picks another slot.

Deposits still apply

If the service takes a deposit, an agent cannot talk its way past your policy. The booking is created as pending, and the response includes a payment link to pass to the client, who pays the same way they would after booking on your page. Your no-show protection works the same no matter who, or what, placed the booking.

An agent gets a short list of things it may do. Everything else about your business is simply not on the table.

You stay in control

The key is the whole relationship. You created it, Bookatu records when it was last used so you can see what is connecting, and revoking it shuts the door on the spot. A booking made through MCP follows the same rules as one made on your page: real availability, your minimum notice, your deposit policy. Connected agents do not get a back door. They get the front door, with a key you cut and can take back.

If you want the deeper detail, the endpoint, the tool descriptions and copy-paste examples are all on the Bookatu developers page. And if none of your tools speak MCP yet, nothing changes for you. Your booking page, reminders and calendar work exactly as before. The server is simply there for the day you want to type book Priya in on Friday somewhere other than your admin.