Chexaf works in three steps: you search a service and a city, you pick a specific business, staff member, and time slot from real-time availability, and the appointment sits in your account so you're not relying on a text you might delete or a business card you might lose. No phone tag, no “call between 9 and 5” - you see open slots and claim one.

That's the mechanical answer. The more useful one is what actually happens at each step, because a few details in the flow aren't obvious until you've clicked through it.

What You Can Actually Book

Chexaf isn't limited to haircuts. The platform splits into three categories, and the booking options inside each one go deeper than a single appointment slot - several listings also sell packages, memberships, and recurring classes, not just one-off bookings.

Category	Example services	Booking types available
Beauty	Haircut and style, barber, nail, henna, makeup	Single appointment, packages
Wellness	Massage, weight loss, mental health	Single appointment, memberships
Fitness	Yoga, Pilates	Single class, recurring classes, memberships

That “Packages / Memberships / Classes” split matters if you're booking somewhere you'll return to regularly - a Pilates studio, for instance, will often show a punch-card or monthly membership option right alongside single-class booking, on the same business page.

Searching: Location and Service, Not Just a Business Name

The homepage search takes two inputs “Where to?” and “What service?” - plus a date field. You don't need to know a business's name; searching “massage” and “Lagos” is enough to pull up a results list.

Results show distance (Chexaf displays this in kilometers on the homepage feed and miles on the search results page — a small inconsistency worth knowing about if you're eyeballing “closest to me”), a category tag (salon, wellness studio, beauty), and a “Featured” label on some listings, which marks promoted placement rather than a quality signal - treat it the way you'd treat a sponsored listing anywhere else.

Chexaf covers ten Nigerian cities: Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, Enugu, Ibadan, Benin City, Uyo, Abeokuta, Jos, and Kaduna. Lagos has by far the deepest inventory of the cities I checked; smaller cities had thinner results, so search radius matters more the further you are from a major metro.

What a Business Profile Actually Tells You Before You Book

This is the part worth reading past the photos. Each business page carries operating hours broken out by day (so you catch a “Closed Sunday” before you try to book one), accepted payment methods, parking notes, amenities like Wi-Fi or air conditioning, whether the space is kid-friendly, and languages spoken by staff.

Reviews aren't a single star average - Chexaf breaks them into four categories: Overall, Punctuality, Value, and Service. Reviews carry a “Verified” tag when they're tied to a completed booking, and business owners can reply publicly to individual reviews, which is a genuinely useful signal: a business that responds to a middling review with a real answer tells you more than the star count does.

One honest caveat: some listings especially newer or smaller ones - show 0 reviews. That's not a red flag specific to Chexaf, it's just what any growing marketplace looks like before review volume catches up; weigh it against the other profile details (hours, amenities, deals) rather than skipping the listing outright.

Businesses can also post time-boxed deals — a “Flash Sale Friday” or “New Customer Welcome” offer with explicit start and end dates on the profile page. These sit above the booking widget, so check them before you pick a service; they don't apply automatically.

The Actual Booking Sequence

Tap “Book Now” and you land on a booking panel that pre-fills the service you came in on. From there:

1. Confirm or change the service - “Add Another Service” lets you stack more than one into the same visit (a cut and a color, say).

2. Select staff - you can book a specific stylist or therapist by name rather than “whoever's free.”

3. Pick a date - the picker defaults to today and shows a scrollable week view, not just a calendar grid.

4. Check Availability - this is where it gets specific: Chexaf shows real slots per staff member, split into Morning and Afternoon, and the times aren't rounded to the hour. On the listing I tested, one stylist had 10:35 AM and 11:20 AM open, while a colleague working the same day had 10:35 AM and 11:40 AM - the granularity comes straight from each staff member's actual calendar, not a generic 30-minute grid the business fills in by hand.

That last point is the detail a spec sheet wouldn't tell you: because slots are staff-specific and pulled at odd minutes, two people on the same team can have genuinely different next-available times, so it's worth checking more than one staff member before assuming a day is booked out.

After You Book: Where “Never Miss an Appointment” Actually Comes From

Once a slot is claimed, it lands in your Chexaf account under Bookings (myaccount/appointments) - a dedicated dashboard separate from your profile, reachable from the main navigation once you're logged in. That's the practical mechanism behind “never miss an appointment”: instead of the booking living in a text thread or a paper receipt, it lives in one place you can check from any device you're logged into.

I'll be straightforward about the limit of what I could confirm from the public site: I could not verify whether Chexaf sends automated SMS or email reminders ahead of a booking, since that would only surface after completing an account signup and an actual purchase. If reminder notifications matter to you, confirm it directly with support before relying on it - don't assume a feature exists because a competitor's platform has it.

If you do need to reach Chexaf directly - a booking issue, a business dispute, anything the app doesn't resolve - general questions go to info@chexaf.com and support issues to support@chexaf.com, with a stated response window of one business day.

What If You're the One Getting Booked?

If reading this makes you think about your own business rather than your next haircut: businesses join through a separate vendor portal (vendor.chexaf.com), where Chexaf's own stated figure is more than 220,000 professionals using the platform to manage bookings. That's a different setup flow entirely, calendar, staff, and service configuration on the business side and deserves its own walkthrough rather than a paragraph here.

One Practical Note Before You Book

Chexaf supports pricing display in five currencies - Naira, US dollar, Canadian dollar, British pound, and euro - via a selector in the header. That's a display currency, not necessarily a payment currency; before you assume you can pay in dollars from abroad, check the individual business's accepted payment methods on its profile page, since that field is set per business, not platform-wide.