...it could simply be that the client is choosing that specific time. It would be great if there was a distinguishing workflow with the client self-booking that differentiated actual requests from time based requests.

In the event a salon has 8 stylists working and there is one spot left for 4pm that the client chooses through the self-booking process, it will show as a request even if the client has no idea whom that stylist is. Let's say that this is for a couple days from now and the business notices the complete utilization of the staff and to compensate for this, calls in other staff to take up what would be turnaways. It would be beneficial if these clients that truly didn't care which stylist they were with were marked that they specifically wanted that time slot (and price), but the provider was unimportant.

A good business would move a fair and proportionate number of the non-request appointments over to provider times that now become available so that the already present staff have the potential to accept requests again while also fostering the other providers' growing careers with some fresh meat.

It is also worth noting that due to the selection process of client self-booking, the data field of "request" vs "non-request" doesn't exactly mean anything for analytics and most online bookings would result in a client's appointment being a request. This is entirely due to the psychology of how we make appointments, we choose exactly what and when we want; which Blvd interprets as, "I only want to be seen by that person" which is an assumption that we adopt without workaround presently. In my own shops I notice that when needing to cancel or rearrange appointments, I can only trust that a client's self-booking's request is truly a request for that provider about 50% of the time. Other times the client will always advance that they don't care who they see and it wasn't in fact a request.