Microsoft Bookings calendar events to not affect availability of personal calendar

You can achieve this by modifying how your Microsoft Bookings events sync with your Outlook calendar. Since you want certain Bookings calendars to not block your availability, you need to ensure that those events are marked as Free instead of Busy when they appear in your personal calendar.

Solution: Adjust Booking Staff Preferences

1. Go to Microsoft Bookings

• Open the Bookings app in Microsoft 365.
• Select the calendar you want to modify.

2. Modify the Staff Settings for Yourself

• Navigate to Staff and select your profile.
• Under Events on Office calendar affect availability, set it to Yes (this ensures your personal events affect Bookings).
• Important: This does not control how Bookings events affect your calendar.

3. Change How Bookings Events Sync to Your Calendar

• Scroll to Events created by Bookings affect your availability and set this to No.
• This ensures that events from this Bookings calendar will still sync to your calendar but will not block availability for other appointments.

4. Verify Event Status in Outlook Calendar

• Open Outlook (Web or Desktop).
• Locate an appointment from the specific Bookings calendar.
• Double-click it and check the Show As field.
• If it's set to "Busy," change it to Free manually.
  • (If you want an automated way, see Power Automate below.)

Automate This Process with Power Automate (Optional)

If you frequently receive bookings that should be Free in your calendar, you can automate this:

• Open Power Automate.
• Create a new flow using the "When a new event is created (V3)" trigger for Outlook.
• Add a condition:
  • If the event comes from Bookings (check subject or category).
• Update the event:
  • Use the Update Event action to set Show As = Free.

This way, every time a new Bookings appointment is added, it will be automatically marked as Free.