The short answer
Both online, and as two separate things. A parent who wants to visit next week needs real slots on a calendar. A parent expecting a baby in March needs a waitlist form. One shared contact form serves neither and loses the second one entirely.
Why they are different
The viewing parent is close to deciding. They have a start date in mind, they are comparing two or three settings, and they will book whichever nursery makes it easiest this evening.
The waitlist parent is months out. They are not comparing yet. They want to be in the queue for the baby room before the queue matters, and if joining it takes a phone call during working hours, half of them never join.
Different urgency, different fields, different follow-up. Two buttons.
What the viewing flow needs
Real availability, not a request box. Put two or three windows a week against the manager's calendar and let a parent pick one. Seeing Wednesday at half two available now converts in a way that "we will get back to you" never does.
Ask for nine things at most: parent name, mobile, email, child's date of birth or due date, target start month, the days and sessions they think they want, and how they heard about you. Everything else waits until they have seen the place.
Then say what a viewing actually is. How long it takes, who shows them round, whether the child comes, and whether they see the room in session or empty after close. Nurseries that let parents visit during the day should say so, because it is a genuine advantage most sites bury.
Say what happens if the room they want is full, and link the waitlist from that sentence.
What the waitlist flow needs
A short form, completable on a phone in a waiting room. Parent contact details, child's date of birth or expected date, preferred start month, the room that implies, days wanted, and whether they expect to use funded hours.
Then answer the four questions parents actually have about your list, on the page:
Is there a registration fee, and is it refundable or credited against fees. How are places allocated, including whether siblings or full-time bookings get priority. Roughly how long the queue is per room, given as a season rather than a number. And how often you will be in touch.
Be honest about priority rules. Parents find out eventually, and a rule stated up front reads as fair where the same rule discovered later reads as a stitch-up.
Which tools run it
Famly, Blossom and Kinderly all handle enquiries, waitlists and the route from first contact to enrolment, and one of them is probably already running your nursery. Send the waitlist form into it so the family becomes a record the manager can work, not an email that gets buried.
Tour slots are a calendar problem. Some nursery platforms include tour booking; where yours does, use it. Where it does not, a scheduling tool such as Acuity sits alongside it against the manager's real availability. Confirm current features with the vendor rather than assuming.
The parent should not see the seam. Two buttons on your site, both working on a phone.
The part that gets dropped
The automatic confirmation is not the follow-up. It says what happens next, by when, and who will be in touch.
The follow-up is human. A booked viewing gets a text the day before. A waitlist registration gets a personal reply within two working days and a diarised check-in after that, at an interval you will genuinely keep. A completed viewing gets a message the next day asking whether anything was left unanswered.
More places are lost here than on the tour itself.
Where this sits
Viewing booking and an online waitlist, wired into the platform the nursery already runs, are standard on a day nursery website as we build it, and the same split runs through our other childcare and family websites. What each package covers is on pricing. Two flows, two honest pages, and no more voicemail.