Forum Discussion
Setting up 30 minute appointments every 15 minutes
I hope this will make sense! I am coordinating health screenings for my company. The screenings will take 30 minutes for each person, and there are multiple pieces to the screening (height, weight, blood pressure, blood draw, etc.). I want a new person to be arriving every 15 minutes. This works because if one person is getting their blood drawn, someone else can be getting their blood pressure taken. I will not be the only person doing the health screenings, but the people assisting me are not from within my organization so I can't add them as staff to the calendar. I can't get Bookings to keep every 15 minute time slot open. For example, if I register for 6:30 am, it removes the 6:45 am time slot because it's a 30 minute appointment. Is there any way around this?
kcshoe It sounds like you have a special use case which isn't so easy to solve with Bookings but I think I have a couple of solutions that might help you with your problem, although each idea comes with a flaw:
Solution 1: Add 2 members of staff to the service. Flaw: 2 people could book the same time
The first idea I had was to set up a second member of staff. It doesn't need to relate to a real person so you can use job titles in the name field. You only need an email address to set up the staff member. You could even use the bookings email address that is created when you set up your booking calendar.
Create your service for 30 minutes.
Allow one attendee.
Set the time increments to 15 minutes.
In the "Assign Staff" tab, turn off the ability for the customers to select a member of staff.
Now when a customer books the slot at 06:30 it is automatically assigned to one of the two members of staff and there will still be someone available for the 06:45 timeslot. But please note that the problem with this solution is that two people could book the 06:30 timeslot and maybe you don't want 2 people arriving at 06:30? If this is the case then it would be better to check solution 2.
Solution 2: Set the service to be 15 minutes. Flaw: Possible confusion for the customer
Setup the service with a 15 minute duration and with just one member of staff assigned. This would allow one new person to arrive every 15 minutes.
Then you could write as part of the service name that it is a 30 minute appointment. You could even add a note in the service description and additional information for the email confirmation sections to say that the person should expect the appointment to take 30 minutes. Hopefully then the customer will ignore the fact that it will say "15 minutes" on the booking page and in the confirmation email.
Hope one of these ideas will help you.
