A booking request is a request. A confirmed appointment is an explicit two-sided agreement with a named time, a named service, a named person on both sides, and a single shared reference. The two should never be conflated.
When a system conflates them, the team assumes the calendar is the source of truth. When the customer assumes the request itself was the confirmation, both sides lose. The cure is one visible status field on the appointment record: REQUESTED, CONFIRMED, COMPLETED, or LOST. No other states.
Once the status field is shared, the conversation changes. The team stops asking "did they confirm?" and the customer stops asking "is my slot held?" The shared reference becomes the place to look, not memory.