Forum Discussion
Appointments on the half hour are no longer showing on my booking page
As of this morning any appointments that should be available are not showing on my booking page. All the appointments on the hour are showing fine, all the appointments on the half hour are not showing and are therefore not bookable. The appointments on the half hour were showing fine up until today, and some clients have managed to book appointments on the half hour previously.
My appointment duration is set to 1hr and time increments are set to 1hr. Staff hours vary and are very specific, so some staff have availability entered as such: 9am-10am, 10am-11am, 11am-12pm. These appointments are showing fine and are bookable by clients.
Other staff have availability entered as 9:30am-10:30am, 10:30am-11:30am, 11:30am-12:30pm, etc. and none of these appointments are showing on the booking page.
I have tried changing the time increments to 30mins, but this does not work for us as it allows clients to book appointments on the half hours where we do not wish them to.
I have also tried (as another poster suggested worked for them) changing the appointment duration to 59mins instead of 1hr, but it did not solve the problem.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
- Seems to be working correctly again. Weekend fix from Microsoft?
- Thanks for providing this update. I've just tested my booking page with some staff members availability, changing the increment and duration back to 1hr, and the appointments on the half hour are showing again now.
Hope it's working for everyone else too. I as off on Friday, Monday, and Tuesday, so just spotted ghanna870's response this morning, so took a look at my Services and adjusted Time increment settings from 1 minutes back to the true 1 hour. Everything works. Glad this was a quick fix. It surely caused disruption for those of us in this thread, and likely or many others, they just didn't realize it.
lizkh I am having the same issue except my appointments on the 5's are either not showing up or are showing as available 5 minutes later. We use our calendar for booking lessons in our library and our school blocks start at 8:45, 9:35, etc. When the 8:45 block shows up at 8:50, the next block does not appear because there are no longer 50 min available for the next block. It seems like this issue is relatively new (within the last few weeks) as our calendar has been set up and functioning well for the past few years with the same schedule. Perhaps there has been a new update to Bookings that has affected the calendar functionality? It would be great to hear something from Microsoft about what is being done to fix this issue.
tdlawrence Once I had moved my scheduling to 1 minute increments all of mine showed up so fingers crossed it will stay like that for now!
Vikram2011Microsoft
Let us get back on this, thanks for sharing feedback!- Looks like I am a week or two late to the party here. I just had my first end user report this issue a day ago. After a couple of hours of troubleshooting on my own this morning, I finally stumbled across the fact that it was only impacting appointments scheduled to start on the :30s. Then, I thankfully found this thread.
This is absolutely a new thing that has just popped up. We have long-used Bookings to schedule appointments at all kinds of crazy increments and start/end times. I am pretty sure we have twisted this tool in directions that maybe shouldn't be possible and made it work. This one baffles me.
The solution that I found to work was to leave the start times, duration, and the like all as is and then set the Time increments to = 1 minute. As soon as I did so, all the appointments popped up as they should and the confirmation emails and calendar invites all show the correct times. Of course, this is only working perfectly for us because we don't have back to back appointments to deal with. For those that do, it would surely impact the times of the previous and next appointment availability.
Microsoft.... please fix this ASAP. lizkh Potential solution:
I found that when configuring a service inside of the bookings calendar Microsoft has decided to change the time increments of available bookings and the length of time that bookings actually are.
To configure a service to have a 1-hour duration you would do so here (duration is how long the appointment will last):
This is completely separate from scheduling policies. The time increments determine how often your service is available. In this case, my service is available every 30 minutes (10:00, 10:30, 11:00, 11:30, etc.). 15-minute increments would result in 10:00, 10:15, 10:30, 10:45 11:00, etc.
For instance, I found that setting meeting times at one-hour durations and setting the time increments at 30 minutes resulted in a bookings page that looked like this:
This shows that I am able to have one-hour bookings at 30-minute time increments. Please respond to my thread if you have any questions.
- Thanks very much for your advice, unfortunately though it doesn't work for my situation (unless I have misunderstood what you have explained).
My appointments need to be 1 hour long so I had set the duration to 1 hour, and I only want my appointments to be booked every hour so I had the increment set to 1 hour also. Some of my staff have appointments available on the hour e.g. 10am, 11am, 12pm. Other staff members have appointments available on the half hours e.g. 9:30am, 10:30am, 11:30am. This was working fine until last week when all the appointments on the half hour stopped showing on the booking page.
If I change the increment to 30 mins, the booking page does show the appointments on the half hours, BUT it allows clients to book appointments every half an hour, which I don't want. For example, if I have a staff member with available appointments at 9:30am-10:30am, 10:30am-11:30am, 11:30am-12:30pm, it allows a client to book an hour appointment at 10am-11am. This means that 9:30am-10:00am is a wasted half an hour, and instead of this staff member being able to have 3 hour-long appointments that morning, they will only be able to have a maximum of 2.
To get around this, I have the duration set to 30 mins and the increment set to 30 mins. I then have blocked off the 2nd half of every hour available in my staff members personal calendars so that they are not available to book (very time consuming).
E.g. setting duration and increment to 30 mins for a staff member whose availability is 9:30-10:30, 10:30-11:30, 11:30-12:30, allows clients to book at 9:30, 10:00, 10:30, 11:00, 11:30, 12:00. But if I then block out 10:00-10:30, 11:00-11:30, 12:00-12:30 in my staff members calendar, it gives the desired result that appointments show as available to book at 9:30, 10:30 and 11:30. The downside is that it is very time consuming to set up and clients see that appointment times are 30 minutes long, not an hour (not a huge problem, but also not ideal).
- I have the same problem, I can no longer make 15 minutes appointments and appointments can only be made on the hour and half hour. We have been using Bookings since April 2021 and this one change has created complete chaos!!! Microsoft please revert back to allowing appointments on the 15 and 45 past the hour.
I'm having the same issue. We set our calendars up with custom times as the consultants want specific appointment slots and durations for different services, some start on the hour, some on 15 or 45 minute mark and some on the half hour. It was working perfectly fine last year, and up until last week, now all of a sudden only the appointments on the hour are showing up on the booking page!
- Yes, just spent an hour digging around with our IT and found that was the problem. We have a wonky school schedule and had a whole special custom calendar set up so students could schedule appointments with us that aligned with their class periods. Turns out in the new version of Bookings, appointments can only be scheduled on the half hour.
Microsoft, PLEASE change this back to allow custom times!!!
- I've found a work around which works for my situation, in case it helps anyone else:
I've changed the appointment duration to 30 mins and the increment to 30 mins- this allows appointments on the half hour to show on the booking page.
However, it also obviously allows appointments to be booked every half an hour, which I don't want as I need to allow a full hour for client appointments. To get around this I have had to put dummy appointments in the Outlook calendars of all the staff assigned to the service, in the 2nd half of every hour that they are available. That way clients are only able to book every hour.
E.g. if a staff member is available 9:30-10:30, 10:30-11:30, 11:30-12:30, in their personal calendar I have had to block off 10-10:30, 11-11:30, 12-12:30.
This allows clients to book at 9:30, 10:30, 11:30 and the staff member they book with is available for a full hour.
It isn't ideal as the booking page shows that appointments are 30 mins in duration, and I would like clients to know they are allocated an hour for their appointment.
It it also very time consuming as there are 20+ staff members assigned to the service and I already have to manipulate their personal calendars a great deal because they do not work the same hours every week and Microsoft Bookings doesn't allow you to enter different availability for different weeks.
But hey, it works for now.lizkh you should be able to leave the duration at 1hour - if you have buffer time that could also be casing you issues. Setting the Increments to 1m or 59 minutes should work
Our page still isn't working and it's frustrating that nobody from Microsoft is fixing this issue. It's worth pointing out that our page has been up and running for over a year and nobody has made any changes to any detail whatsoever. This is a glitch and we shouldn't need to 'bodge' the page to get it working (although for what it's worth the bodges listed above don't work either - either setting it to 59 minutes or not on the half hour). It's incredibly frustrating. I could change the time so that it's not on the half hour but then we will get people turning up at the wrong time, which will cause all sorts of chaos.
I literally just spent the last 2 hours trying to fix this. All my appointments just disappeared from calendar... Now they seem to be working again, I seriously felt like I was losing my mind.
- Same thing happened to ours. Only showing availability twice a day for some odd reason for about a week now. What did you do to fix it? Or did it just randomly start working again?
- Mine still isn't working - we have multiple calendars that have been running for years and they're all broken. The only thing I could do to fix was set up my business hours for each time slot (very time consuming) and then set a shorter duration. E.g. Business hours 08:30-09:00, 30 minute duration. It's not ideal and we have had to put a note on the email confirmation about the actual booking length but still people will be confused. I am very cross with Microsoft right now as they haven't even bothered to acknowledge the problem, even with support tickets submitted. It's been nearly 2 weeks.
