Forum Discussion
Allowing multiple bookings for the same time in Microsoft Bookings
Hi,
I am trying to setup a bookings calendar that allows multiple people to book the same service at the same time. In this instance it is First Aid Training for a specific day without time increments.
To simplify this question. Is it possible to setup a service to allow multiple people book in for a 09:00am service on the same day? It appears once the first person books this service, it blocks out the time slot which I understand why it would do this.
If not, any suggestion on how to do this?
Thank for your suggestions.
- There is a workaround for this - create the number of dummy staff up to the maximum number of 'customers' that you want to book into the session, and assign them all to the service. So if you want 20 seats available at the training you create 20 dummy 'staff'. Once all 20 seats have been booked that date will no longer be available.
30 Replies
From my example above, you can see that I have one trainer/staff member to N (multiple) customers. If you have multiple staff, the designation will be N:N service and the icon will show multiple people.
I use Bookings through Teams. This is how I found how to allow for multiple bookings for one appointment time:
- Create a new service. (Once you have created a service that shows as 1:1, you're doomed. Just start over.)
- Immediately after naming the service, set the maximum number of attendees to anything more than 1.
- Save changes. Then you can go ahead and fill in the rest of the settings as desired. You'll see the difference on the main booking page.
- Good afternoon!
I am struggling to find a way to to allow double booking on microsoft bookings. I have already tried increasing the number of attendees, also creating two services with the same characteristics. This feature is crucial for me. Would someone know what to do?
Thank you in advance!Hi YuliaKozlova, I achieved this by creating two different staff members for myself. I created an alias for my email address so they could have two different email addresses. Then I could accept parallel bookings.
- Thank you for the prompt response. I do have my colleagues assigned to my service, a total of three staff are assigned to each booking, does that not count?
Hi everyone! Finally figured it out with a colleague following these steps:
1. First in the services section, click edit services.
2. Next you go to Availability options.3. We have an event on a specific date and time, so we had the General availability as not bookable.
4. Availability during these dates was set to start and end date of the event.
5. Now for the times, it should be set to bookable when staff is free.
6. Next click the Assign Staff
7. Choose service type should be single staff.
8. And you select the staff members you want assigned for the event.
9. That's it!
If you need to block out a time for maybe lunch, click the Staff Section, choose the staff and click edit staff.
Our event is from 10AM to 5PM and we wanted to have our lunch scheduled from 1PM to 2PM, so we changed our individual availability from 10AM to 1PM and 2PM to 5PM.
Please let me know if you have any questions
Christopher Carter thank you for this discussion, I found it very useful. After reading it, I think I have found a solution that is working for me.
As suggested here, I have created dummy staff, to allow appointments to run alongside each other. To solve the problem of giving each staff member a unique email address, I am using a single, non-Microsoft, email address for all of my dummy staff, but I have created email aliases for that email address. This seems to be working fine.
(The host of your email will probably let you create email aliases, for example this is like creating both mailto:robert@myemail.com and mailto:rob@myemail, and the server treats them all as being the same thing and belonging to the main email address.)
I have the same issue. I want to book 2 staff members for one service. If one is already booked the system should book the second appointment in the same time slot with the second staff member. It is not doing this. Instead it blocks off that time. Doesnt allow it to be booked again even though I have dedicated staff that are available. Please help!
Christopher Carter Looks like this is coming in Q1 of 2020.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=&searchterms=bookings
Thank you. Our school is planning to transfer the students' emails to the staff domain name by Christmas, which was the problem that kept us from using Bookings. If creating dummy employees to create multiple appointment slots for the same time doesn't get too expensive (since I'm paying for this out-of-pocket because Bookings isn't available in the Education package), I will begin using Bookings in January. Good to know they are finally addressing this seemingly obvious need in the app. Now, if Bookings would get added to the Education app bundle. . .?!? 🙂
Kim Johnson I don't know how Microsoft breaks down the licensing, but as a non-profit we are eligible for ten donated Microsoft 365 licenses, which includes Bookings. I am looking forward to being able to use this feature.
Hello
I am looking to do this and wondered if you had managed to work this out?
Thanks
Simone
I have created dummy staff in order to have multiple people book the same time slot. (Group dog obedience classes)
When the client booked online they could pick a spot (dummy staff member) or leave it for me to assign.
My husband managed to create dummy emails that just connected to our actual email address. Don't ask me how!
- There is a workaround for this - create the number of dummy staff up to the maximum number of 'customers' that you want to book into the session, and assign them all to the service. So if you want 20 seats available at the training you create 20 dummy 'staff'. Once all 20 seats have been booked that date will no longer be available.
Not sure if this post is still valid but I'm trying to create staff with alias email addresses but it doesn't add them.
Hi Geoff
I've created "dummy staff" to allow multiple people to book the same slot for a group dog training class but it won't allow me to use a generic business email for multiple staff?
Is there a way around this? I don't want to be creating 8 different fake email addresses!
Thank you
Sue Waugh did you ever manage to find a solution to this? I have run into the same problem.
I saw in a previous response how to create dummy staff to allow for multiple bookings per time slot. However, my staffing isn't the same for every hour of the day. How do vary the number of bookings I can do, hour per hour, throughout the day?
